Architrave

B2B SaaS Prop Tech

Architrave offers a suite of products for commercial real estate managers to Digitize and organize their documents to maximize the sale value of assets

Role summary

As the sole product manager at Architrave I had the privilege and challenge of handling everything from day to day operational tasks to long term strategy at architrave.

On most days, my work involves a lot of collaboration with the Engineering and Design team to drive current and upcoming work, building the roadmap and organizing the release.

Based on the stage of various projects and features, on a weekly basis I am responsibile for writing requirements, cross team communication, refinement of tickets with developers, PO acceptance and managing the release handover to customer support team.

I also work regularly with our Data and Customer Service team to communicate with our users and gain qualitative as well as quantitative insights to inform our roadmap.

Last but not least, regular collaboration with my friends from Marketing and Sales to craft the right stories to help existing users understand product benefits and find the right hooks for new customers.

Impact summary

I was able to make a significant impact on several topics during my time at architrave:

1. Improved search performance by 9%

2. Remove legacy components to increase revenue (10-15% estimated by EOY 2024)

3. Introduced data analysis for product decisions

4. Six Security updates

5. Improved triaging process

6. Establish a new framework for product strategy

Impact deep dive

1. Improved search performance

Introduced two new search features to increase search usage by 9%. This was done over 7 months with A/B testing measured via Heap Analytics.

2. Remove legacy components and increase revenue

A crucial part of our product was still using legacy front end component. This lead to a few issues:

• Inconsistent UX for Administrators

• Front end dependencies that prevented us from shutting down the legacy product

• Several customers refusing to convert to the new product

After a lot of internal advocacy, I was able to convince everyone to update 2 crucial parts of the product. Once this work is done by June 2024, this should lead to several customers moving away from our legacy product and a projected 10-15% increase in overall revenue by the end of 2024.

3. Introduced data analysis for product decisions

Architrave used Heap analytics to track user activity across our products. I was able to work with the data team and design team to introduce a new process to come up with a use case or hypothesis or use case, analyze usage via Heap and drive product decisions based on that.

Home page improvements
I was able to advocate for major changes on our homepage(aka Cockpit) using heap. We used to have a split view of asset tiles plus a map. Though heap and user feedback we realized it would be a lot better to split them up into a tile only view and a map only view.

As an added bonus, this also increased performance and reduced load time of the home page by 40%.

4. Security updates

Security is a crucial pillar of product in an indutry as regulated as commercial Realestate. During my time at Architrave, Security was a huge area of focus. I was able to work on several security updates spanning:

• Malware scan update of documents

• Restrict upload of uncommon file types

• Update 2FA features

• Brute force attack warning

• Session hijacking protection

• Guessable user protection

5. Improved triaging process

Setup a new process for reviewing feedback that comes from users as well as internal teams. Optimized the process to push submitted ideas into one of three buckets:

• A spot on the product plan

• Gather more information

• Reject idea

The biggest improvement here was to communicate back to user or team memeber about status and progress of ideas on a regular basis.

6. Establish a new framework for product strategy

Focus through 2023 was all around cost cutting. So going into 2024, I wanted to setup a new framework for product strategy so we can focus on more innovation and revenue growth in 2024 and beyond. At a high level the first half of 2024 will be on building specific features so in H2 we can focus on upselling conversations with some strategic clients and focus on infrastructure improvements.

Here are some of the key pillars I established for the 2024 product strategy:
Yearly closure
New naming convention that aligns with the year and helps everyone at Architrave undersatnd what will be built within the cope of that year. At the end of the year - process learning, gain closure and inform strategy for the next year.

Product improvements
Understand crucial features demanded by users, prioritize ideas with the biggest impact and communicate which ones willl be worked on in H! and H2. This is important for retention as well as sales.
In 2024 I am proud we introduced:

• Visualize data extracted from documents in our data room

• Show preview of office docs in our data room (word, powerpoint, excels sheets)

• Reskin legacy pages (2 parts of the product with about 10 pages under them)

Infrastructure improvements
Our product is evolving and our infrastructure needs are changing. in 2024 the focus is to move a few customers towards AWS to help us scale better in 2025 and be prepared to offer better search and AI capabilities. Which will be difficult with the current infrastructure we have.