I started at Rentlytics in September 2016 as a Product Manager for the Business Intelligence Solution; this was the first time I made a move from product designer to a more strategic and management position.
This portfolio page is a combination of the many projects I have managed and designed from the start to launch. Starting with my very first project: "My Pinboards" and continuing to other extensions like commenting and alerts.
About Rentlytics:
Rentlytics is a provider of cloud-based business intelligence software solutions enabling multifamily owners and managers to drive better performance and grow portfolio returns.
The Rentlytics Business Intelligence platform gathers and normalizes data from hundreds of different systems to deliver holistic property- and portfolio- level analysis, thereby resolving system incompatibility, data accuracy issues, and time-to-analysis delays. Source
Pinboards & Sharing
Rentlytics users faced a considerable challenge: they have access to over 20 dashboards and 400 unique key performance indicators. That much data is overwhelming, and at the time, the site was not customized to fit their individual needs.
The goal of this project was to provide users the ability to start tailoring Rentlytics in a way that drives their everyday workflow and delivers value to each user within an organization. The project increased user engagement and made Rentlytics a critical solution for customers.
Business Goals
- Drive data consumption within Rentlytics
- Increase Daily Active Use
- Decrease Customer Support Interaction
Problem Statement
Users have to visit multiple Rentlytics data dashboards to find the information they need. Every user has specific needs for their position within an organization; users do not have the daily data they need in one place.
Feature Goal
Provide users the ability to start tailoring Rentlytics in a way that drives their everyday workflow and delivers value to individuals and the team within an organization.
Role Product Manager and Designer (that startup life!)
Team Director of Product, Director of Engineering, and three web engineers.
Timeline
- MVP Launch - April 2017
- Improvements - June 2017
- Feature Addition - November 2017
Perfect World
Over the first few weeks, I developed the “Perfect World” for the feature. The "Perfect World" is to give Rentlytics users the ability to create a configurable dashboard or "Pinboard" from any existing or custom metrics in the system. We then wanted to turn those dashboards into reports that the creator can share with his or her team.
MoSCoW
When planning, I broke down items down into manageable features. Then simplified features broke down into a MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have). Some "must have" features included: a new "Pinboard" homepage, the ability to add, remove, arrange metrics, metric filters, view the detail tables for each metric and share their "Pinboards" with members of their organization.
Sharing
We added the capability to share "Pinboards" as well as manage the users who can view the Pinboard content.
User Testing Process
Once development was nearly complete, we began Beta testing the Pinboards with stakeholder customers. Working with the customer success team choose 40 power users to start the testing process. We sent a simple 15-minute Google survey along to the testers and received useful feedback.
Next Steps
After working with the customers to review the results, and discussing with the team, I broke down the next steps. Some items became immediate changes and others, seen below, would come in future iterations of the product.
1. An “Edit Mode”, so the user can hide the arranging and add options.
2. Users want multiple Pinboards
3. Edit the title of the Pinboard(s)
4. Ability to add a description to explain what is on the Pinboard.
5. Add metrics from search.
Product Launch
After customer feedback the version one of Pinboards and Sharing was launched in April of 2017.
These simplified features set up the product for scale and laid the foundation for the “Perfect World” plan.
Pinboards V2 - Launched June 2017
Shortly after the launch, using the Beta testing feedback, we started Pinboards V2.
Features included the ability for users to add multiple Pinboards, updated navigation, an edit mode for title editing as well as the ability to delete a Pinboard.
Pinboard Descriptions - Launched Nov 2017
With continuation of the project, we launched the ability to add descriptions to each Pinboard.
Conclusion
The Pinboard project continued to develop to the "Perfect World" solution until Rentlytics sold to RealPage in the Fall of 2018.
Upon leaving Rentlytics, I left behind a plan to launch additional features. Features included the increasing the number of metrics the user could contribute to their Pinboards, improved search abilities, and a new way to view and filter data within the dashboards. I created further plans around comments and metric alerting.
