As Juwai IQI’s COO and CIO, I lead the effort to manage and build our technology platform and “super-app” Atlas. Today, Atlas has more than 20,000 users, all of whom are agents in Juwai IQI’s global real estate network, IQI.
Here, I’d like to share the five most important lessons we have learnt from creating this global tech platform from our headquarters in Malaysia.
Talent matters
The first and most important lesson we learnt is that when it comes to building a global tech platform, talent matters. A lot. Having a great team is critical to success.
Salaries for software engineers vary country by country, with some, such as the United States, paying more for the same talent as in other places like, say, Malaysia. But a good team-building strategy can’t be focused on paying the least. It has to be centred around finding the best available talent. I’m proud to say we have been able to attract and retain some world-class engineers and operators thus far and continue to grow our team.
We did this by building a strong culture of excellence and teamwork. We were very intentional about the values we wanted to instil in our team, and we hired people who aligned with those values.
Setting a good foundation is even more critical because our team is still in its early stages of growth since we intend to employ more than 1,000 tech and data staff in Kuala Lumpur. Especially after we take possession of our new larger offices, we will need to fill many, many roles. These include platform and mobile app developers, data scientists, and social network community specialists.
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So, if you’re working on building a global tech platform, my advice is this: talent matters. A lot. Invest in your team and your culture and establish your core values early.
Put the users first
Another important lesson we learnt is that you have to put the users first. Always.
When we began building our platform, we constantly asked ourselves: what do the users need? What are they trying to accomplish? How can we make their lives easier?
It sounds simple, but it’s not always easy to do. There are a lot of competing interests and agendas in any organisation, and it’s easy to get caught up in those and lose sight of the users. What’s more, corporations tend to focus on the desire to create the perfect solution, but application development only succeeds when you focus on the user’s needs.
If you keep the users in the front and centre of everything you do, you’ll easily stay on the right track. For us, that has meant consulting directly with our users, engaging with them at every stage of development, and receiving direct feedback on what they think about our latest release and how we can improve it.
You also must manoeuvre delicately around the difference between what users say they want and what features they would actually embrace.
One lesson we learnt from our users is to avoid over-engineering the product. A product plan can include many features that users simply don’t want. For example, we found our real estate agent users wanted to maintain personal control of their lead and client information. We had to build around this desire. Some other real estate platforms have struggled because their business models depend on agents sharing this data.
Think globally from day one
From day one, we knew we wanted our business to scale internationally. That meant our platform would have to be used by real estate agents worldwide. So, we made sure it was built to be scalable and accessible from anywhere.
We are committed to localising our content and supporting different languages so that users worldwide can use our platform in their mother tongue. From the very first, our app has supported multiple languages and currencies, has been hosted on servers worldwide and has relied on robust infrastructure to accommodate future growth.
Thinking global also meant that we had to be more ambitious. We weren’t simply trying to digitise a formerly offline process. We hoped instead to re-engineer the process, reduce complications, and make our agents more efficient.
In this journey, we constantly walk the tightrope between doing too much and too little. We can neither present our users with entirely new and unfamiliar ways of doing things nor offer them too few efficiency advantages. We must strike the right balance.
Be willing to pivot
The next lesson I want to share is that you must be willing to pivot. Pivoting means changing direction – both when things are going badly and also when you identify an opportunity you hadn’t planned for.
Our platform looked very different when we started than it does today. We had to make many adjustments along the way based on user feedback and changing market conditions.
Early on, we found our users would often fail to enter complete and accurate addresses, including postcodes. As you can imagine, valid addresses are critical in the real estate business. Even so, our users told us they wanted to save time by entering partial addresses while on the go.
We resolved this challenge by creating code to use machine learning to identify correct property addresses from the available information. This took more work but also resulted in higher satisfaction and usage rates.
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So, if you’re building a global tech platform, my advice is to be willing to pivot. Be flexible, be adaptable, and be open to change. It can be painful but can also make your platform much more successful.
Data is vital
The final lesson that I want to share is that data is vital. Without data, it’s impossible to understand what’s working and what isn’t, identify new opportunities, or fulfil your broader business goals. If you’re considering building a global tech platform, make sure you have a plan for collecting and analysing data. It will be essential to your success.
Sometimes, you collect data even in the absence of an immediate plan for making use of it. I find that data is like money: it is best to save what you can because, eventually, you’ll find a need for it.
Data allows you to understand your users and make decisions that will improve your platform. And because our users are the agents in our network, data also gives us deeper insights into our business. Without data, we would be flying blind.
These are the five most important lessons I learned while helping build a global tech platform in Malaysia for Juwai IQI. I hope they are useful to you as you plan your own development efforts.
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