Great idea. Now what? (Lessons learned from pushing product out the door)

We all get great ideas now and again. Sometimes, we’re even able to validate them. We know exactly what our users are after, but when it comes delivering the thing they want, we find ourselves at a standstill unable to move forward. To push the big ideas through the bottleneck.

Why? It’s not uncommon to find yourself stuck due to various reasons, from limited resources to questionable return on investment.

So how do you create an influence and an environment where ideas can be cultivated and fully actualized?

That’s the question our team recently explored as we brought one of our latest, biggest mobile features to life. The struggle was long, the barriers were plenty, but in the end we persevered.

I’ll share the whole story with you in a minute, but let’s get right to the good stuff first. Here are my learnings and how they might help you and your team, if you ever find yourselves stuck trying to push a product out the door.

How to push a big feature past the idea phase

1. Take a leap of faith: Too often, doubt holds us back from being bold and causes us to look for ways to buy time (like running excessive experiments before we’re willing to act on anything at all, or letting the idea marinate in a bottomless pipeline). Corny as it sounds, take a lesson from Nike and JUST DO IT.
2. Keep moving: The only way to push forward is one step at a time. Move from pitch to actualization with incremental releases, continuous testings, and iterative improvements.
3. Keep measuring: You need your stakeholders’ buy-in every step of the way, so make sure you’re always keeping them in the loop. Set goals together, ask for feedback early on, and share your results as soon as possible.
4. Get on the same page: It takes a whole team to move things forward, but you all need to head in the same direction. The best way to achieve a shared perspective is by starting with as many varied ones as possible. Come to the table with an open mind, listen to one another, and remove the subjectivity until all that’s left is an agreement.
5. Let things go wrong: The fact that you know it went wrong means you’ve gained some insight. Ask yourself: What can you learn from it? How can you monitor that data and use it to stay hopeful? What are immediate actions available to mitigate better solutions?

And now…

The Domain Inspection Planner Story

The idea.

For a very long time, we knew that our existing desktop Inspection Planner would make for a killer mobile feature. But despite knowing we were sitting on a great idea, and despite the endless customer demand to bring it to life, we struggled to do so.

“Can not access desktop features
Have built a very handy inspection planner on the desktop version that I will not be able to use, as I can not access it via the app or any mobile device. There also does not appear to be any capacity to switch from the mobile site to the desktop version. This is nuts.” —September 2016

The above reviews paint a picture of what our Inspection Planner offering was at the time; a desktop only feature with an outdated, hard-to-use interface.

See for yourself:

The feature was accessible only from the user’s shortlist, where it would display inspection dates and times for properties that a user had shortlisted. It had a map on top and a list view down below, both of which were difficult to navigate and use. Despite these issues, people were still using Inspection Planner because it was meaningful and important for them. At the end of the day, they would rather suffer through poor usability than be without the feature at all.

The pitch.

Despite continuous demand of this feature from our consumers, Inspection Planner didn’t really take flight until last year when a small team decided to get together to build “Project Saturday” for Domain Innovation Day (internally known as Inno-Day). At the end of this 3 day event, we delivered a ready-to-launch code-complete prototype that we believed could both satisfy consumer and business demands.

And all of it was pitched in just 3 minutes.

We started out by highlighting the current situation. Our data showed we had high session engagements every Saturday which we assumed correlated with Saturday open houses. Then we talked about our current offering; a desktop-only view of inspection details with an ancient interface that was quite challenging to use.

Finally it was time to reveal our mobile Inspection Planner, complete with a list of open houses to attend, turn-by-turn directions to each property, and a new ability to add notes, attach pictures and give feedback on the inspected properties. On top of all these new functions, we also introduced sharing capability as we knew our users often hunt for houses with others.

Here was our submission:

After winning first place and being posted in our internal “hall of fame” site, our Inno-Day submission acted as a ready-made pitch, earning the attention of our executive leadership team. This gain made the company switch gears, ultimately affording us a dedicated team to focus only on bringing mobile Inspection Planner to life.

The workshop.

To keep the momentum going, we scheduled a workshop to re-work what was shipped for the Inno-day by taking a closer look into specific use cases and identifying any red-flags or other issues that may have been overlooked.

After this first workshop, we briefly tested the prototype with a few users, gathered feedback and insights and then produced design concepts and wireframes to carry over to the second workshop.

The designs presented here illustrated most use cases, including edge cases. After prioritizing what would be our first phase deliverables, we then proposed a set of metrics to measure our success.

And with that, we set out to start our work.

The build.

Getting started was the easy part. What we really needed to figure out, was how do we bring this big idea to life?

