Leader Spotlight: Creating exceptional resident experiences, with Braeden Scheer
Braeden Scheer is Vice President of Product Management at SmartRent, a smart technology solutions company built for real estate owners, managers, and residents. He began his product management career at Elm Street, a technology firm offering a portfolio of real estate technology and marketing services, before joining SmartRent on the product team. Braeden has been with SmartRent for almost seven years and has played a key role in developing and expanding the company’s smart home platform, in addition to integrating solutions from ongoing M&As.
In our conversation, Braeden talks about how his team blends machine telemetry with human context to guide decisions. He shares why he leans on a “map and compass” approach to combine data, empathy, and conviction, and how SmartRent is evolving from a point solution to a platform.
Understanding context and finding friction across personas
With billions of monthly IoT signals, as well as tens of thousands of boots-on-the-ground maintenance and property staff, how do you incorporate both machine telemetry and human insights to guide product strategy?
When we started with SmartRent, we had zero IoT signals — and now we have billions. There are some core ingredients to the recipe that have always been true. The specific tactics have changed given scale and variety, but key common elements are, first, a deep understanding of the people we’re solving problems for, as well as the B2B2C dynamic. We always need to know who our personas are and understand them as the humans they are. What is their incentive? How are they trying to advance in their career? What are their problems?
Then, we need to understand the consumer side. What is their incentive structure? How are they receiving this value prop? That context helps to build a compass. Internally, we talk about having a compass that starts with human understanding. We want the compass to include an articulation and understanding of what the data means — where it comes from and how it’s sourced.
The final part of the compass relies on conviction to move the problem forward. The issue with a ton of data is that when you lay it out on a map, you can get lost. Data alone doesn’t give you a decision. In a B2B2C dynamic, if you just adopt a data-driven philosophy, you can go too far and get lost in your map without a compass to help you navigate. And even if you’re getting the right amount of data, there’s still something else that can impact that data that the data itself is not representing.
A great example is a smart lock that’s installed on the front door of a building with physical damage. Your dataset may not indicate damage, but there’s human context driving it. Understanding all of that is how we navigate those challenges as a product team.
When you’re working with multiple personas across a product ecosystem, where do the biggest workflow friction points emerge?
The interesting thing about friction points in this type of product operating model is that they emerge when you look too much in a silo. In these models, there’s a virtuous lifecycle: the business is trying to deliver value prop to the end customer, and technology enables it. But when you dissect the workflow, if you only talk to one team — it might be marketing, leasing, or maintenance — you can get so deep into the value chain of their specific problem statements that you forget what the virtuous lifecycle is aiming for.
For example, one of the biggest friction points in apartment and multifamily leasing is maintenance. Around half of renewals — a resident’s decision to stay or move — comes down to their experience with on-site maintenance. You have to compel them to live there in the first place through marketing and leasing, and good tours. But once they’re there, it’s a different ballgame. If I have an issue as a resident, I’m measuring my experience on whether that issue is resolved quickly, with high quality, and with a good experience.
Maintenance teams also have a lot of turnover and retention issues. They’re inundated with so many things to do, like turns, cleaning, landscaping, and systems running well. So it comes down to where the time-suck is and how we can help them have better quality.
We do everything with the resident in mind. If we help maintenance in a resident-first way, it therefore helps both the team and the resident. And then maintenance is happier as a result because they get measured by that resident experience.
Your customer is not the resident. Your customer is the property owner. How do you ensure that a resident-first feature also moves the business outcome that your customer wants?
This is where product theory versus reality comes into contention. Of course, we may have things like a beautiful RICE framework to prioritize work, but in a B2B2C dynamic, we can get stuck on how to prioritize something that doesn’t have a direct ROI validation point.
In product, you’re trying to drive things that have ROI for your business and financial ROI to the end customer. For us, that ROI can show up as operational savings, asset protection, or charging for a tech amenity use case. But the ultimate ROI is whether we can help get higher lead-to-lease conversion. Can we help property owners attract more people to live on-site? And can we help that property owner renew them?
When we think about it that way, we can prioritize the end-resident experience features because we characterize them in a manner that impacts those outcomes. For example, when you’re coming home with your kids and you have groceries in your hands, it’s tough to dig out your keys and unlock the door. It’s a differentiator to use your phone or watch to get in. We would never charge a resident for that, but the property is thinking, “Well, I already have this tech. How do I differentiate that experience so someone renews with me?”
Incorporating intuition with prioritization
You mentioned RICE as a framework, but how it may lead you to prioritize the wrong thing. Is there a time when applying a product framework helps your team move faster — and when it slows things down?
My hot take is that if you start with wanting to apply a product framework, you’ve already started on the wrong footing. Frameworks aren’t bad — they’re tools. But you don’t pick up a drill or a wrench and go, “How do I use this and what should I use it on?” You start with the problem, and the context dictates the tool.
With RICE specifically, it can be useful, but it leaves out intuition. Say you score your items, and the highest one is 9.2. Is that the thing that’s actually going to move innovation up the hill to solve the real problem for the real human? Intuition comes down to conviction. You might actually want to go with a lower-scoring item because it enables a process change. That’s convicted product leadership — you create a world that’s not possible today by having intuition guide you through the map.
With prioritization, we start with context and the compass dynamic. Do we have a good sense of the specific humans? Internally, we make personas real people — actual people we have a relationship with. Then, we have the data part of the compass. From there, we have context and command on the problem statement. That leads us to the right framework.
