circa 2019
Role
I worked on New Product initiatives at Opendoor including List with Opendoor, and Home Reserve. I owned the end-to-end design process. For the Home Reserve launch, I heavily contributed to product strategy and research earlier in the process, to owning both of those later on in the launch.
Stakeholders
Head of Marketing
Head of Customer Success (Buyer Org)
PMs (Buyer Org)
PMs (Seller Org)
Eng (Across 3 teams)
Content Strategist
Opendoor — Empower people with the freedom to move
Opendoor’s bread and butter product is to provide a cash offer to sellers and close as quickly as 15 days. The customer values we deliver on are Speed, Certainty and Convenience. In the beginning of last year, we saw 44% of the sellers who’ve come through our funnel needed the cash towards their next home purchase.
Home Reserve Idea
What if, we front load that cash offer, to let customers buy their next home with our cash, move into their next home rent free, and we sell their home over a period of 90 days guaranteed? Internally, this became known as the Home Reserve product. A small team was tasked to prove out the product market fit.
Traditionally, buy and sell is usually a 120-day plus cycle. We’ve managed to reduce it by half.
Home Reserve launch
Ops launch
We began this endeavor by pitching to our customers on our first human touchpoint — the discovery call. In this phase, we wanted to understand:
What our customer pain points are
What our value props are
Identify any magical moments in customer journey
Customer Pain Points
Need the cash from home sale towards next home
Disruptive selling experience
Finding temporary housing and paying 2 mortgages
*I worked with my research partner to identify the following pain points after listening in on 55 customer phone calls
Value Props
Competitive cash offer to win the next home
No hassle listing
No double moves or double mortgages
* I worked with my PM to crystallize these value props from customer pain points through multiple rounds of user testing with UXR and Content collaboration
Magical Moment
There was a lightbulb moment for our customers when the agent objection handle their fears in the process and provided localized expertise.
How might we bring this online?
Top of funnel launch
At this time, we’ve lost both PM and research partners due to resourcing constraints. My Ops partner and I decided that I should take the Top of funnel while she manages the Ops launch.
While we were working on the Ops launch, the marketing team tested a Home Reserve ad that yielded 3x more click-through-rate than our core product, which gave us the confidence to build out the rest of the experience.
Customer goal
Understand how Home Reserve is able to help solve their pain points without hand holding.
Business goal
Gauge drop offs in the funnel to scheduling a call with the agent, and all the way to signing a contract.
Approach
Conversational tone
This has done well across adjacent landscapes, and has tested well with our audience.
Anchor on value props
Reinforce why they should sign up
Ask only what is necessary
I’ve trimmed the buying criteria down from 8 criteria to the 2 that customers are most familiar with early in the process
Build out a lead management system
I also worked on building out a leads management system with an engineer:
Let’s have Buyer org take the leads
Two weeks before launch, there was decision made by senior leadership that the buyer org should handle the leads management. I then pull in key stakeholders to identify experience discrepancies.
Agent pitch framework
I put together a doc to help agents anchor their conversations with customers:
