DISCOVERY & STRATEGY
Pacific Cove Property Management
How Acro Commerce’s discovery and strategy process led to the right solution and gave Pacific Cove the chance to find the best partner to implement it.
Project Features
About Pacific Cove
Driven to provide residents of British Columbia with a rental experience that exceeds expectations.
Pacific Cove Property Management (PCPM) is a BC-owned and operated property management, development, and investment company providing rental accommodations to families and individuals in communities throughout British Columbia, including Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, Vancouver Island, and the Okanagan.
Treasured Tenants
Exceptional Residences
Professional Property Management
Motivation
Pacific Cove's goal is to provide its residents with a rental experience that is second to none. With 47 buildings and serving over 5,000 residents, having a website that serves not only the needs of their tenants but the business is critical for growth.
What does that look like? Streamlined, easy to navigate and scalable.
It needs to work for
- Tenants — whose technical ability ranges from completely inept to technologically savvy, so the portal must cater to all skills.
- Management — there are many layers of management and roles within PCPM, including residence managers, property managers, admin, and more, that all have different roles and levels of interaction with the portal, creating a complex layer of roles and responsibilities for the user setup.
Tenants and administrative users found Pacific Cove’s previous portal hard to navigate and clunky. It also did not meet PCPM’s minimum requirements or connect with their CRM software, resulting in too much manual data entry for administrators.
Current Website Pain Points
- Clunky experience for all users
- Not integrated with their CRM
- Confusing admin interface
- Difficult to navigate
- Complicated resident and building manager workflows
- Unable to easily add more buildings to the system
Solution
Uncovering all of the bumps before building the roadmap. We call that Discovery & Strategy.
Our journey with Pacific Cove Properties started with a very in-depth Discovery and Strategy (D&S) phase to ensure everyone was on the same page at every turn.
During D&S, PCPM stakeholders and Acro Commerce subject matter experts dove into the extensive resident portal requirements. By going through every requirement with a fine-toothed comb, Acro Commerce was able to identify all of the components needed to make the goal a reality and identify and architect a streamlined solution for residents to manage their tenancy with Pacific Cove Properties.
The outcome of discovery & strategy is an actionable technical document and information architecture that eliminates as many unknowns as possible before development starts.
In November 2022, Acro Commerce delivered our technical architecture proposal to the PCPM team. They presented the tangible documents to their leadership (VP & ownership level), who then took those technical details and shopped them around to other development agencies.
Acro Commerce fully supported the PCPM vetting process.
In fact, we encouraged it, giving Pacific Cove all the information they needed to shop the solution around properly. Throughout the process, we continued answering questions on "why" we recommended certain things.
Ultimately, PCPM returned to Acro Commerce, having done its due diligence. There were a few more rounds of adjustments to fit within their budget and create a phased approach to development.
By working collaboratively with Pacific Cove and ensuring that we understood every aspect of their stakeholders’ needs, Acro Commerce could:
- Identify the technology solutions needed for every requirement.
- Find ways to eliminate redundancies in technology and data.
- Explore and suggest APIs for functionality and data migration.
- Present PCPM with a comprehensive Technical Architecture document.
- Establish a feedback loop and revise as needed to ensure PCPM was confident in our technology and deliverability.
EXTRA INSIGHT
The devil isn’t in the details. It’s in the project structure.
Have a look at the Discovery & Strategy outline in this instant download. We know keeping IT happy is important, so take a peek behind the scenes.
Proposed Sitemap
Design Prototypes
Delivering a superior online experience for BC’s rental residents
Hampered by a clunky user experience and a previously failed CRM integration, Pacific Cove Property Management knew exactly what it wanted
- Easily navigable tenant portal experience.
- Streamlined resident and building manager workflows.
- Ability to scale as PCPM adds more buildings to its portfolio.
Acro Commerce took every concern to heart and delivered a comprehensive technical document and information architecture to Pacific Cove's stakeholders so they knew exactly what to ask for when shopping for development partners.
Ultimately, PCPM returned to Acro Commerce because of the expertise demonstrated throughout the Discovery & Strategy process. And after the D&S delivery, our collaboration and the scalability of our solution could offer sealed the deal.
Meet with our team today if these sound like your website development goals.