We started with some discovery workshops, with people from virtually every department including business, marketing, product, engineering and design. Together we were able to reach a shared perspective, through which we began conceptualizing ideas and tackling small and fast releases with big results.

One of the first things we did was identify what the user wanted most. During our first round of user research, we discovered that “time” was the most crucial information for Inspection Planner. Not only did people want to know when the inspections are happening, but they also tended to go through their schedule list by list, grouping items according to time occurrence.

With this insight in mind, we decided to take a timeline approach, concentrating our effort in list-view at first. Despite our Inno-Day suggestion of displaying a split view between map and list, we put off the idea as earlier testing suggested it would be an unfavorable move.

We also did some quick behavioral mapping by looking through our data to understand our user’s most common tasks and behavior patterns. This activity acted as the catalyst for our product’s entry point, inspection notification strategy and other product decisions.

Phase 1: The initial rollout.

For our first quick release, we decided to roll out the inspection planner within an existing feature: Shortlist. This required only minimal design change, in addition to re-arranging the header to create an entry point for inspection planner. Our first phase only allowed users to view inspection dates and times for their shortlisted items.

It looked like this:

Phase 2: List View Design.

While Phase One was rolling out, we were working on a completely new design for Inspection Planner. We started by identifying all the vital information a user would need, and then how our design could address it. We were very conscious that people remember visual cues far better than a string of words or numbers, so we tried to find ways our design could offer a memorable experience. For example, we decided to include property pictures along with inspection details so that the image could act as an identifier, putting less pressure on the address to commit the property to memory.

Our next challenge was organising all of the vital information we identified, which included inspection times, address, price, number of rooms and parking spaces. We also discovered our users wanted help navigating to their next inspection in a timely manner, and would like to make notes after the inspection, including whether or not they were still considering the property.

Below is what our progression looked like, from a conceptual wireframe to a finished product. There are a lot of iterations not presented here, but as a whole you can see a continuous concept evolvement.

And here is a representation of how the visual design evolved.

Phase 3: Map view design.

Since maps were so critical for helping users get from one open house to the next, we put our efforts into syncing our user’s list view to map view. Our map view got a revamp, displaying states like visited, past, upcoming, liked and disliked properties. To bring continuity in design, we matched our card approach so it looked similar to the one shown in the list view. This allowed users to maintain the same context when locating vital information such as time, notes, inspection status and finding the next action buttons.

Phase 4: Close loop experience.

Of course, the user’s journey didn’t end with simply using this planner. We set out to bring an end-to-end experience, closing the loop from the moment the user added a property to the planner, to whether or not they bought or rented it and every action in between (including managing their planner, inspecting the property and their post-inspection stories).

This design phase involved creating a structure to facilitate the above by capturing sentiments about the properties, jotting down notes and conducting next actions for the property.

The release.

After rounds of internal testing and much anticipation, we released Inspection Planner feature phase by phase to the public. Along the way we did a lot of A/B testing, from information placement to action button placement both in copy and visual. We also tested different ways to increase the feature adoption by having multiple entry points from different areas of the app. A steady monitoring of our data helped us continuously improve the way we served Inspection Planner to our users.

The verdict.

When I first started at Domain, our app review was around 2.6 stars. Today it’s 4.6, and it’s features like Inspection Planner that have contributed to that jump.

Although we always knew Inspection Planner was a valuable tool for property hunters, getting positive feedback never ceases to remind us that all the hard work and the effort to push it out the door was worth it.

Positive reviews aside, the proof is in the data. We started the Inspection Planner project around the end of August 2017, with our first release coming in just under five weeks later. By mid-October 2018, we were already reporting a 33% increase in the number of users detected within close proximity of properties with open inspections available. Our initial goal for both iOS and Android was an increase of 20% for each platform.

The success and value of Inspection Planner led to its own spring 2018 campaign. Inspection Planner was featured everywhere from public banners to this TV commercial:

The learning.

Overall, it’s been a humbling and exciting opportunity to be able to take part in such a valuable feature development. I am amazed to see what a team can produce and accomplish in such a short time period, and the impact the feature has on so many people.

I started this blog by pointing out how challenging it can be to follow through with a great feature or product idea. My greatest learning from the Inspection Planner project is this:

Only action takes you further.

While it’s great to make and discuss amazing propositions and present beautiful decks and pitches, sometimes it takes that extra effort to win the pitch, and the right action does that. In our case, the action was building a prototype so we could demonstrate in the flesh that it was a feasible solution that met both market demands and business goals.

When there isn’t an avenue of that sort, don’t despair; the most important thing is that you keep moving. As the saying goes, take it one step at a time.