Hostmaker built a dynamic pricing tool for their rental properties. Due to the complexity of multiple business rules, the pricing tool was not giving desired results for the rental properties. This raised some apprehensions in the stakeholders. With rental properties across multiple countries, the pricing tool initially only catered to countries with maximum properties. We needed to release the updated version of this product by addressing the above issues and refining its functionalities, thereby making the tool effective for all property types and gaining the trust of stakeholders & end users in the product.

The main challenges were as follows:

• Making it work for dynamic business rules and optimizing existing rules to handle scale.
• Lack of any documentation pertaining to how the existing product works.
• Short and strict deadlines to rollout V1 of the product.
• Understanding how property pricing is done and emulating the same in tool.
• There were parts of the algorithm which were not flexible enough to cater to dynamic business rules which made the tool difficult to scale.
• Identifying how the algorithm should do the complex calculations of dynamic pricing.
• Working with a distributed team across 3 different time zones.

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We started with understanding what had been developed till date and made sure all the features worked as expected.

We worked directly with the Pricing Analysts to get their perspective on how the algorithm should behave.

We made the tool flexible to adapt to different pricing needs and scale up easily to accommodate newer rules and markets.

We provided the tool with a much needed QA harness, covering the product with ample functional tests.

We created smaller milestones and a backlog of features around these milestones, which were then prioritized according to the business priority and user's feedback.

In a span of 3 weeks, we were able to release an updated version of the product for the properties in Central London.

All the knowledge acquired was documented for future onboarding of the team (pricing analysts, tech team) and scaling of the product.

In just 7 weeks, the latest version of the tool was successfully pricing properties across London. The business stakeholders now plan to add properties from other cities as well.