Overview
openigloo is a real-estate tech company revolutionizing the experience of renting for both tenants and property owners.
As the founding Product Designer, I built the design function from the ground up and own the end-to-end design efforts for all mobile and web products.
ROLE | Product Designer
TEAM | CEO, CTO, Data Analyst, 3 Engineers
SHIPPED | B2B2C Mobile and Web Apps; SAAS Dashboard
Lay of the land
When I joined the team, the only product in existence was the pilot version of the mobile app which was an apartment review platform. A figma file handed-off by the freelancer who had designed it before me was the extent of the design function at that point.
First things first
The first order of business was to build a sustainable foundation that allowed me to design and iterate rapidly enough in parallel with our roadmap.
Below is a glimpse of what organizing that chaos looks like. It consisted of building a design system from scratch, establishing design guidelines, formalizing process and branding. This allowed us to ensure that every thing we built going forward was cohesive especially we have every intention of scaling.
Design System
Brand Refresh
Stand and deliver
All of the legwork went on to pay dividends. The first phase of the work was a redesign of the review platform app.
The second phase was a total transformation of the product and business direction. The goal was to go from simply being a free resource towards profitability. Months of exploration and pitching to landlords, renters, and investors and exploration resulted in us building a new kind of tenant-landlord marketplace. In other words, an end-to-end tenancy management experience where you can reap the benefits of vetting trustworthy landlords and renting from the directly. A major challenge I also overcame was introducing this new portal in a way that integrated seamlessly into the existing experience.
Outomes
💸 Funding and revenue increased
📈 User growth from 50k to 1m+
Learning it forward
I can write multiple books based upon my experiences as a design team of one at this point but here are the most valuable learnings:
🚀 QA before each launch should be a standardized product team practice
💡 Educating the team on design process and lean ux makes everyone more efficient
I hear you
I know what you must be thinking. There’s so much to the story and you’re left wanting to know more. I’m all ears for your questions so feel free to reach out and I’d love to answer them for you!