Profolio — a listings CRM for 200+ MENA property agencies
A whiteboard-style listings CRM used by 200+ agencies and 50k+ agents across MENA, with 30k+ agent logins. Rebuilt uploads, quota, reporting, and market-insights into one operator surface so agency owners could run their portfolio without leaving the tool.
- Client
- Bayut / dubizzle · via Systems Limited
- Role
- Product Designer
- Year
- 2021 — 2022
- Tools
- Figma · Design System · Research
Method, insight, decision, tradeoff.
The four beats that turn a project into evidence — how I researched it, what I learned, the call I made, and the compromise I accepted to make the call.
Four weeks shadowing agents at agencies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, plus interviews with agency owners about how they measure a good week — not just a good listing.
Agents didn't need a prettier uploader. Owners needed to know, on Monday morning, which agent was under quota and which was leaving credits on the table.
Redesign the Monday-morning conversation, not the uploader. One console for listings, quota, insights, billing, and website management, split by role — agent vs. owner.
One shared surface across two very different jobs, instead of two purpose-built tools. More constraints on every screen, but no more tool-switching mid-day.
Phases, decisions, artifacts, outcomes.
The actual shape of the work — not the marketing version. Each phase lists the calls I made, what shipped, and what moved.
Discover
- Shadow agents at real agencies, not just agency owners.
- Audit the legacy tool before proposing a redesign.
- Agent + owner personas, workflow audit, competitor teardown.
Reframed the product from a listings uploader to an agency operating surface.
Define
- One nav model split by role — agent vs. agency owner.
- Reporting and insights sit alongside listings, not in a separate tool.
- IA, permissions matrix, section-by-section spec.
Committed the roadmap to a single console covering listings, quota, insights, billing, and website management.
Design
- 3-step add-listing flow: details → amenities → uploads.
- Impressions, clicks, and leads visible on the same overview.
- Add-listing flow, overview and insights sections, team + quota management, billing.
One console covering the operational day of an agency owner and their agents.
Ship & Measure
- Region-by-region rollout across UAE agencies.
- Feedback loop with agency owners baked into monthly releases.
- Rollout plan, release notes, feedback log.
Adopted by 200+ agencies with 30k+ monthly logins across MENA.
Context
Bayut / dubizzle's agency network in the UAE runs on quota. Every agent has a ceiling on how many listings they can post, how many can be flagged as "hot," and how many deals of the week they can claim. When the tool that governs that quota is slow, agencies lose money the same week.
The existing product was a listings uploader that had grown, section by section, into something no one at the agencies could describe end-to-end. The redesign brief was to rebuild it as an operating surface — one place where agents upload, owners manage, and both sides read performance out of the same numbers.
Constraints on the table
- Two distinct roles — agent and agency owner — sharing every screen.
- A live customer base already trained on the legacy flows.
- Quota logic that touched listings, hot flags, and deal-of-the-week credits.
- Reporting and market insights teams had been building in parallel and needed to converge.
Research
Four weeks of shadowing agents at agencies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, plus interviews with agency owners about how they measure a good week. The agents didn't need a prettier uploader — they needed to know, at a glance, whether the listings they had already posted were pulling their weight.
That reframed the product. Listings were table stakes; the real value was the report that let an owner walk into a Monday meeting knowing which agent was under quota and which was leaving credits on the table.
Decisions
The add-listing flow collapsed into three steps — property details, amenities, uploads — so an agent could finish a listing on a phone between viewings. Every section landed on the same overview: impressions, clicks, leads, quota used, quota remaining, deal-of-the-week credits still available.
Agency owners got their own layer on top: team management, per-agent quota, and market insights showing how their agency's listings ranked against competition by area, purpose, and price band. Billing and agency-website management joined the same console instead of living in three separate tools.
What shipped
- 3-step add-listing flow, mobile-first.
- Overview: listing performance by area, quota, and credits.
- Reports section: traffic and leads by area and platform.
- Insights: market trends, popular areas, and competitive benchmarking.
- Agency section: teams, users, quotas, deal-of-the-week credits, reviews.
- Billing and agency-website management.
Reflection
The instinct at the start was to redesign the uploader. The right instinct, in hindsight, was to redesign the Monday-morning conversation an agency owner has with their agents. Once that framing landed, every section had a clear reason to exist — and the ones that didn't got cut.