Role
Product Lead
Team
Product Designer
Software Engineer (5)
Timeline
December 2023 - March 2024
Overview
I launched a feature that helps real estate agents prepare properties for showings more efficiently, reducing friction in the scheduling process, increasing showing success rates, and ultimately accelerating transaction velocity.
Context
Listing agents are responsible for configuring access instructions for their properties. Previously, the onboarding team required clients to meet a certain percentage of configured listings to launch. This requirement was removed to simplify the launch process.
While streamlining the launch process improved speed, it introduced unintended consequences. Showing agents were frequently unable to access properties due to missing access instructions, resulting in a spike in support calls tied to failed showings and significant costs to the business.
Could not access properties, leading to failed showings and frustration, appearing unprofessional to clients.
Receiving complaints and having to repeatedly provide ad-hoc access instructions, impacting sale of the listing.
Team overwhelmed with 30% of calls being preventable access-related issues across multiple marketplaces.
Unsustainable support-related costs exceeding $100,000/month.
I started with qualitative research, interviewing internal team members, reviewing support tickets, speaking with users, and auditing the existing listing setup experience to identify key pain points.
During exploration, I brought together cross-functional stakeholders, including engineering, support, and onboarding, aligning them on the problem by sharing context, leading discussions, and facilitating key decisions that shaped our direction.
Auditing the current listing setup experience
Users lack personalized onboarding to guide them through essential workflows like listing setup.
Users are unaware that missing access instructions can negatively impact the success rate of showings.
Navigation to showing settings is unintuitive for most users, despite multiple access points throughout the platform.
The settings experience is cluttered, with access instructions buried, reducing visibility and importance.
Leading a brainstorm
I synthesized research insights into a clear problem statement and facilitated a structured brainstorming session with the product team. I provided the necessary context to enable productive collaboration, guiding the team through ideation. After generating a wide range of ideas, I led the effort to group them into themes, prioritize based on impact and feasibility, and align the team on a focused shortlist of solutions to move forward.
I engaged the technical lead early to evaluate the feasibility of proposed solutions. Based on our exploration, we prioritized creating a high-visibility component within the dashboard, the first touchpoint on both web and mobile, to surface the importance of setting up access instructions.
An email notification was also included in scope to proactively alert listing agents about listings missing access instructions, encouraging timely completion.
I partnered closely with the product designer to refine the experience and developed a walkthrough video to clearly communicate the proposed solution. This was shared with stakeholders to gather alignment and feedback ahead of implementation and release.
To prevent recurring issues with spam complaints that previously impacted email deliverability and reputation, I set the notification cadence to once a week, scheduled for Monday mornings.
This introduces a potential delay in agents being alerted about missing access instructions, which may result in showings proceeding without the necessary setup for listings created mid-week.
To deliver value quickly and stay within scope, I excluded the administrator persona from the first iteration, as their distinct workflows would have added complexity.
While this decision accelerated development to deliver a focused experience for listing agents, it reduced user coverage and may require additional work to support administrators.
Agents often customize settings like notice periods and durations, but I focused solely on access instructions to address the most critical blocker without increasing scope.
Limiting functionality reduced implementation time and complexity but left agents managing other critical configuration options through less streamlined workflows in the short term.
The primary metric was the percentage of listings configured with access instructions. As a baseline, we measured this at 60% prior to release. Using data collected over two quarters, post-release immediately boosted that number by 13%, with an overall improvement of 21% increase within six months.
21%
Increase in listings configured with access instructions
76%
Decrease in monthly support calls related to missing access
72%
Reduction in resourcing costs tied to access-related issues
Collaborative brainstorming
Facilitating a structured brainstorming session with led to a wider range of ideas, deeper shared understanding of the problem space, and stronger alignment on the final direction. Creating space for diverse perspectives helped surface edge cases and practical considerations early.
Early alignment drives momentum
Engaging cross-functional stakeholders early in the discovery and scoping phase helped build shared understanding and accelerate decision-making throughout the project.
Emphasis on product analytics
We lacked the granular analytics needed to track how users engaged with the new experience (e.g., visibility vs. interaction, drop-off points), which made it difficult to quickly identify what was working and what required iteration in the critical weeks following release.
Copyright © 2025 Karen Nguyen