Anyone who has ever purchased a home — or considered doing so — knows how arduous and intimidating the process can be.
While this creates a ton of opportunity for tech companies, the issue with having so many problems to solve is deciding where to start, what to build and what exactly a solution should accomplish. The team over at Orchard has answered these questions by establishing and continuously adhering to a defined product vision.
“Essentially, vision is the tool that paints the picture of where we want the product to go and why it matters for our customers,” Head of Design Rye Bennett said.
Orchard’s mission is to make homebuying stress-free. To that end, its technology enables people to purchase a new home before they’ve even listed their old one and automates the more tedious aspects of the affair, like filling out and signing endless pages of documents. Orchard launched in 2017 and has grown rapidly, raising $138 million, including a $69 million round that closed this past September.
When the round was announced, Phil DeGisi, co-founder and chief product marketing officer, told Built In that the company’s success is owed to its “relentless focus on the customer.” Maintaining that focus requires the team to stay true to their product vision, and Bennett walked us through what it takes to make that happen at Orchard.
First, briefly tell us about your overarching product vision. What is it, and how do you communicate this vision across the business?
Orchard is relentlessly focused on the customer experience and eliminating the pain points that traditionally come with buying or selling a home. To achieve this, we need products that empower both our customers as well as the internal teams at Orchard who help serve them. Our consumer-facing products help customers find their dream home and manage their transaction online, while our internal product automates behind-the-scenes processes and facilitates the coordination and handoffs between the hundreds of people on our teams.
We communicate this vision cross-functionally throughout our organization. For the design team, having visuals, like a storyboard, to support the high-level themes makes it easy to share concepts with the larger product, design and engineering teams. We then shift to smaller squad-level breakout groups to discuss relevant portions of the vision, ensuring teams feel inspired and enabled to translate the vision into an actionable strategy.
Essentially, vision is the tool that paints the picture of where we want the product to go and why it matters for our customers.”
How does your product vision help inform your product strategy or other decisions around product development?
The primary goal of our product vision is to provide a shared “North Star” for the future we are trying to create, and every team understands how their work contributes to achieving the product vision. A critical part of communicating our vision is to be inspirational and clear about what the outcome should be. We focus on the value we’re delivering, rather than the specific solutions. Essentially, vision is the tool that paints the picture of where we want the product to go and why it matters for our customers.
As a designer, focus is a powerful tool to unleash the creativity of my team. For example, instead of saying, “We want to build the best home search tool,” we’ll align with other teams across the organization to better understand the relationship between our agents and customers and how the product could enhance it. When the team is given a narrower focus, we’re able to deliver more value to the customer. This is where Orchard excels: Focusing on the customer first, then putting the pieces into place to give them the best possible experience.
How do you stay true to your product vision while also taking into account the wants and needs of various stakeholders?
Cross-functional alignment is key, and we utilize objectives and key results (OKRs) to ensure that our individual and team goals are aligned to the larger company objectives. If the product vision is reflected in the company-wide goals, and the team’s goals align with the company’s OKRs, cross-functional prioritization becomes much simpler. For my team, this helps cut down on last-minute requests and helps us prioritize. The benefit of having a startup mentality is that we’re always iterating, learning and keeping an open mind to new ideas that can inspire us to make changes that will revolutionize the way people buy and sell their homes.
