Redefining Redfin’s Mobile App Strategy
Role: Product Manager
Team: Senior Director of Product, VP of Engineering, Product Designer, Engineering Manager
Duration: 3 months (Jan–Mar 2019)
Challenge
Redfin is a real estate brokerage leveraging technology to redefine the home buying and selling experience in the consumer’s favor. Its website and mobile applications allow users to browse homes on the market and request services like property tours and agent representation from Redfin’s brokerage.
It considers its iOS and Android mobile apps the “crown jewel” of its product ecosystem, as together they account for 40% of global traffic and boast a 90-day conversion rate 14x higher than the website. Despite these numbers, however, a focused strategy and vision for the apps was lacking. As a result, different teams would jockey for their projects and strategies during the quarterly planning process, and the roadmap looked more like a list of various bets than an opinionated plan.
This shifting focus made it challenging for the team to drive appreciable impact in any one area and plan further than three months into the future.
Process
As the product manager for the mobile apps team, it was important to me that we seek out a better solution.
I began by interviewing our app users to develop a stronger understanding of why people used our app, what we were doing well (and should continue doing), and what we could do better. I also gathered my design and engineering partners, as well as our product and engineering directors, to discuss the impact of these challenges and what we might do to change them.
The product designer on my team and I worked together closely to refine the key issues and formulate potential solutions. We put every idea we could think of on a whiteboard, with the intent to hone in on what we really believed could drive the change we were looking for.
We narrowed our considerations to two options: (1) splitting the team into two different focus areas and hiring another product manager and designer, or (2) aligning the team’s focus to the company’s current strategic priority and limiting support for other unrelated projects.
Solution
We brought our proposals back to discussion with the group, and ultimately decided to move forward with Option #2: aligning the team’s focus to the company’s current strategic priority and limiting other support. A few weeks later, we took on a strategic innovation project aimed at reducing the barrier for customers interested in seeing a home by allowing them to tour without an agent.
Because our solution also required us to limit our support for unrelated projects, we also authored an internal document to serve as a resource for other product managers and teams interested in working on our mobile apps, with tactical guidelines for developing projects with our limited capacity for support.
Traction
Implementing this solution made our work newly fulfilling, allowing us to build cumulatively on our work and make more meaningful strides. It also hasn’t been without its challenges. This project instigated an initial shift in the company’s overall perspective of the mobile apps, but it will take time for the shift to happen completely and for alignment on this strategy across various teams to grow.