Plentific
A SUCCESS STORY IN THE PROPERTY MANAGEMENT SECTOR
Plentific’s mission is to reduce maintenance costs for property owners while providing local professionals with access to a vast marketplace of high-quality leads. Initially launched as a B2C platform, similar to TaskRabbit or Airtasker, it later expanded into B2B.
As Head of Design, I played a key role in this shift, which led to 30x growth in just four years, international expansion, and over £130 million secured in two funding rounds.
When I joined, the company had 40 employees and managed 15,000 properties. Today, it has over 450 employees and manages well over 450,000 properties — thanks in part to our product delivering on its vision.
Let me walk you through how my team and I navigated this pivotal shift and scaled the product from a design perspective, from inception to exponential growth.
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Alessandro Filippi (Head of Design)
Many others (about 200+) -
Sketch
Invision
Abstract
Adobe Creative Cloud (barely) -
High fidelity prototypes
Concept work
Styleguide
Product identity studies
THE PIVOT
Pivoting out of B2C and into enterprise B2B took overall 18 months of collaborative work to MVP. Was designed and built progressively as a branch of the live product, using a new, fully modular design system. This allowed us to deliver 40% faster that before. We validated our assumptions running user testing and driven innovation through discovery workshops with our clients and market research.
The product started to get exponential traction shortly after.
During the following 48 months the company grew 10x.
Properties under management went from about 12k to 380k.
The design team grew from just me to 5 people (5x),
Company headcount went from about 40 to over 400 (10x)
The concept design showcasing the next 6-8 months roadmap were used to define and test the product strategy, which overall played a key role in closing 2 subsequent rounds of investment, one for £30M and one for an £100, bringing in VC for international scaling.
From just the UK, the company went international, starting operations Germany and the US, supporting multiple languages, currencies, and all the required local level tax systems and regulations.
From our original focus on social housing, we expanded to private residential, commercial, offices, increasing out addressable market 10x.
From just offering end to end maintenance automation, we started offering enterprise grade compliance and asset management with embedded finance as modular add ons, this both increase conversion by 20% but also lifetime value for each account by 120%.
SUPPLY CHAIN FOR REPAIRS
Plentific’s perhaps most appreciated functionality is about supply chain management. With a dedicated application for suppliers that facilitates communication, exchange of updates and payments, traceability and audit log for every work order. From the property management application, property managers can create work orders against any of the properties in their portfolios and dispatch it to one of their first party suppliers, internal workforce or, when those are under too much pressure, a shared marketplace, which is especially great in large metropolitan areas. No matter what the problem is, there’s always 3 or 4 contractors ready to quote to solve the problem within 5 minutes.
While Plentific offers many integrations for raising work orders and portfolio management, with its modular approach ultimately can be e one stop shop for repair and maintenance, inspections and beyond, reducing dramatically the fragmentation of a management company workflow as well as operational data, which is also one of the aspects that are truly attractive, real time analytics with extensive dashboards. Scaling adoption of Plentific empowers richer and richer analytics, covering work order processing efficiency, payments, supplier performance, time to repair, and much more. And all of it, fits today in the same core structure and visual language that I originally pitched.