Property Developer Journey Map
Research
Service Design
Context
Since I started at Property Guru, I felt desperate to map out the interweaving journeys and processes of all the user and customer types. The domain is a highly complex one, and I soon came to find out how grand of a challenge mapping all that would be, and I came to weigh it against the business value it would bring.
In 2023, leadership identified developer offerings as a heavily underdeveloped section of the business. To date, the business had, rightly, focused on consumers and the marketplace. This worked when it was a start-up and a scale-up. But now as a mature business with two new arms, one into consumer financing and the other into a complex data platform, we needed to broaden our understanding of developers, as our biggest B2B customer type, to better position of products for them.
Early collaborative exploration
Brief
Acting as the B2B researcher, I was invited by the Strategy team, who are closely tied with the C-suite and upper leadership at PropertyGuru, to contribute to a new project to learn about internal property developer structures. Simultaneously, leaders on the data side of the business approached me with the idea to interview senior developer executives to get their high level knowledge on the property ecosystem.
I took the initiative to bring these two groups together and form a working interest group. I facilitated several inception sessions to establish the problem statements of the two groups, to mark the overlaps and construct a rational research plan.
The ultimate task was to undertake a vast meta-analysis of current and past research to provide the stakeholder groups with:
A refreshed and reliable model of the developer value chain
A description of the internal make up of teams within development organisations
A set of key costs of property developers across the value chain, in terms of both financial and time costs
A gantt-style chart of the developer process, which helped form the journey map
Activities
Using an external vendor to source the participants, as well as one sourced through internal networks, I conducted interviews with CEOs and CMOs at large developer organisations in Singapore and Malaysia. I planned the discussion guide to uncover fine detail about the three target topics, and transcribed each in detail. It was important to make optimal use of the sessions and their results, as these sessions were expensive and slow to organise.
With one of my key stakeholders observing each interview I was able to keep the different internal groups informed throughout the process, and midway through I was invited to present my findings so far to the group leadership team.
I was aware that the sample size of the executive interviews was small, though the data was rich. So to enlarge the sample, I systematically re-assessed over 10 more developer executive interactions from the year. These were sourced from two initiatives, the latest hackathon event (which invited developers in Singapore, Malayisa, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia to participate) and the fireside chat initiative (periodically set up by the Sales team as a way to continue good relations with clients).
By cross-examining these three major sources I was able to build a complete story of the developer process and the three subjects. I delivered these findings back to the stakeholder teams in the forms that best suited them.
Following this, I started creating a Developer Journey Map as a side project. I presented the work in progress map to different stakeholder groups as it developed, in order to get their buy-in on the final output and integrate their knowledge. I found I had to break some ‘rules’ of traditional journey maps, such as not having it be based on a persona, being non-linear, and not including an emotional factor.
Importantly, I used the findings to make the journey map product-agnostic, meaning not specifically about any PropertyGuru product or service. Instead, the journey map focused on outlining the developer's jobs to be done and how they structured themselves to tackle the current property eco-system.
By doing this I was able to put all the findings into an easy to read, interactive space. Each stage included the following items:
A short title and description
A key business opportunity
All developer tasks
All likely painpoints experienced by someone internally at the developer organisation
A set of existing solutions in the space, including our own and competitors’
The comparable RIBA Plan of Work stage
A key quote from developer interviews
A set of links to the research activities, or sources.
The journey map in development
Outcomes
This project was a long term one, taking almost the whole year. Because of the expensive nature of the interviews, we had to book them one by one, to make sure that each one was as insightful as the last. However, in the end the findings of this process achieved several things:
The process was used as a benchmark by the Thailand team to conduct a mirrored project in Thai.
The findings informed the activities of Strategy Day, a group leadership offsite in which the next year’s planning and priorities are initiated.
Among many minor ideas generated, two major ideas were developed and presented to leadership. These included the potential purchase of a small business in a parallel market space to us, and an entirely new venture to bring PG’s offerings to the closing part of the property purchase journey.
The product-agnostic map was used to develop a product-specific onboarding journey to aid the sales and operations teams.
Those outputs were delivered even prior to the final release of the Journey Map, which will continue to act as a baseline to inspire PropertyGuru staff to ideate and seek more opportunities for several years.
The Journey Mapping process has also led to an Agent Journey Map, co-created between me and my research colleague, which the agent leadership team used as a basis for the 2024 product roadmap.
The tidied journey map (left) and the summarised business customer onboarding map (right)