BOSS - Building the business operation system for space

Role & Responsibilities

*BOSS is a solution built by REinvent, the property-tech startup company founded in 2020. This project started in July 2020 , and in Dec 2021 it's ready for launch in the Singapore market in Dec 2021. 

As design lead, my responsibilities centers around two major areas:

Design

Drive design quality across products. Build process to help product designers to improve the quality and detail of their own works. Push the team to deliver design that is well-researched and present reader-friendly documentation.
Recognize and handle major problems with unknowns on tight timelines, helping the team to prioritize and make sense of deeply complex problems and cut through to simple design solutions together.
Provide useful and actionable feedback on multiple team members’ work. Articulate in a fair and efficient way especially on the “why”. Encouraging an environment where disagreements and contrasting opinions are welcomed to enhance the design quality.

Team leadership

Manage a team of five effectively, maintaining a happy and committed team that is focused on delivering high quality design with positive team chemistry. Mediate difficult conversations between others in the wider team, help direct reports to come to a good solution around performance, title, attitude or compensation.
Protect the team, ensuring they are always clear on the goal, at the same time work to create space for them to make decisions and grow. Manage stakeholder expectations and serve as the bridge in conversations between HOD and team.
Lead the team's design delivery momentum and ensure the quality of product shipped is consistently high. Define multiple interlinked problems across various areas of the product, work with team to provide structural solution and drive implementation.

Project Background

BOSS - Business Operating System for Space - is the one-stop solution to automate workspace processes, manage tenant lifecycles and streamline flex & hybrid workspace operations. We believe in building a solution that enables unified business modules will boost business efficiency and growth for landlords & space operators like never before.

Pre-pandemic, “flexible working” was slowly but surely taking office culture by storm. And then the pandemic happened. Once remote work became the norm, employees acquired a taste for the flexibility it offered—and their expectations shifted. This gave rise to the “hybrid working model”, and it’s safe to say it’s shaping the world of work as we know it. With BOSS, landlords and space operators can strengthen a gratifying customer experience and boost retention. In turn, maximize the business revenue while ensuring accuracy and efficiency. See above for a complete product feature scope.

Visit official website for more information.

Key product offerings

Depending on who’s using, different BOSS modules can be put together and become a one-stop solution. With the Flex Operate product, an end-to-end customer journey can be managed seamlessly, starting all the way from leads acquisition, contract approval workflow to tenant engagement. With the Engage products, fulfilling experiences can be created to increase customer retention and revenue.

Target Customers

BOSS provides comprehensive benefits to all building stakeholders including the following types:

Process & Approach

Throughout the sprint-based product development process, the product design team has been working closely with product managers and engineers, where squads were formed to maximize efficiency. In every sprint (=2 weeks), the design process is compressed yet solid. In general, after receiving product feature briefing from the product manager, the following steps will be taken to complete the design for a new feature or existing feature improvement:

• Product research - Identify 3-5 competitive products from different markets to 1) breakdown and study the design for inspiration, reference and avoid bad user experience, 2) compare the planned feature to other competitors to see if we can further enhance user need fulfillment.
• Product design - Conceptualize key page layout and user flow, then go into detail design by following branding guideline to create new components that aligns with the visual look and feel, or take existing components from the design system.
• Deliver & iterate - Brief all related parties on the new design, receive feedback and alternate design.

Design Results

The scope of BOSS product design is massive. BOSS is mainly web portal based with 9 core modules: dashboards, sales, space inventory, community, engagement, billing & payments, IT resource, tasks and settings. Each module contains 2-8 key features, for each feature, around 10-40 screens/component variations were created. Aside from the web portal, there is a companion app to go with the community and engagement module, the app contains over 10 features: announcement, news, room booking, service request, door unlock, event space booking, invoice and payment, perks, events, member connect, membership and profile.

Throughout the entire product, data would flow through different modules making the system automated and highly efficient. In order to design for optimized user experience, designers must understand business logic fully and become domain expert.

Main achievements

• Create designs on app, web portal and official website by optimizing usability, simplicity and consistency, pixel by pixel.
• Identify baseline screen layout/structure, define grids and set up responsive rules for each layout/structure.
• Establish design systems including 1) fundamental components that will be used repeatedly such as input fields, selector, dropdown menu, table, date & time picker, pagination and more, 2) unique components that are used for specific features such as workflow, dashboard, floor plan editor and more.
• Collaborate with engineering team to build synced up component libraries.