Designing a Real Estate Affordability Calculator - Lopes / Thoughtworks

Business Challenge

At Thoughtworks, we were a multidisciplinary squad working on Lopes’ digital transformation. At the time, the company followed a waterfall approach, with little investment in research, UX, or hypothesis building and validation.

A Thoughtworks tem uma cultura muito forte em entrega de software e agile, que eram as ferramentas que estavam sendo usadas para reverter esse cenário, mas não estava dando certo. Nossas retrospectivas eram impedidas e o C-Level insistia em colocar pontuação cada vez maior dentro das sprints.

Approach

I created a presentation called "Product Mindset", combining theory, results I had achieved in previous projects, and a few frameworks. I presented it to my Thoughtworks team as a way to express my intention to help change the product culture at Lopes.

Workshop

The first step was to properly frame the problem we were facing.

I proposed a workshop using the 5 Whys method to help us identify the root cause of the problem and leave the session with clear, actionable next steps.

Building Relationships

One of the most important outcomes of the workshop was the need to build stronger relationships with people from different teams, so we could help whenever opportunities emerged.

At the end of one of these conversations, the BA and I stayed until 9 PM talking about our product perspective with Gustavo Lopes, the CEO’s son. That was when I had the opportunity to show him the Product Mindset presentation.

Gustavo Lopes then discussed the opportunity with the C-level team and asked us to help solve a specific business challenge:

• How could we explain financing terms in a way that was easier for users to understand?
• How could we demonstrate that new developments could be more financially attractive than existing properties?

Benchmarking

We knew Zillow was an important benchmark in the real estate industry. It had also been featured in several Reforge lessons about retention and engagement.

We analyzed Zillow along with other Brazilian and international platforms and identified several relevant features and patterns that could help inform our solution.

Research

We were working under several constraints. One of them was that, by decision of the CDO, we were not allowed to conduct formal user research.

I decided to at least talk to a few friends who had recently bought an apartment. I also took advantage of the legacy portal, which still had significant traffic but was no longer a priority for the company, to run a poll with a few questions.

Qualitative

Interviews with 4 people.

• Understand what their buying process was like.
• Understand what difficulties they encountered.
• Understand what information created confusion during the process.

Quantitativa

Poll on the legacy website.

• Understand the biggest questions people had during the buying process, open-ended.
• Understand the biggest questions people had when financing a property, open-ended.
• Thematic analysis.
• Clustering.

Ideation

Gustavo Lopes already had an Excel tool that he used for real estate calculations. Together with Gustavo Lopes, the team decided to test this feature.

Prototype

I created a high-fidelity prototype and tested it in person through guerrilla testing. The prototype addressed some of the problems I found during the interviews as well as the business problems, for example:

People were not familiar with technical terms such as ITBI, additional down payment, etc.

We created tooltips in the calculation results.

I created a high-fidelity prototype and tested it in person through guerrilla testing. The prototype addressed some of the problems I found during the interviews as well as the business problems, for example:

We needed to show the difference between an existing property and a property bought off-plan.

We created two sides of the same result.

I created a high-fidelity prototype and tested it in person through guerrilla testing. The prototype addressed some of the problems I found during the interviews as well as the business problems, for example:

Diagnosis

This created some discomfort for the CDO, who ended our contract one month before it was scheduled to end, which unfortunately took away our opportunity to work on improving the feature or conducting research that could provide solutions for Lopes' users.

Fortunately, our efforts to build closer relationships paid off, and the results of the calculator caught the attention of the director, who asked us to provide a diagnosis of how we saw Lopes and its digital transformation process.

Results

The calculator helped us show the director at Lopes how we could deliver features that brought value to users. It also gave us the opportunity to have a much more mature conversation through the diagnosis.

• While we were away, the leadership team restructured the C-Level and hired a well-known product leader in the market, Joca Torres.
• Joca brought us back because he saw that our diagnosis aligned with what he had in mind for Lopes, which resulted in a second Thoughtworks engagement with Lopes.
• At least until I left, the calculator was the feature that generated the most qualified leads across the entire portal, both new and legacy. It was the lead source that every real estate agent worked to gain access to.