When Product Development Meets COVID-19: A Closer Look at ImmoScout24’s Live Viewing Feature
By Thu-Trang Ho
The Corona pandemic has bought a lot of challenges but it has also have made us become more agile than ever. The story behind the further development of ImmoScout24’s live viewing feature is a perfect example for that. With the help of this feature, home seekers can take part in a property viewing at any time and from anywhere via video call using the ImmoScout24 iOS or Android App. We sat down to talk to Alia Asaad, Product Manager, and Haitham Aboshahba, Engineering Manager, to discuss the challenges, the implementation and the learnings.
1.The live viewing project was born when Germany got hit by Corona. Could you tell us a bit about the reasons behind its implementation?
Haitham: During lockdown, we thought about finding the best way to help our users in their journey of finding and relocating to their new homes. We did our homework and asked our users and the answer was pretty clear: online video viewing with easy usability and top-notch quality. That was the moment when we shuffled our priorities and committed to deliver it to our users.
Alia: In fact, the social distancing situation came suddenly and many usual processes couldn’t take place normally anymore. The core of the real estate business is that home seekers can visit a property to see if it fits their needs. Since this was not possible during lockdown we had to find and offer a quick solution to our consumers and customers.
2. The project was developed within a short amount of time which means that the teams needed to be on the same page very fast. What did you do to make collaboration work well?
Haitham: That was one of the biggest challenges we had: running against the clock and delivering the service to our users as fast as possible without compromising on the quality aspect. We had really strong commitment, engagement and dedication from the whole team behind that clear single goal. Everyone was pushing the bar to the max to achieve it, the mindset of #MakeItHappen gave us strong confidence to pave our way through many uncertainties without a shadow of a doubt that we will succeed .
Personally, I’ve had many challenging projects in the past, I am sure that I will have more in the future, but this project is so special to me and I am definitely proud of our achievement.
Alia: In addition, what helped us was that all team members believed in the value of this product. To make the project work for the whole team working remotely, we scheduled daily updates on the progress, pairing sessions between different team members and brainstorming meetings on digital boards. Another simple and yet effective routine is the organisation of video calls for alignment because text messages could be misinterpreted.
3. What were the biggest challenges and how did you solve them?
Haitham: To begin with, we had many ideas on how the feature should look like and what are the potential capabilities we can add to it. Many ideas were great, but we had to stick to a lean approach and shape the MVP first. Also having both product and tech discovery process running in parallel was challenging as they could impact each other in case of tech limitation or other constraints. We’ve managed to overcome all the challenges by being resilient, open to ideas and feedback.
Alia: For me, the biggest challenge was prioritisation. With such a tight deadline and a lot of approaches to solve the problem, we had to find the real minimum viable/valuable product. We ran discovery in parallel to delivery. In other words, we defined the MVP based on what we thought it was and then tested this in interviews with different user groups (consumers, private customers and professional agents) while starting to build the technical solution. Any feedback that we would get from the users’ tests was included right away in the technical implementation. It was a very agile project where the whole team was open for changes based on the learnings.
A further challenge was to think about the experience as a whole and not based on one platform or one target group. We had great collaboration between our different teams where our UX researchers, our marketing experts and us product managers worked closely together.
4. What did you learn during this special project and how does it differ from your other projects?
Haitham: It differs from other projects primarily due to timeline — running against the clock — and lots of undiscovered territories of the tech stack and solution. In every other initiative we always have time beforehand to do research and both product and tech discoveries. In this project it wasn’t exactly the case, as we needed to bootstrap and move fast in response to covid-19 restrictions and lockdown situation. Therefore, we did many things in parallel, research, UX, tech discovery of potential solutions and hooked up many components of our tech stack together… and it worked well.
My biggest learning here is, well, actually, it is rather a confirmation than a learning. Our Scout DNA Culture Code really pays off and as a result, we have highly engaged, motivated and challenge-driven individuals who collaborate to tackle and overcome challenges to deliver the best value to our customers and consumers.
Alia: This project was special for me because of the need for a fast delivery, but more importantly because of the unusual situation it was built in. We were all suddenly supposed to work from home and adapt our lifestyle. Some of the team members have families that also had to stay home suddenly and needed extra time and care. It was important to be flexible and supportive of other colleagues’ circumstances. For me the biggest learning was compassion. Everyone understood that it was not an easy time for every other team member.
It was also a special experience to pair with fellow product managers and see different perspectives, especially since we product managers are usually solo fighters.
6. Let’s talk about its implementation. In which business areas has it been integrated and what are the future plans?
Alia: So far our customers, private home owners or professional realtors, have access to the feature and can invite consumers who are interested in a property to such video appointments to view it. In the future we want to give our consumers the possibility to request a live viewing appointment if they are interested in a property. This feature is one step towards digitising the property search journey. We think that this is the way to go and further steps of the journey should be possible online in the future.
By the way, the team is also looking for support: Team Lead Product Management (m/f/x) Digital Marketplaces. More job opportunities can be found here.