In a B2B2C organization, how do you build a product lifecycle where the needs of all the personas — residents, onsite teams, commercial stakeholders, but also the enterprise — influence the roadmap? What’s your playbook for when those priorities don’t align?
We’re going through this right now. We’re in quarterly planning and solidifying our roadmap. Our first tenet is to always be ready to change. Our playbook needs to be responsive to enterprise needs, what’s happening in the marketplace, what’s happening with the businesses, and what’s happening with the consumer.
So, we established a product advisory council. Then we worked with client-facing teams and did in-person client visits to get nuance on each customer — because every customer is their own enterprise. They’re dealing with corporate strategy, organizational challenges, change management, and innovation. And for all product professionals, your customers are doing the same thing.
A big part of the playbook is: who do you want to become as your enterprise? Who does the B2B customer want to become? And where do residents want to go? Then we synthesize those inputs and make trade-offs based on the inflection point that creates the widest denominator of impact across the value chain. This is essentially a fancy way of saying, “What’s the 80/20 bet that gets your enterprise closer to who we want to be and helps the customer do the same?”
The final layer is embracing uncertainty. You have your map, you have your compass, you’ve plotted where you need to go — but start walking and make rapid iterations. At SmartRent, we timebox. We think about the minimum impactful product, or the biggest problem we can solve in a timebox-constrained scope. Then, we let the customer tell us whether we made progress.
Can you give us a real-world example of that?
We’re creating a platform experience that blends value-based features together. One example is bulk management, i.e., configuring features, settings, and preferences at scale. Customers own hundreds of properties, and we work with thousands of them. We have to solve things at the unit level, and then enable management across 100 properties, 100,000 units, etc.
Vacant energy management is one example. On a vacant unit, can you control the temperature so it’s comfortable for tours without running all the time and wasting money? We had to get that right at the unit level. Now we’re asking, “Can we allow a property manager to change that across 100 properties and 100,000 units?” If you can click a button once instead of 100 times, we reduce complexity. It saves time while meeting the need for a great end-customer experience.
Channeling the voice of the customer
You mentioned using a product advisory council to understand systemic pain points. What advice do you have for leaders looking to adopt a similar model?
First, it’s an opportunity to build trust with customers. There are lots of ways to do it, but what’s been successful for us is de-scoping unit-by-unit problem statements because we have other feedback channels. Start by assessing where your feedback channels are today, and what problem you’re trying to solve. For us, we wanted attention on where customers want their businesses to be in the future.
When you get customers in a room together, it’s different than a 1:1. People hear each other and realize they’re facing the same thing. Starting at that top layer gets you the right nuggets from the tactical layer, because then they’ll say, “The reason I can’t get to that big change is that I’m facing these tactical problems.” Now you can synthesize where momentum should go and get the demand signal for the roadmap.
We curated a cross-section: customers with different product usage, and different business models — own and manage, manage for owners, and owners with third-party management. Those differences create varying implications. The product advisory council gives you common themes and different tactical nuances.
Then we brought the raw feedback back to the whole technology team. Engineers, PMs, and designers know they’re trying to solve something for the property manager, but they don’t always know exactly what issues they need to solve. Raw voice of customer initiatives creates a lot of “aha” moments. Finally, we shared the feedback across our entire organization. The more everyone in our company understands the real-world realities our customers share, the more empathetic and forward-focused we are able to be across departments.
As you mature, you are moving from a smart device solution company to a platform company. What strategic shift has been most important in helping the market understand SmartRent as a platform?
I think that companies usually have one of two fates. You’re either a point solution that stays a point solution, or you’re a point solution that tries to become a platform yourself.
SmartRent is in that phase of going from platform story to operating and being, at scale, a platform where the story is well understood. The challenge is how to insert unique value into the end customer lifecycle. Tech gives you optionality. You can build something cool, but if you don’t scale it with the right sequence, you get lost, and the platform story doesn’t resonate.
From day one, we had a simple assertion: smart home technology isn’t purpose-built for multifamily. We started there, then we built access and asset protection. What’s the correlation? Operations of the asset — helping teams do the work faster with better quality for better resident experience. We talk about a physical AI layer. We can understand an HVAC unit problem in a vacant unit before it’s about to go down, create a work order, manage it, and provide access to complete it.
Getting lost in complexity and looking toward the future
Do you have any advice on how to take the complexity out of telling the story to the market?
It’s easy to get lost in complexity. For us, this is about smarter living and working. If we can be smarter, we can be 1 percent faster and 1 percent higher-quality every time we do something. At scale, that means better resident experience, faster leasing, and more renewals. For residents, it means value out of living in a community in a way you wouldn’t in another.
SmartRent sits with a unique value prop of being able to drive income, lower expenses, and make your home a home. And the platform play is always about empathy to the human. Who is the actual person? Can we help them realize how we’re solving a problem for them? Everything else is delivery.
What will the role of product technology look like in multifamily real estate over the next five years?
It’s a huge opportunity. To address the next five, it’s good to think about where we come from.
Multifamily has been brass keys — very offline and with disjointed technology. Adoption accelerated with the COVID pandemic. Leasing offices literally stopped, so if you had to give up brass keys as a resident, what were you going to do?
Over the next five years, I anticipate that the next disruption factor will be AI. Software is going to become commoditized and easier to build. For big real estate companies, creating software becomes more approachable. Then, you have to look at what you have and ask, “How do things flow together, add business value, and help data and experience transform the business?”
The opportunity is in the foundational truth of human problems that you haven’t been able to solve — and now you can — but in a way where things integrate. Experiences become easier and more approachable, and you use AI strategically.
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket’s Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.