Portfolio Insights

Beyond - 2020

Overview

Team: 1 PM, 1 UX/UI designer (me), 1 backend developer, 1 front end developer

Timeline: 3 months

The problem

We were hearing a common complaint amongst our customers. Our tool was great for digging into an individual property’s performance, but the majority of our customers have a vast portfolio of properties. Our tool didn’t offer a high level look at portfolio performance, causing a few issues:

Customers were purchasing outside software to get this information (most notably Key Data, but also AirDNA, etc) 

Internal teams (CSMs / Revenue Managers) were struggling to find this information to stay on top of performance and inform decisions 

digging deeper

To make sure we understood the issue from all angles, my team and I conducted 3 upfront stages of research.  

synthesizing findings

Our team held a long session once our research was complete to make sense of what we learned.

We found that our users want to be able to...

• Understand performance

• Troubleshoot

• Take action

  …all in one place.

Ideation

To be perfectly frank, organizing so much data in a meaningful way seemed impossible when I began ideation. It made me take a step back and think, “what is the first thing a user wants to see when they come to insights - why would they be looking for this kind of data?”.

Users want to see, “how am I doing? How is my portfolio performing?”. 

Giving users a high-level overview of their portfolio’s performance using various metrics as a jumping off point for digging deeper made sense to me at this point.

It’s important to note that a big reason this project was crucial to customers at this point in time was that it was at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. We wanted to provide users with a way to keep tabs on how the market was changing by bringing things like cancellations to the forefront, and how they were pacing against the general market.

That initial direction got a bit complicated fast. We knew from speaking to customers that every PM company was set up differently - multiple markets, single markets, multiple PMs, etc, meaning there were different ways they wanted to look at the data. We heard often in our interviews that our competitor’s tools did one thing well - either it did a good job of giving them a general overview but it lacked the ability to drill in, or it gave them a very focus view that led users have to work really hard to get a general understanding of trends in their portfolio.  

This lead me to ask myself “how can we give them both? What are the ways users want to look at their data? How do they slice and dice their portfolio when reviewing it?“

3 perspectives jumped out to me:

1. General overview (a quick “temperature check”)

2. Market-specific health (both with how markets were doing AND how they compared to the general market)

3. Granular, property-specific view (troubleshooting a property)

Unfortunately, this provided its own set of issues. Mainly, it was all the same data - just presented differently on each view. So this made me think, “was this really valuable to do this for the user or should we allow them to choose what is important to them?”. 

Another huge aspect that was lacking was the ability to make the data actionable. Simply spotting issues wasn’t enough. We needed a way for users to spot specific issues, easily uncover the root of these issues, and then take appropriate action.

One day I was poking around our graphs and I thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if, when you’re messing around with different filters, then you spot a dip on a graph -- if you could highlight it, then view specifics of what’s going on? Then take it one step further and be able to take action right from there?”

This is where the concept of the “lens” (think: magnifying glass) was born! With this tool, you can click and drag over any insights graph to summon listing-specific data, that allows users to investigate what is going on.

The extra information is key. Knowing that a listing isn’t performing well revenue-wise isn’t useful -- but knowing why it isn’t performing well allows you to make an informed decision on how to address it. 

V1 coming to life

Need 1: Understanding performance

To accomplish this, we provided key top-level metrics (determined by our research) for the entire portfolio, that was then parsable by:

• Date ranges (Past/present/future/custom)

• Market

• Bedroom size

• Specific groups of listings, defined by the customer

Need 2: Troubleshooting

To accomplish this, we provided graphs and data-sets for all the major metrics used by property managers, organized by logic. Though each graph was defaulted to the most common use case we found, they could be viewed as broadly or granularly as desired, allowing users to change the scope depending on their specific needs.

The lens feature allowed users to troubleshoot issues in real-time, by grabbing information as they spot trends on the graphs.

Need 3: Taking action

The information surfaced by the lens could be sliced and diced as needed, so that users could find the root cause. From there, we allow users to select the property or properties with an issue, and then “edit” them using the same flow they currently use in our Pricing product (and are therefore familiar with) — without ever having to leave the Insights tool.

So, what is insights again?

To take a step back and define the product, here are the key defining aspects:

For our business💡

• Grow Pricing customer base (reduce barrier to entry >> Drive sales leads; ↑organic growth)

• Offer smarter Insights & recommendations (via more connected accounts)

• Increase retention (↑clear competitive advantage over Pricelabs, etc; ↑ ability to demonstrate value)

For our customers  📈

• Be an instant expert (Understand & review market, portfolio performance)

• Troubleshoot & spot trends without in-depth knowledge of analytics

• Have all critical tools in one platform (no need to buy KeyData, for example)

• Take action without leaving our platform

• Back up conversations with owners

reflection

I was so proud at what our small team accomplished in such a short amount of time. Insights was the fourth product added to our product suite and was immediately embraced by our customers (4 of our largest customers dropped their current solution and starting using us first week!).

Though we did a lot of things well, there was still a lot our team wanted learn and reflect on:

• Should we have done more analogous research (top BI tools NOT in vacation rental space)? 

• How can we measure engagement going forward? (beyond just page views) 

• How can we promote regular engagement? 

• Should we revisit our findings from Insights and look at smaller themes that were not implemented? Are they still relevant today?

• Can we use engagement metrics to discover if using Insights > happier customers & increased retention?