Harding Fire Protection
Harding Fire Protection currently manages more than 25 million square feet of real estate of all sizes and complexities. Whether serving a large multi-tenant office, a complex industrial facility, or a franchise portfolio, Harding Fire Protection strives to be the premier provider of fire protection inspections, testing, and maintenance.
We built a proprietary web-based solution designed to help property executives, property managers, and facility managers mitigate risk & manage code compliance within complex, high-value, and diverse business operations.
My Role
I was hired as a Product Manager for the web application. I worked with executive stakeholders and product developers to expand the product vision from an internal operational relational database to a cloud-based solution adopted by 3 prominent, property management companies. I managed the product as it passed through the various stages of vision, user interviews, strategy, design, prototype creation, initial MVP, and commercial launch.
Problem
Property managers are responsible for ensuring legal compliance and effective risk management across 100s of commercial properties. They typically oversee operational and reputational risks including building and contractor safety, public safety, and property compliance as well as 1000s of audits, inspections, and repair programs to manage.
Their biggest challenge is prioritizing risks effectively and the information they rely on is often held in disparate systems and formats (including paper copies) making it very difficult to spot potential problems. The worry keeps them awake at night.
Product & Solution
The need for a single, central source of all current and historical data pertaining to fire and life safety devices is imperative and allows property managers, facility managers and property executives to mitigate fire & life safety risks, manage & meet their compliance obligations. We designed and developed a web-based software platform that provides organizations with both high-level and custom-tailored views of their fire and life safety data from a central source.
The solution was deployed within 3 of Canada’s largest property management companies. After using the product for fire & life safety these same clients started asking how we could implement the same product internally for other areas of their portfolio. Areas such as,
Mechanical Systems – Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning, air filtration systems, and boilers.
Electrical Systems – Power generators, branch panels, and transformers.
Security Systems
Elevators
Janitorial Services – Deicing sidewalks.
We explored these uses cases but decided to keep the solution focused on our area of expertise: fire and life safety. The product is a success and is being used today.
Key Learnings
As a product from early in my Product Management career, it taught me the importance of understanding and defining the scope of the product and the value of building and demonstrating prototypes to end users.
The further the buyer is from the user, the less user-friendly the product is expected to be. It seems strange, but enterprise software is often described as hard to use, but hard to use doesn’t mean bad. Large companies have near-infinite resources and if they were losing deals because their products were hard to use they would improve in a heartbeat. B2B customers are buying for different reasons than B2C.