Solving the right problem in the right place
Impact
Strong early adoption showed the workflow had landed in the right place.
59%
1,262
+14%
Within two weeks, property managers were actively using the feature inside their existing rent workflow — early evidence that integrating the experience into established behaviour had given users a reason to move away from their spreadsheets.
Overview
Property managers relied on spreadsheets and manual processes to manage rent increases, despite Kolmeo holding the underlying data.
I led the work to close this gap, using customer insights to challenge the initial MVP, influence product direction and align the team around an integrated workflow designed for adoption.
The result: 59% account adoption within 14 days.
My role: Product Designer
Collaborators: PM, Solution Architect, Tech Lead, BA, Customer Success, Engineers, QA
Scope: Discovery, product direction, interaction design, testing, stakeholder alignment, GTM support
The problem
Customers had built the missing workflow themselves
Rent increases are an important revenue driver for rental agencies, but managing them requires tracking dates, decisions and compliance requirements across thousands of properties.
Kolmeo held the underlying rent data, but didn’t support this workflow end to end. Customers had filled the gap themselves with multiple spreadsheets, reminders and duplicated records.
This wasn’t simply a missing feature. Customers had built a business-critical workflow around a gap in ours.
The workflow needed to live where the work happened
The challenge wasn’t just what to build, but what we could deliver without compromising adoption.
Discovery showed that property managers approached rent increases through their existing rent workflow, rather than as a separate task. Despite this, we were challenged to deliver a solution in one sprint. A standalone MVP offered the fastest path to release, but risked overlooking how customers actually worked.
Testing exposed the weakness in the MVP: it addressed the functional gap without creating enough value to change established behaviour.
I used those findings to challenge the proposed scope and make the case for investing more time in an integrated experience. The Head of Product agreed to extend the deadline, giving us room to pursue a solution better aligned with how customers worked.
Speed to market had little value if the experience wasn’t compelling enough to replace the existing workaround.
Early testing pointed us towards the existing rent workflow. Testing the lean MVP proved that speed alone wasn’t enough.
Designing for behaviour change
The stronger solution wasn’t more functionality
Based on testing, I advocated for returning to an earlier direction: integrating rent increase tracking directly into the part of Kolmeo property managers already used to manage rent.
The response was immediate:
“Yes, yes, yes — we’ve been waiting for this. It makes way more sense.”
The difference wasn’t the amount of functionality. It was context.
Instead of asking users to maintain another tracker, we could introduce the right dates, prompts and actions around something they were already doing: recording and managing changes to rent.
Engineering constraints meant we couldn’t deliver the full end-state experience immediately, so I worked with the team to identify the behaviours that mattered most for the first release.
We focused on capturing the right information when rent changed, surfacing it when a decision was needed, and connecting that decision to the next step in the workflow.
Rather than adding another feature for users to manage, we were connecting steps that had previously been fragmented across Kolmeo and spreadsheets.
One action could now carry information through the wider workflow — updating rent history, setting the next review date, improving compliance visibility and triggering a rent review request.
Navigating the release challenge
Knowing when we had enough confidence to launch
Late in delivery, new stakeholder concerns surfaced just before release.
We paused — not to reopen the product direction, but to understand which concerns represented meaningful adoption risk and what needed to change before customers saw the feature.
Once those areas were strengthened, continuing to delay presented a different risk: seeking certainty internally that we could only get from real behaviour.
I reframed the decision around what we already knew. We had validated the core workflow with customers, addressed the key risks, defined the signals we would monitor and had a safe path to learn after release.
My recommendation was clear:
“Let’s release it. Let’s track performance. Then iterate based on real usage.”
The team moved forward with a measured launch rather than waiting for absolute confidence.
The outcome
Adoption validated the product decision
The final experience brought previously disconnected parts of rent increase management into one workflow.
Property managers could record when rent increased, see the information needed for compliance, set the next review date and initiate the next action — without needing to manage this data separately in a spreadsheet.
Within the first 14 days, 59% of accounts had adopted the feature, generating 1,262 interactions and contributing to a 14% increase in engagement with the existing rent workflow.
Those results mattered because adoption had been the central product risk from the beginning.
By investing more time in an integrated experience rather than releasing the fastest possible MVP, we created a stronger foundation for future visibility, automation and workflow support.
The outcome reinforced the value of challenging delivery assumptions when evidence suggests they could undermine adoption.