What Property Brothers taught me about launching a digital product — and other clickbait titles.
By: Raul Troyo
Tags: Product Management, Digital Product, Software Development

My mom just got HGTV. Needless to say, I’ve watched a lot of Drew and Jonathan during pandemic times. If you are reading this post in a sarcastic tone, please don’t. I actually like these shows.

Who are Drew and Jonathan? Drew and Jonathan are twin brothers from Canada that buy, sell, and renew houses in both Canada and in the US. You may know them from their shows Property Brothers, Forever Home, Buying and Selling, Celebrity IOU, and many more.

Some Context

If you have never watched an HGTV show or South Park’s ‘White-people Renovating Houses’ episode, here’s a quick summary. Most of these shows are about finding a house and renovating it.

While the premise is pretty much the same for all shows they always have a spin. Some of these shows are competitions –Live it or List it, others are about house flipping and maximizing property value — Bargain Mansions; and a third heartwarming group –Celebrity IOU, Hometown, and Fixer Upper.

Clear Goals and Market

Having goals for your product will guide your decisions. House flippers usually try to save some money to increase profit. Competition shows are all about winning and stretching the budget to deliver the most value. Heartwarming shows are all about building dream homes for their clients.

All of these shows have different clients and satisfy different pain-points. In the context of digital product management house-flippers build general-purpose products. They design and build houses that can be sold to anyone. They even use personas to guide the design and construction process. “This house is a beginner’s home, this is a house for entertaining, this is a bachelor pad.”

House flippers and product managers are not that different. They have an investment hypothesis that requires a deep understanding of market dynamics, cost efficiency, product delivery, and design.

Each show has clear objectives. These objectives guide their decisions, budgets, and timelines. It makes sense to invest in a wider staircase if you are planning to grow in a house. It makes sense to save money in door-knobs if you want to maximize profits.

Modular Construction

I am from Mexico where most houses are built with bricks and concrete. Tearing down a couple of walls to create an open floor plan isn’t a cost-effective possibility for us. If a wall is not square and the door isn’t a standard size, you need to make one.

My experience with house renovations in the US is limited to TV Shows. But it looks like houses are built with strong foundations and a shell. Inside walls are room dividers. You are able to tear them down with a saw and create new spaces. The episode and the couple that inspired this post wanted a large kitchen island because they love to cook and entertain.

In the context of digital product development and engineering, most Mexican houses are monoliths. American and Canadian houses are service-based architectures –no pun intended.

This may seem like a stretch, but Mexican constructions work in a waterfall fashion and are not supposed to change. Aside from labor costs, repurposing and resizing a room is not as time intensive.

Another element of modular construction is standard walkway dimensions, standard door, and window sizes. These elements work as an API. A standard agreement on how to connect different elements of the construction.

There’s always asbestos

Building a house and a digital product will always have a beautiful surprise. These surprises cost time and money. In Property Brothers the surprise is usually asbestos, support walls that can’t be torn, and black mold.

Jonathan has a ton of experience fixing these issues. They are not new. Surprises will happen in your first and in your hundredth house. Your experience will teach you how to plan and how to solve these problems.

Dependency errors between development, staging, and production servers? Use docker, create a CI/CD process. Breaking changes? Implement proper version control.

Learn to deal with Tradeoffs

House renovations in the HGTV world will always have tradeoffs. If you are looking at the show carefully you’ll see the golden triangle of software in every show.

If the new homeowners have money they increase their budgets. If money is scarce they prioritize between rooms, appliances and flooring options. They may not get the copper backsplash for the kitchen.

Stairwells are never up to code

In the past couple of reno projects I’ve seen on TV, stairwells are never up to code. Steps need to have a certain height, a certain depth, and a certain width. This is needed to sell a house and to forgo liability in case someone falls off the stairs.

In digital product development, we sometimes build things in a way that fixes our problems but is not the right way to do it. For a small internal product you might forgo HTTPS, risk is minimal. If you are building a banking application you will need to stick to standards like PCI compliance, encryption, and Know Your Customer. In these cases, it is better to simply build your stairs up to code. Reduce your liability potential.

House Renovations and Product Management

If you read this article carefully, you caught multiple product management principles house renovators learned empirically like: Kano Model (Basic, Performance and Delight Features, Strategic Alignment and Risk Assesment.

Let me know if you liked my post and whether you would like me to write more around this topic.