Product People Harmonizes Business Logics Across 12+ Products For White Label Platform at AVIV

The Client: AVIV Group

AVIV Group is one of the world’s largest digital real estate tech companies, headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

The company operates a portfolio of digital real estate marketplaces and brands across Europe, providing a wide range of services to help connect buyers and sellers and make the process of buying, selling, and renting properties as easy as possible. The brands constituting AVIV Group’s family are 🇫🇷 Meilleurs Agents, 🇫🇷 Group Seloger, 🇧🇪 Immoweb, and 🇧🇪 Immowelt.

In addition to its core operations, AVIV is also a leading investor in innovative real estate tech companies such as 🇬🇧 PurpleBricks, 🇩🇪 Homeday, 🇺🇸 Zumper, and 🇺🇸 Parcel.

The company’s ambition is to become the leading employer in prop-tech in Europe, shaping the industry's future through new business models by providing funding, resources, and expertise to these companies.

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The Mission: Interim Product Manager for Intermediary Domain

We joined AVIV to serve as Interim Product Managers in the Intermediary domain. We coordinated with 16+ cross-functional teams participating in the White Label Program (among others: Intermediary, Seeker, Commercial, Product, CRM, Marketplace Design, and more).

The goal of the White Label Program was to harmonize the business logic behind the portfolio of 12+ products across 5 different platforms in 3 markets (Germany, Belgium, France) to ensure increased operational efficiency, reduced technical debt, and increased time-to-market.

Due to the complexity of this initiative which required coordination across multiple markets, AVIV needed a centralized PM function that would facilitate communication between different domains. Our interim PM role was crucial to bridging the gap between Program and Product Management by coordinating collaboration between various teams, facilitating timely launches, managing dependencies, and ensuring transparency across all platforms and brands.

We had several opportunities and challenges to support on:

• Portfolio Harmonization: Determining which features should be kept, phased out, or expanded across different markets required careful evaluation. This assessment leveraged insights gained from a previous mission between AVIV & Product People, where the decisions on which features should be ‘kept’, ‘expanded’, or ‘killed’ were made.
• Feature Mapping & Documentation: Each platform had a unique feature set guided by varying business logic, yet lacked comprehensive documentation of current functionality. AVIV required assistance in mapping the existing feature landscape to establish a clear, harmonized vision.
• Regulatory Compliance: Diverse contractual obligations across countries complicated efforts to harmonize features while remaining compliant with local regulations. We needed to navigate these varying requirements carefully.
• Commercial Harmonization: Aligning the pricing strategy across different markets required a thorough understanding of local contracts and commercial practices. This ensured that pricing remained consistent and competitive while accommodating the unique commercial frameworks and customer expectations within each market.

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Our Main Quest: White Label Business Logics Harmonization across 5 Brands in 3 Markets

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

AVIV's White Label initiative involved over 16 cross-functional teams, with the Seeker team leading the efforts. However, the centralized role essential for fostering collaboration within the Intermediary domain remained vacant.

We swiftly stepped in to support this segment, working under the guidance of the Seeker-led initiative. By clarifying roles and responsibilities specific to the Intermediary domain, we helped build the necessary structure and coordination. This contribution enabled seamless collaboration within our domain, supporting the broader goals of the White Label Program and advancing toward a harmonized White Label state across all involved teams.

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Prioritized White Label Feature Launches based on Business Impact, Effort, and Urgency

Problem:

• With over 12 features needing to be launched across five platforms in three different markets, establishing a clear prioritization strategy was critical.
• Each feature had its own set of challenges and requirements, necessitating careful consideration to plan the rollouts efficiently.
• Without a well-defined prioritization framework, it would have been challenging to allocate resources effectively and meet business objectives.

What has been done:

• To address this, we collaborated closely with the cross-functional teams to evaluate each feature's business value, the level of effort required, and the urgency of its rollout.
• By conducting thorough discussions and analyses, we gained a comprehensive understanding of the impact that each feature would have on different markets. Based on these insights, we created a clear, prioritized sequence outlining the optimal order in which to launch features.
• This prioritized approach enabled us to maximize business impact while ensuring that engineering efforts were efficiently aligned with market needs and urgency.

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Created Business Logics Framework for Operationalizing the Functionality of White Label Features

Problem:

• Before defining a unified vision for harmonized business logic in the White Label state, it was pivotal to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the current state of 12+ features across five platforms in Germany, Belgium, and France.
• These features lacked clear documentation, creating challenges in understanding their current functionality and dependencies.

