Vacation rental management platform Vacasa has a new app to help its clients keep track of the performance of their rental properties and manage their own use of the home.
The company centers its business on the technology it uses to run the organization and the software that ensures home rental rates maximize revenue for the homeowners. With this new app, those homeowners can now receive notifications on home bookings, see revenue forecasts and place holds on the calendar for their own use of a property.
“The last major feature increases the communication and access to local managers and customer service,” said Chief Product Officer Mike Xenakis. “The app is the central platform for the homeowner to manage the communication (with the company).”
Prior to this release homeowners had an online portal to receive this information. However, an app has been the most requested product from homeowners over the years. The company now manages more than 30,000 vacation properties within its ecosystem.
Xenakis spoke with the Business Journal about product management and how he thinks about prioritization and roadmaps for a fast-growing company. Xenakis spent 16 years at OpenTable where he was senior vice president of product management and managing director of international operations.
The role of the product team:
The product team is meant to help the organization prioritize. Start with the overarching company objectives. For Vacasa, the company is a two-sided marketplace but actually has three groups it must serve. The first two are the customers, who are both homeowners who put their homes on the platform and the guests who book stays. He has team members that specialize on each of those groups. The third group are employees who support the other two groups and maintain homes. He has another team focused on that.
“Across the different constituents and departments, the product managers work to understand the most important needs of customers at any given time,” he said. “They do prioritize and have individual roadmaps and the real challenge is, that is great, but you have a limited set of resources. We have to decide what to do and when.”
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On how to handle trade-offs:
Because resources are limited, it's his job to ensure the executive team and broader leadership team understand the trade-offs on where those resources should be spent. For this product, it was something so consistently asked for by homeowners it was a straightforward decision. But, figuring out these trade-offs can be more challenging.
On how to keep the peace between teams when these trade-offs happen:
An important element is making sure the whole organization, and even customers, understand how different teams and constituents create the whole. And this ties into overall company culture. For instance, a focus on the homeowner experience will also likely increase the satisfaction for the guests staying at the home. “You have to connect the dots,” he said. “It’s all reinforcing.”
On how far Vacasa plans product:
The team is always looking 12 months out. Right now they are finalizing the 2022 product roadmap. “When we do the roadmaps what we are actually doing is firmly committing to a quarter out,” he said, so the organization knows what will ship in that next quarter. The further out something is, the less definitive it might be, but every quarter things are reviewed and a more firm commitment is made. Something like this homeowner app took six months to develop, so it spanned quarters.
From a higher level the product organization looks out three years for an overall vision standpoint in order to create a “north star” for the company.
