Written by Misrab, CTO and co-founder [updated in Dec. 2022]
🎧 Check out Misrab’s Spotify interview on co-founding GetGround.
We’ve been busy since I first published this post! We recently celebrated a special milestone of £1Bn in property on our platform and now have 5,000+ customers based in 70+ countries. We’ve been able to achieve this in a short period of time because of the brilliant product and engineering people at GetGround.
This post shares how we move product and technical requirements into action. We believe in balancing short term value delivery with long term foresight to keep our product and tech modular, flexible and robust.
We aspire to be highly capable, yet down to earth as embodied by our values which sit at the core of everything we do — the pursuit of excellence, feedback obsession, no BS and healthy egos.
Our mission is to make assets more transparent, trustworthy and accessible. We believe increased access to asset ownership will enable a fairer, more productive world. We are doing this by bringing the world’s assets online, starting with residential property.
What we are building and why it matters
5,000+ people are using GetGround to find, buy and manage their investments all with us, end-to-end.
Setting up and managing all of this can be expensive and difficult using traditional methods.
That’s where GetGround come in!
We are turning investment horror stories into happy ones, by streamlining the whole process of investing in the world’s biggest asset class. We fundamentally help people to:
- Shorten the search for investment properties
- Manage the whole purchase process through one provider
- Make it easy to set up and manage a digital limited company
The first end-to-end product of its kind
Focusing on the real estate sector for now, our Tech team of ~30 people is building functionality not unlike digital company management platforms such as Revolut, Wise, Intuit Quickbooks, Docusign and more, all in one place.
In summary, we are a digital:
- search platform for finding UK investment properties, providing all the data, instantly — from capital growth to projected returns
- company formation agent. We programmatically incorporate and webfile companies (filing company information with Companies House in the UK)
- document signing platform. Our in-app document signature system carries a cryptographic audit trail and easy to use UI;
- ewallet provider. Customers expect this to collect rent or pay their mortgage via direct debit;
- currency exchange. Some people are international and require competitive currency exchange;
- accounting solution. We make yearly accounts cost effective and easy;
- eventually, we will build a marketplace for trading shares.
A big reason for our success is because we make it affordable and easy to use a digital limited company to buy property in the UK. There are several advantages to wrapping a property in a company shell like this.
Firstly, it gives that property a legal identity, which means it can open a bank account — creating transparency over cash flows. Secondly, it means multiple people can own and govern a property together more effectively. For example, five friends could each own 20% of a company, buy a house together and rent it out. Thirdly, it creates liquidity because the shares of the company can be bought and sold much more easily than the underlying property.
So all this has been built in the last 24 months?!
Yes! There are two reasons this has been possible. Firstly, we are laser focused on our use case. Secondly, we try to avoid complexity at all costs. Engineers at GetGround spend a lot of time thinking about abstraction design, interfaces, and the technical refinement process. We also try to stay humble and realise that there’s always a long way to go.
Our refinement process… Fast yet thorough
Both product and technical refinement typically take 2–6 weeks from inception to the first lines of code.
On rare occasions it can take less if urgent priorities arise, but we try to avoid such scenarios to allow sufficient time for high quality review. On the other hand, we try not to let the process go on for longer, as thinking can go stale in such a high pace environment! 2–6 weeks is usually the Goldilox point.
Anyone can submit a product or technical request, whether based on a thought they have in the shower, some data or interaction with users. This then gets prioritised by our product team against GetGround goals (e.g. growth, retention, security, monetisation…) and sanity checked with different people.
The product team subsequently writes a press-release or “contract” on the functionality, often with developer feedback. Once high level functionality has been agreed, the product and design team enters the discovery phase, diving deeply into the problem and generating creative solutions, culminating in designs and high-level acceptance criteria.
Our Quality Assurance (QA) team is then involved in defining lower level acceptance criteria, ensuring test cases are documented and failure scenarios are handled. Again, this involves collaborating with the engineering team.
Then to the part I enjoy most… our in-depth refinement sessions.
I love these, as product members and engineers debate functionality. This frequently leads to a much more efficient design, superior functionality, and a better understanding of tradeoffs such as difficulty of implementation.
A trivial example was a design that included a notification for unread notes on our internal tool that helps us manage so many companies. This meant tracking an additional state. After some discussion, we decided to retire with the notification feature for version 1, which led to a faster release. This may seem banal, but hundreds of decisions like this enable us to move fast.
That’s also why we hire engineers who understand and incorporate design thinking and clear communication into their ways of working.
Product Discovery
This involves writing a press release or contract that clarifies requirements with key stakeholders. Then all sorts of exploration is done — from speaking with customers or potential users, to analysing data, sending out surveys, trying out existing similar solutions and brainstorming product design. It makes sense for there to be an analogous process for deep exploration of technical system improvements. Technical projects, even if not directly user-facing, can have long term impact on flexibility, usability and robustness of the end product.
Enter RFCs — our starting point for large technical projects
The format is quite simple: we have a document with the problem statement, requirements, proposed solution, tentative architecture and technical details, milestones, measures of success, open questions, and useful references.
It may seem obvious, but framing thinking this way can be surprisingly effective. Typically one or two engineers will take the lead writing out a first draft, which tends to be an exciting process of discovery! Others will then add their comments, have a discussion and eventually settle on an agreed upon solution that goes into the refinement process (acceptance criteria etc). One example RFC template we love is Rustlang’s, although there are various formats out there!
Concluding remarks
I hope this has provided an insight into how we build products and tech at GetGround! We’ve only scratched the surface so far, and will be sharing more in the coming weeks.
If you think we could be a fit for you, and you’d be excited about joining a VC-backed tech company, check out the links below or connect with me on LinkedIn.
And remember, “keep it simple, keep it safe” :)
🎧 Check out Misrab’s Spotify interview on co-founding GetGround.
