Problem statement

As a part of a strategic planning exercise, Mindtree conducted an executive workshop, which revealed that the client portfolio had multiple products across their brands that had redundant capabilities, thereby resulting in high OPEX and inefficient utilization of their resources. Moreover, as an organization, they wanted to bring in efficiency by outlining the common future-state business capabilities across all brands under a larger enterprise strategy.

By doing this, the client will be able to:

• Have a clear plan in terms of how the next five years look like and how the market share can be increased with other disruptors in the space.
• Define their future product strategy and how it can be ‘experience-led,’ catering to different personas, rather than being ‘product-led.’
• Retain their leadership in the real estate world by enabling a more open ecosystem and building a marketplace for home buying, selling and ownership, through which they can add multiple revenue streams by bringing in partners, third parties and other entities into the larger ecosystem.

By enabling the above, the client will be able to establish themselves as the leading and most integrated provider of residential real estate services, seamlessly connecting home purchase, ownership and the sale journey through products and an open ecosystem that will empower innovation and choice.

Challenge

Mindtree embarked on this journey with the client’s C-suite and other senior executives in early 2020 to strategize and prioritize what’s next to enable Product NorthStar, and build an open ecosystem and marketplace. Given the scale and strategic importance of the program, the client had to overcome a lot of hurdles to make this a reality.

They had to:

• Align on an organizational vision and value statements that they would be delivering to their customers, agents, brokers, partners and to the real estate industry as a whole.
• Weed out redundant products that increase the operational expenditure of the organization and channelize those funds into transformation initiatives.
• Identify a common set of horizontal and vertical capabilities that fit the journey of these key personas and prioritize them to build it across the brands.
• Ideate and visualize what the open ecosystem and marketplace looks like. Also, the client needed to think about the means of generating additional revenue in the future by bringing in a wider variety of services, and enabling their partners and other third parties.
• Firm up on the right technology architecture and tool stack to enable seamless build and roll out of the open ecosystem and product experiences.

Planning an endeavor of this scale meant having a clear-cut roadmap of what needs to be done in the short, near and long-term with clear milestones, deadlines and business KPIs needed to be achieved.

Solution

The journey began with a joint workshop for product rationalization that eventually turned out to be the business case for pursuing Product NorthStar and the open ecosystem strategy rigorously. Mindtree’s consulting team also conducted a 12-week jump-start with the client’s executive team to outline the business, product and technology strategy, and come up with a clear roadmap.

The solution needed to address:

• The product rationalization strategy that outlines the products that meet expectations and those that are redundant with low adoption across brands. Also, the associated decommissioning and cut over plan had to be determined.
• The end-to-end journey of key personas, both from a B2B as well as a B2B2C lens, to help the client prioritize the value to be delivered at each phase of the lifecycle, thus leaning towards a true future-state.
• Prioritized horizontal and vertical future-state business capabilities across all the brands with a clear roadmap for realization.
• A composable technology architecture that can scale and flex, based on the demand.
• A persona-focused marketplace design and use cases to allow the client to drive adoption and scale quickly to onboard multiple partners and affiliates.
• An open ecosystem with a developer portal that will allow all entities to use the client’s data and resources to create a truly open environment for innovation and brand building.

Mindtree is embarking on this strategic initiative with the client to build the next gen experience-focused product suite that will provide a product ecosystem to allow access, ease-of-use, integrations, and choice for agents and brokers to best-in-class products, based on their individual and localized needs. This solution will also empower their consumers with unparalleled experiences while augmenting meaningful interactions with their agents and keeping them engaged throughout the buying, home-ownership and selling lifecycle.

On the other hand, the open ecosystem will enable the client’s brands to democratize access to their existing assets and capabilities by integrating digital services through APIs, while augmenting the external capabilities to offer best-in-class consumer, agent and broker experiences.