From Friction to €140K: How Simplifying Asset Management Unlocked Instant Valuations and Long-Term Partnerships
We thought our dashboards were powerful. Then we watched users get lost in them.
February 2, 2025
5 min read
“Our goal was to help investment managers evolve from spreadsheet dependency to live, data-informed decision-making. I played the role of the product guide, navigating ambiguity to deliver clarity and value.”
The asset management module forms the foundation of DoorFeed's platform and drives recurring revenue through its property and asset management features.
The module is divided into four categories:
- Letting: Tenant acquisition and property listings.
- Property Management: Tenant management and rent collection.
- Asset Management: Financial performance, valuations, and cash flows.
- Renovations: Project management, payments, and capital expenditure.
Challenge
Asset managers live in a world of spreadsheets and silos. One team handles lettings. Another handles maintenance. Another does valuations.
This team fragmentation slows everything down.
DoorFeed set out to change that, to unify these disconnected workflows into one streamlined platform. But early on, we faced a big question:
How do we build for everyone, without building everything?
With investment managers as our core users, we knew we had to simplify fast, or risk becoming just another complicated tool that gets tossed aside.
Our platform consolidates these traditionally siloed services into one place, providing significant value to institutions managing large asset portfolios. The key challenge is identifying which features matter most to each user group.
Since our principal customers are investment managers, we focused on improving the platform to meet their needs.
Problem statement
The existing interface made it difficult for investment managers to access the information that mattered most. A cluttered layout, unclear hierarchy, and excessive reliance on visualisations buried essential data like asset performance and valuations under too many clicks.
As a result, users struggled to confidently assess portfolio health or make timely decisions, often reverting to spreadsheets to regain control.
A user said, “I don’t even look at the charts anymore; I export everything back to Excel.”
The message was clear: we’d overbuilt. Our complexity was costing us trust.
Feedback
Early feedback revealed a critical gap between how we designed the platform and how investment managers actually used it.
While our dashboard offered a wide range of features, users found the layout cluttered and struggled to locate key financial data. Through usability testing and interviews with asset managers, we uncovered three core insights:
- "The assets table was buried. It took multiple clicks to access, despite being the most-used element."
- "Charts were deprioritised. While visually appealing, most users didn’t rely on them for day-to-day decision making."
- "One-size-fits-all design fell short. Strategy differences between funds meant some charts were irrelevant to a large portion of users."
An overwelming theme that provialed from these interviews was that there are a number of different strategies a fund might use. Meaning some specialised charts we placed would be useless to 80% of users.
These insights made it clear: value wasn’t being lost in functionality, but in how we surfaced it.
Previous designs
Customer Alignment & Industry Insight
Collaboration with the commercial team and direct user feedback confirmed our primary user: the institutional investment manager. Their priorities were clear, fast access to trusted valuations, and visibility into portfolio performance relative to the market.
Traditionally, these teams manage performance through spreadsheets and manual processes. Aggregating comparables from multiple sources, validating through third parties, and building financial models from scratch.
This created delays, duplicated effort, and introduced risk.
DoorFeed’s opportunity was to replace this workflow with a unified, automated valuation system delivering insights with the speed and reliability of a Bloomberg terminal, tailored for real estate.
Final Design
Improvements
- We prioritised financial performance screens over operational tasks. We reduced the number of tabs to just Valuation, Rental, and Letting.
- Enhanced our financial performance indicators for Rental and Valuation, showing month-on-month changes for each asset and the portfolio as a whole.
- Moving the tables to the front of the page provides immediate access to the assets in their portfolio.
- Introducing parent-child table rows allows the user to track the performance of their buildings and units within.
- Showing current rents compared to rental market rates provides immediate value for tracking performance, empowering investment managers to maximise their portfolios' yields.
- Deprioritised charts on the screen, reducing to the most impactful and actionable data visualisations, valuation breakdowns, risk profiles and portfolio cash flows.
Impact & Business Outcomes
Product Simplification Led to Commercial AccelerationThe redesigned asset management module led to measurable product and commercial outcomes.
- 40% reduction in clicks across core asset management workflows
- Faster decision-making, with rental and valuation insights surfaced immediately
- 10% average uplift in rental income, driven by improved market alignment
Most significantly, the platform captured the attention of an institutional investor managing a €140M portfolio. They validated our valuation model within a 1–2% margin and opened discussions to adopt DoorFeed as a core partner, representing €140K in annual recurring revenue and long-term growth potential.
Reflection & Takeaways
This project reinforced a few core principles I carry into every product partnership:
Every client is a collaborator. Treating clients as strategic partners not just users led to faster alignment and better outcomes.
Clarity always wins. We originally equated complexity with value. In reality, simplifying to what users truly needed unlocked both usability and commercial traction.
User insight beats assumption. Interviews and testing consistently outperformed internal hypotheses. Building with users not just for them was the shift that mattered most.
