Digitally Transforming Real Estate: A User-Centric Approach to Growth
Persona X conducted a Persona-Strategy Workshop for the product development company Honey Mustard—creators of the real estate SaaS product Mappen—to reimagine their product strategy through the lens of persona storytelling.
Setting the Scene: Identifying the Challenge
Honey Mustard’s tool Mappen, designed to digitally transform residential real estate projects by centralizing, organizing, and showcasing development units, faced a paradox. Despite its high retention rates, indicating customer satisfaction, Mappen’s growth trajectory did not align with the positive sentiment. The workshop aimed at solving this puzzle by attacking it at a foundational level, aiming to extract the problem by understanding the business goals and user experiences.
Phase 1: Crafting the Character
In order to set the foundation for a compelling narrative, the workshop’s initial phase focused on character creation. This step was pivotal in grounding the product’s vision in the reality of its users’ needs and challenges. By identifying Mappen’s primary user segments and distilling their pain points, Persona X laid the groundwork for a story-driven development path. Real estate agents, now facing the brunt of scattered and outdated pricing information, emerged as the central characters of the narrative.
Phase 2: Scripting the Storyline
Armed with insights from a recent survey and augmented by real-time field research, the team illuminated key pain points of their customers, particularly around inventory management and system accessibility*. This discovery phase acted as a catalyst, refining Mappen’s narrative to focus on high-impact areas that directly influenced the user experience.
Phase 3: Directing the Script
A pivotal realization emerged: improving the sales journey necessitated addressing the interdependencies within the sales ecosystem, notably the onboarding of sales directors. By shifting the narrative towards enhancing these crucial touchpoints, Honey Mustard envisioned a more cohesive user journey that not only streamlined operations but also amplified product value.
Phase 4: Visualizing the Storyboard
With a clear narrative in place, the team leveraged AI to ideate and visualize critical touch-points, unveiling opportunities to refine the onboarding process. This creative exercise highlighted the potential of integrating AI in data handling, proposing an innovative approach to reduce manual efforts and improve efficiency. The excitement around streamlining onboarding to enable a 7-day free trial pointed towards a new direction for product-led growth.
The Finale: Crafting the Experience Blueprint
The workshop culminated in the development of an Experience Blueprint, an expanded vision that weaved together the various narratives and solutions into a comprehensive roadmap for implementation. This blueprint served as a beacon for Honey Mustard’s strategic planning and messaging, ensuring that every touchpoint and interaction was aligned with the overarching goal of user-centric product development.
Transformative Insights and Actionable Outcomes
Persona X’s workshop not only provided a structured approach to tackling Honey Mustard’s growth challenge but also highlighted the transformative potential of AI in understanding and addressing user needs. The journey from character creation to the final blueprint underscored the value of a narrative-driven strategy in product development, offering a replicable model for businesses seeking to align their offerings more closely with their users’ needs.
For organizations looking to harness the power of user-centric design and AI, Persona X’s workshops offer a unique opportunity to reimagine product strategies through the lens of those who matter most: the users.
A comical yet insightful revelation emerged when exploring the AI-generated persona for sales agents. The Head of Product, after embarking on a field study, was amused to find that sales agents frequently echoed the AI-predicted phrase, “I don’t have that information at the moment, let me ask my manager,” when queried about unit specifics. This real-world echo of the AI’s insights not only validated the predictive power of AI in identifying common pain points but also highlighted the humorous reality of sales agents’ struggles to access timely information. Persona X leveraged this anecdote to underscore the importance of grounding AI-generated assumptions in real-world experiences, marrying technology with human insight to refine Mappen’s strategy.
