Vision Workshop
What is Zillow Vision Workshop
Creating a dedicated week set aside to think about the future of our product and services to better serve the renter/landlord. The output from that will inform the roadmap and product direction for the rentals team.
My Role
Design Leadership, Strategic Lead, Cross-functional collaboration
Project date: 2022
Team: 4 Designers, 2 Researchers, 1 Content Writer
How it started
Project objectives
The Design team is always busy with tactical work. Knowing that the objective is to be able to set aside dedicated time to work through a vision and the ability to propose something exciting and meaningful to help drive the product roadmaps. The secondary objective was to have the team come together to socialize and work together and improve the morale of the team.
Getting buy-in
- Getting partner alignment to have a week for the design team to focus
- Make sure resourcing and business trade-offs are considered
- Incorporating thoughts and future business objectives from product partners
Expectation setting
The most important thing to set up the team for success is to make sure the team is aware of the expectations for the design week, assigning different team members roles and responsibilities and helping them understand how they contribute.
Workshop planning
- Assigned a lead designer to plan out running the exercises in the workshop
- Asked a designer and 2 researchers to come up with segmentation for our personas so we can better understand user needs
- Planned out the itinerary for the week
Creating New User Segments
User needs & behavior varies based on their different context. Before this exercise, we only used Irene (landlord) and Rachel (Renter), but to design a better experience for our users we need to think about the different spectrum of their needs.
Rachel Segments
We broke down Rachels into two profiles, (The Rachel) which is someone who looks okay on paper, has decent credit with a salaried job, that wants to be sure about the home before applying for it. (The Freelancer) who is cautious about sharing info about herself, does not have a fixed income, and had trouble passing some landlord screenings.
Irene Segments
We did the same for Irenes, breaking them into (The Investigator) who prioritizes spending time to find the right tenant and wants to narrow down on candidates early to reduce risk. (The Maximizer) that looks for convenience in the screening process and is willing to look at all leads as she does not want to miss out.
Rental’s Design Week
Setting aside a week to have designers, researchers and content writers think about the future roadmap for the rentals team
- Research segmentation share-out — “The researchers share out the segmentation work that was done prior to the design week to give insights into different behaviors”
- Identify experience themes — “Mapping out insights though-out the rental journey and coming up with a (How might we’s) statement that we can drive forward”
- Hypothesis to explore — “Grounding it with the current hypothesis and business objectives, to make sure we are still able to tackle a general area of focus”
- Crazy 8 & Solution sketching — “Exploring different solutions based on the themes we had and voting on ideas we would like to explore further”
- Building the vision with storyboards — “Crafting a story around the most exciting ideas we had in our ideation · Wire-framing the visuals that would best help depict the vision · Creating a vision deck to share with partners and stakeholders to influence the future roadmap”
Design Vision Output
I worked with the team to string together the story from the output of the ‘Design Week’ and presented this to the product partners.
Driving the Product Roadmap
Key Priorities that will be addressed on Rentals 3YP 2022
- Differentiate our marketplace on quality & efficiency with the highest-intent leads
- Grow our transactional marketplace driven with ZRM subscription revenue
Execution Plan
The goal was to align the output of the design week to the product goals that are being crafted for the 3YP for the rentals team. We aligned on the 2 value drivers that we were tacking and created a execution plan to break down the vision and try to achieve it over the next few quarters.
Mapping out the current and future goals
As there are already current projects that aligned intending to create ‘Property matching’ and ‘Instant tour booking’, I mapped out what needs to be done to get to some of the goals of the vision. This was tricky because everything was interdependent on the other, and we will not be able to provide value without first creating some of the products that build a better understanding of Rachel/Irene before we can drive more value.
In Progress Projects
- (Rachel) Rental profile [Started Q1 2022]
- (Irene) Listing quality [Started Q2 2022]
New Initiatives
- (Rachel) Renter profile builder [Q4 2022]
- (Rachel) Property match score [Q1 2023]
- (Irene) Renter confidence score [Q1 2023]
- (Rachel/Irene) Instant tour booking [Q2 2023]
Next steps
I am currently working through sharing the plan and getting alignment with the execution plan, and the goal is to get an agreement to start on the initiatives above to work towards having a more personalized experience for the renters on Zillow.