How do you turn a Brilliant Idea into a Brilliant Product?
Innovation is challenging.
That might seem a bit of an obvious statement, but nonetheless, it’s true.
Innovation is challenging. Very challenging. You’re trying to build the world of the future, but you’re unsure what exactly that future is going to be. You can have a brilliant idea, solve a problem that nobody else has solved, but translating that idea into a must-have product is rarely straightforward.
This is a story of how we turned a brilliant idea into a must-have product by getting it wrong a few times along the way.
Let’s go back to the beginning; what was our brilliant idea?
We knew how to solve one of the biggest problems in estate agency: repeat business.
Brand loyalty is extremely valuable but is virtually non-existent in an estate agency. We found that, on average, only 13% of people will sell their house with the agency they bought it from — even though that agency has already proven they can sell it!
We researched the reasons for this and found that most people couldn’t even remember the agency they purchased a property from after five years. Brand recognition was clearly the problem.
To solve this, we would create a product to generate automated property reports for people on the anniversary of their home purchase. It would be interesting for the recipient and maintain that important connection for estate agents. We set to work and launched the product a few months later.
However, it didn’t quite work out.
Everyone who saw the system liked it. Everyone who used the system loved it.
Estate agents found it extremely easy to use. It was an automated system, so after the initial set up all the user needed to do was sit back and let the leads roll in. And roll in they did! We saw repeat business levels more than double for our clients, with one agent citing it as the source of more than half of their new business! It appeared that we had struck gold, but there was a snag. The system didn’t quite have the market traction we expected. It took us some time to fully understand why. We were a victim of our own success.
Our main product, Spectre, was entering a period of exponential growth and the anniversary idea became something of a forgotten child.
After a few years of rapid hiring, a large part of the company had never used it and didn’t feel confident selling it. The original team still loved the product, and wanted to give it attention, but couldn’t justify it given the comparable revenues. Because we felt it wasn’t performing well, we weren’t giving it attention. Because we weren’t giving it attention, it wasn’t performing well. A classic Catch-22.
In the end, we decided that drastic action needed to be taken. We considered axing the product altogether, but the anniversaries idea was too good to waste. Instead, we would merge it with our lead product, Spectre.
What followed was one of the stranger experiences of my career. How often do you have the chance to answer the question “If I could do this again, what would I do differently?” Rarely in my case! Anything we didn’t like in the original, we had an opportunity to fix. Spread out settings? Let’s centralise it. Lengthy setup? Let’s create a setup wizard. Too different from our main product? Let’s synchronise styles.
We all understood the problems because we had worked with this system for years, and were able to act with precision in the product discovery phase. This led to another problem: we started to get carried away. We wanted perfection, a chance to fix everything in one go, but helpful check-ins with the wider company stopped this getting out of control. Before long, we realised the new product, which we were now calling Anniversaries, was ready for the world to see it. We migrated our old users and opened it up for the rest of our clients on Spectre to see.
The decision to transfer Anniversaries to Spectre was validated within twenty-four hours. We quickly surpassed the old product in terms of users, and it was done without intervention. Previously we had a lengthy onboarding process that could take weeks and required hand-holding from our commercial team, but within half an hour of the launch one of our clients had set themselves up completely independently.
Since then, Anniversaries has gone from strength to strength and is credited by some of our clients as being their single greatest source of new leads.
This was a lengthy journey. At the time of writing in November 2021, we are four years on from the initial idea, and it is a journey I’m incredibly grateful for. So I’ll close with several key lessons it taught me as a Product Owner:
- A good idea isn’t a product on its own, it needs continued support to flourish otherwise it will be a drain on resources.
- Just because a product doesn’t appear to be working doesn’t mean it should be thrown away, it can just be a matter of implementation.
- A product doesn’t need to be perfect to be successful. You might have ideas for how to make it even better, but it might be able to provide value to clients immediately.
To find out more about life at Street Group, visit streetgroup.co.uk, our Glassdoor page, or visit our careers site.
