Design Sprint

Helping home buyers make the right purchase decision

During my time at Properly, I led our design and product teams through a multi-day design sprint in order to validate solutions to problems for home buyers. The sprint was primarily informed by Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) research. Our team engaged with an outside consultant and surveyed 1,000+ participants in the Toronto and Vancouver areas. Initially we drafted more than 600 needs for home buyers, but for the purpose of the survey, we selected the top100 needs for quantitative analysis.

Once the research was finalized, we selected three areas of focus for our design sprint:

As a homebuyer, I want to understand the total cost of home ownership, so that I can assess my affordability
As a homebuyer, I want to understand the quality of a home, so that I avoid costly repairs and renovations
As a homebuyer, I want to make the best possible offer, so that I increase my chance of winning the home

Below I’ve outlined a high-level summary of our sprint outcomes.

Let the sprint begin

In order to jam on three separate home buyer problems, we split our sprint team into three teams. In total our sprint had 21 participants, with some folks acting as subject matter experts from our operations, real estate, and mortgage teams, while the rest being active participants in brainstorming, sketching, and converging on solutions.

I created a high level roadmap to align the team on the sprint’s activities. The goal was to spend three days together as a sprint group, then break out and let the design team take the concepts to high-fidelity and user testing.

One of the challenges with such a large group, and being remote-first, was to quickly get the team up-to-speed on how to use FigJam (our tool for conducting the sprint). I decided to use “Two Truths and a Lie” as a fun way to get to know each other, have some laughs, and get comfortable with sticky notes and voting!

Once we found our groove, the team quickly got heads down on Day 1 and brainstormed using How Might We statements. We grouped common themes and voted on the top categories.

As you can imagine, the team had a ton of ideas! We knew we couldn’t solve all of them during one sprint, so we voted and converged on the three topics outlined above. Before voting however, it was important to align again on the goals of the problems we wanted to solve. We used the following prompt:

Solving this problem will...
...take a “moonshot effort”
...create a defensible, unique experience for buyers
...grab buyers attention and give them a reason to choose Properly
...impact lots of customers
...and solve a identified Job-to-be-done of buyers

Breakout into separate groups

Once we identified and agreed on the main categories of home buyer problems, we split into three groups, and continued with our Day 2 and Day 3 activities.

Each team spent time reviewing competitors, sketching solutions, creating ‘art museums’ to share sketches and vote on the most exciting ideas, then creating storyboards for the winning idea, and finally sharing out their ideas with the larger sprint group.

My role throughout Day 2 and 3 was to jump between the different Zoom sessions and ensure every team was clear on their tasks. The energy and excitement in every room were palpable!

At the end of Day 3, each team had created a storyboard, which was a combination of the winning sketches strung together into one narrative. This provided a starting point for our designers to take the concepts and create high-fidelity prototypes.

The final concepts

After a week of heads-down Figma work, and a few rounds of design reviews, our design team finalized three high-fidelity concepts addressing costs of ownership, offer strategy, and home inspections.

View concepts (password-protected)

Due to confidentiality reasons, please reach out directly and I’d be happy to walk-you through the solutions.