Product People Discovers a New Communication Tool for AVIV

The Client: AVIV

AVIV Group is one of the world’s largest digital real estate tech companies, headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

The company operates a portfolio of digital real estate marketplaces and brands across Europe, providing a wide range of services to help connect buyers and sellers and make the process of buying, selling, and renting properties as easy as possible. The brands constituting AVIV Group’s family are Meilleurs Agents, Group Seloger (🇫🇷), Immoweb, Immowelt (🇧🇪),  Housell (🇪🇸), and Yad2 (🇮🇱).

In addition to its core operations, AVIV is also a leading investor in innovative real estate tech companies such as 🇬🇧 PurpleBricks, 🇩🇪 Homeday, 🇺🇸 Zumper, and 🇺🇸 Parcel.

The company’s ambition is to become the leading employer in prop-tech in Europe, shaping the industry's future through new business models by providing funding, resources, and expertise to these companies.

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The Mission: Interim Product Manager

In September 2023, AVIV reached out to us as they had identified the need for a messaging service on the AVIV platform to link buyers and seekers in a way that didn’t push these users to email or phone calls. AVIV had no control of the messaging experience and because of this they could not solve pain points in this part of the user journey.

The problem was threefold:

1. Owners felt like they would be bombarded by seekers contacting them in their inboxes
2. Seekers felt like they would send a request and it would disappear into an ocean of requests and they would never hear back
3. AVIV could not improve this experience because they had no control over it and due to that they could not monetize the process of linking owner and seeker with a sale

The expectation from the champion was to go deep into the problem, understand the requirements and how this impacts all the dependency teams, scope the product, and find a 3rd party provider that we could leverage to get the product shipped without too many engineering resources.

The team initially consisted of a designer and a PM which later progressed into a team with 2 engineers and an engineering manager. The team is located within the tooling department under the platform experience domain. The key stakeholders were the actor domains that would integrate the built solution both on the owner and seeker side. This meant constant dependency mapping and stakeholder management to move anything forward.

We were contracted for three months and stayed for six months in total. During this time the company strategy changed and the French brand we had planned to roll out with was forced to change, this meant rapidly adapting to the German brand and all the complexities that lay within this brand.

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Our Main Quest: Scope a Communication Tool

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

We onboarded fast and were able to get up to speed on the problem very quickly. We got to work and started an internal discovery sprint, which began by interviewing stakeholders and dependency teams to try to understand the problems they would like to solve before we jumped into a solution. From there we went into customer interviews to understand their problems followed by opportunity mapping.

First Deliverables and Results

1. Clearly scoped out senior leadership requirements
2. Clearly scoped out customer requirements
3. Presented to dependency teams and got buy-in and active support on the next steps

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Notable Bodies of Work Delivered

While working on the communication tool we realized there are some unavoidable bodies of work that need to be done to ensure this product can get shipped. This meant going over and above simply scoping the requirements of the product.

Piece 1 - Selecting 3rd party provider

This was a more difficult problem to solve than it seemed, due to the sensitive information we would be collecting in a communication tool we needed to ensure our partners were compliant with GDPR and other Privacy laws in the EU and quickly found that the obvious front running candidates were not. This meant finding a European-based company and pressure testing their privacy regulations early on in the conversation before pricing was even mentioned.

Problem:

• Selecting a 3rd party with strict privacy controls that adhere to European privacy regulations that also is accepted by the procurement department

What has been done:

• Interviewed 4 providers
• Led legal discussions with third-party providers
• Selected a 3rd party that adhered to privacy regulations, is cost-efficient, and provides all required functionality

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Piece 2 - Alignment with dependency teams

Problem:

• The team does not have its own users, as the team's job is to build tools for other teams. A communication tool impacts both sides of the marketplace and everything in between, this meant we required alignment from teams in many departments from the owner and seeker team to the customer care team.

What has been done:

• Alignment with owner and seeker champions as well as the sub-teams within these domains
• Alignment with supporting teams on timeline and requirements from them
• Buy-in from dependency teams to assist us with the build and collaborate on one solution rather than two teams building 2 solutions for a similar problem

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Piece 3 - Building a moderation blueprint

Problem:

• The type of proposed solution did not exist in AVIV, this means there is no team that was prepared to handle 1-1 owner and seeker communication and their disputes and offensive content

What has been done:

• We created buy-in with the moderation team
• We scoped a moderation portal that our customer care team can use to moderate users on the platform
• We collaborated with the marketplace design and customer care teams to build a moderation process for reported and blocked users that extends from the communication tool to the platform level
• We built business rules around moderation from scratch to help the moderation team do an efficient job

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Identified problems, scoped solutions, and built product requirements.

💡 Created buy-in across multiple dependency teams with conflicting timelines and interests.

💡 Built a clear moderation plan to ensure user safety and got sign-off from legal, privacy, and customer service teams.

💡 The mission was extended for 3 months.

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