Movem was founded by Peter Ramsey in 2013 with the goal to help renters find great properties & landlords.
In late 2016, after a successful funding round, Peter asked me to join an all-new Movem team as employee #1 and help re-start Movem.
22 months later, after lots of great and challenging work by the team, Movem was acquired by a Barbon Insurance Group at a significantly higher value.
Background
Movem's mission statement made sense to me, but it was struggling to make progress in early 2016. I reached out to Peter to find out why. We met several times to dissect the problems and explore solutions. Pete said that he found our meetings to be the most helpful resource he had found, which led to us working together.
The problem
Movem received funding to achieve a goal defined in the crowdfunding campaign, and needed to begin work ASAP.
Movem needed a development team with a project/product manager to execute this plan.
Who else was involved
• Peter, CEO
• Mike, Lead Back-end Developer
• Mark, Lead Front-end Developer
• Felippe, Senior Back-end Developer
What tools we used
• Asana
• Jira
• BitBucket
• Google Docs
• Dropbox
• Whiteboard
• Balsamiq
• Sketch
Discovery phase
Movem was set to become a digital product for Renters, Landlords and Letting Agents.
The very first task was to completely rebuild the existing review site for tenants. Our foundation was the experience from Pete with managing the existing review site.
As Tenants ourselves we had personal input, as well as reaching out to connections with rental experience.
I led most of the visits to Letting Agents and Landlords, asking them about being on the receiving end of a review. We used the feedback to help us design a review form that captured relevant information for multiple parties.
The process
Pete & I spent a lot of time around the whiteboard working out solutions at a high-level, when we reached an agreement, I would work on mockups and flowcharts, so we could analyze them to surface problems early. Below is just a random example of multiple daily discussions we had day to day to test ideas.
This was very effective, and we developed and abandoned many ideas before development time was wasted. The good ideas survived and were developed further.
When we were confident about a feature or concept, we'd welcome the feedback of the devs as both Tenants and as software professionals. Again this dynamic often led to great critical analysis and helped avoid pitfalls down the line.
When we were satisfied with an idea, and when we judged it necessary, we would arrange to discuss these with real individuals in the target market. We would discuss our findings with the team then take time to make decisions.
The first year and a half of Movem was an especially exciting period with a lot of pivots and responding to breaking information and regulatory changes i.e. the government ban on tenant fees which affected literally all of our potential Letting Agent customers.
We started with a very B2C product, and for strategic reasons pivoted to a product with a 50/50 split of B2C and B2B. This was a tough decision and we had the backing of lead investors to pursue this new direction.
When we decided to tackle tenant referencing, many of the challenges were in the back-end, I spent a significant amount of time interpreting raw data returns (XML, JSON) from partners and I designed the Tenant Reference Report which is a complex translation of the raw data into user friendly information. (Cannot show this here).
The data inputs and outputs informed a lot of the design of the tenant form, the B2C end of the product.
Real world conversations with Letting Agents informed a lot of the design of the Agent dashboard and features.
We didn't outsource any testing, and it was my responsibility to do virtually all testing and green-light all deployments.
After some great work during a constantly evolving roadmap, we succeeded in being the first to build an automated tool for delivering tenant background checks in a few minutes, compared to the industry standard of days.
The final outcome
We ended up building a completely different product to what we started, and learnt that is quite normal.
The review site was a success on a technical level, and we did not find usability problems with what we had built. Instead we hit a marketing & strategic problem that led to a pivot.
We succeeded in being the first to launch very ambitious technology in the tenant referencing industry and were promptly acquired.
In the small team, I juggled multiple roles; Product Manager, Product Designer, Project Manager, QA Tester, Support Analyst etc.
The importance of high-level product decisions outweighed any concern or desire to get involved with very low-level final UI design and we ultimately hired a dedicated designer. I am confident now more than ever that I provide massive value on these different areas and it is more efficient to delegate the finishing UI/UX design.
I'm proud to have worked with a very talented team and satisfied knowing that they would be happy to work with me again.