What has been done:

• We began by creating a business logic framework to operationalize the status quo of each feature, helping us understand the differences across different markets.
• To ensure thorough data collection, we reviewed existing documentation to identify gaps and better comprehend the features' intricacies. We then circulated the framework to stakeholders in different countries, encouraging them to fill in details and provide insights.
• All the information gathered was consolidated into Confluence as a centralized repository, creating a single source of truth accessible to anyone within the organization. This became the first comprehensive documentation detailing business logic across all features, empowering any team member at AVIV to easily locate and understand relevant information.

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Conducted Discovery for Defining the North Star Harmonized Business Logics State for the White Label Platform

💡 ‘North Star’ in the context of this project means the state in which all the features across 5 platforms work in the same way (both on the front-end and back-end)

Problem:

• The features across different platforms varied significantly, each having distinct business logic. Our challenge was to determine the target functionality for the harmonized white-label state.
• Furthermore, each market had unique contractual obligations, which made the process even more intricate.
• Any adjustments to feature functionality needed careful consideration to avoid potential breaches of existing contracts.

What has been done:

• After gaining a comprehensive understanding of each feature's current state across various markets, we organized a series of over 15 workshops involving more than 50 stakeholders. These collaborative sessions aimed to define the North Star harmonized business logic for each of the 12+ features.
• Following the workshops, we consolidated the wealth of information gathered into clear documentation aligned with the business logic framework.

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Coordinated the Roadmap for White Label Launches Across 5 Platforms in 3 Countries

Problem:

• The five platforms each had their own distinct development roadmaps with varying timelines and priorities, leading to fragmentation and misalignment in planning and execution.
• Collaboration and communication between cross-functional teams were inconsistent, resulting in silos that made managing dependencies and aligning efforts across platforms difficult.
• Without a central, coordinated roadmap, achieving strategic objectives and ensuring timely feature launches was a challenge as each platform pursued its goals independently, risking duplication and misaligned implementation.

What has been done:

• We coordinated the creation of a detailed roadmap outlining the feature launches across five platforms in Germany, Belgium, and France. This roadmap served as a strategic guide, aligning implementation efforts across all teams.
• To support the execution of this roadmap, we developed a governance framework, clearly defining roles and responsibilities within all teams. This framework ensured that every team member understood their role in achieving the harmonization goals, fostering smooth collaboration throughout the process.

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Conducted Discovery & Defined Business Logics for the New Flagship Product

Problem:

• While managing the coordination of White Label launches, the need for a new flagship product became evident.
• This realization emerged from an analysis of the performance of our packages, indicating a need for more differentiated value propositions. This lack of differentiation was impacting our agents' perception of value, which in turn affected upselling opportunities.

What has been done:

• To tackle this, we organized a series of discovery sessions focused on framing the problem with key stakeholders. These sessions provided clarity on the problem statement, highlighting that the lack of distinction in the number of leads across tiers was causing agents to feel undervalued. With this insight, we identified potential solutions that could address agents' concerns and improve upselling opportunities and prioritized the creation of a new flagship visibility product enhancing the ranking, branding, and size elements for agent listings.
• We conducted competitive benchmarking to analyze similar products in the industry and uncover gaps in the current market offerings. This analysis helped refine our strategy by identifying opportunities where the new flagship product could differentiate itself and provide unique value.
• Next, we outlined an opportunity canvas to build a compelling business case for the new flagship product. This strategic planning document laid out the potential market impact and value proposition.
• To guide the development process, we also defined a North Star business logic framework for the new product, consolidating all related documentation to ensure clarity and alignment in product development.

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Boost Mechanism Harmonization

Problem:

• The boost mechanism, which enables agents to enhance their rankings in search results and improve lead generation, was inconsistent across countries. Each market used a different approach, leading to maintenance complexities, increased technical debt, and reduced operational efficiency.

What has been done:

• To establish a unified solution, we first mapped the current state of the boost mechanism in each country, enabling us to perform a gap analysis between the as-is state and the desired target.
• We also conducted competitive research to understand how boosting mechanisms function among industry leaders.
• With these insights, we proposed a North Star target state that would provide a harmonized framework to simplify maintenance, reduce technical debt, and improve operational efficiency while delivering consistent results for agents across markets.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

Notable outcomes we've delivered during 10 months of our collaboration:

💡 Led the business logic harmonization initiative for 12+ features at 5 platforms across 3 countries by homogenizing the product suite to be built on White-Label.

💡 Ensured alignment and transparency throughout the White Label Program, contributing to seamless cooperation and efficient project execution.

💡 Led the discovery phase for a new flagship commercial product aimed at enhancing agent visibility and upselling opportunities.

After the initial 4 months of the engagement, the client decided to prolong the mission by another 6 months.