AppFolio Alpha
Goal
Market validate the real estate asset management space, and build an additional product offering for existing Investment Management customers. This new product would be an additional cost to the core product in order to increase revenue, and gain market share with larger Investment Management companies.
Process
As the UX lead in the market validation we reviewed competitor products, talked to industry experts, identified key product features, and explored pricing and packaging options. Once complete it was clear we wanted to move on this opportunity quickly.
We formed a cross functional team in May 2022 to build the asset management product with a goal of launching in January 2023.
We reviewed the research with the team, and identified areas to focus on to make progress and learn more about the space quickly.
We knew the software needed to handle three key things:
- Importing property management reports
- Normalizing financial and leasing KPIs across all assets
- Visualizing the KPIs for internal and external review
Identifying charter customers to work with was critical to our success. We collected property financials, and rent rolls in order to learn about the structure of the reports so the team could build parsers that would intelligently pull out the data.
We also ran research calls to get initial feedback on early prototypes to ensure we were focused on pulling out the most critical KPIs from the reports first.
Senior leadership came to our team to strategize on how to launch the product at our annual customer conference, 3 months earlier than originally planned.
Our team rallied together to identify the must haves for launch, and what could be slimmed down in order to provide all the features originally identified as critical to launch.
We made our deadlines and in October 2022 we officially introduced the new value added asset management product for Investment Manager customers, AppFolio Alpha.
Final Product
Alpha is a robust platform that provides asset managers the ability to aggregate, normalize, and visualize key property management data. It provides investment companies actionable insights to drive better property performance, therefore providing better returns for their investors.
The product continues to improve as we gain new users, and improve our underlying technology.
