Immo Scout 24

Digested Read

ImmobilienScout24 is Germany’s largest real estate portal with more than 12 million active visitors each month. They boast a whopping 96% prompted brand awareness in their target market. Their goal to ‘create the world’s best real estate app’ was a challenge we were excited to work with them on.

Key Themes
Product Discovery • Product Design • Mobile Engineering • Agile Leadership

The Brief

When ImmobilienScout24’s CTO, Richard Durnall, asked us to help his team to ‘create the world’s best real estate app’ for iOS and Android we knew this project would be interesting and challenging. We worked closely with the team at ImmobilienScout24 to define what success looked like and identify the KPIs we needed to keep on track and to create the most value digital product for their business.

We knew that search functionality was an important element to get right and delivering a seamless experience between multiple devices was also key. Alongside this, we were tasked with consult on how to optimise the team structure and processes to support the transition of the in-house team to a product focused, high performing delivery team.

You would expect from a company like Novoda that they bring in a high skill set in app product development. What did impress us was the extreme enthusiasm and can-do attitude every single Novoda team member showed from their first day on.

– Patrick Gerstenecker, Head of Product Consumer Experience, ImmobilienScout

Our Approach

As with all our recent projects we adopted a user-centred design approach, with in-depth customer interviews and rigorous testing throughout the process to help us shape the product roadmap. We trialled different team structures to improve transparency and ownership, utilising the team’s core skillset in the best possible way to help them achieve their objectives.

We adopted agile methodologies throughout all our processes, helped refocus the development team onto the product and pushed for a regular 2-week development cycle with clear commitments. This laid the ground for the team to be able to move from unreliable 6–8 week release intervals to a “release train” leaving every 2 weeks.

Collaboration is always important to us at Novoda and this project was no exception. We worked with ImmobilienScout24 to develop the mobile product strategy, shared knowledge and made decisions as a team. We operated in a transparent fashion, leading to improved remote capabilities and greater openness throughout the team.

The End Result

Our improved apps first shipped in Sept 2016 and they have been a huge success, achieving a 4.2 Play Store rating and 4.7 on the App Store. Due to our partnership and the exciting new features and meaningful improvements being released every two weeks, we had impact in the following areas:

• Monthly active users increased by 19% while monthly user sessions were up by 35% year on year across both apps.
• The map functionality has seen a 78% increase in usage due to the refinements the project team has made.
• Defined business metrics have become shared goals for all members of the team, creating a unified focus and streamlining decision-making.
• We helped them shape their in-house consumer experience team to champion user needs. They follow a streamlined, agile process for product delivery and are well-equipped and ready to tackle any future development challenges.