SignPlacer

A Simple Problem Worth Solving

Real estate agents rely on physical signs to drive traffic to open houses, but placing several expensive signs across an unfamiliar neighborhood creates another problem: remembering exactly where each one was placed and efficiently retrieving them afterward.

SignPlacer was a homegrown digital product developed by a company where I previously worked. The original concept was not mine, but I took ownership of translating the idea into a focused product. Conversations with real estate agents validated that the problem was real. Open house signs are both important and expensive, making better placement and reliable recovery a useful, practical workflow rather than technology looking for a use case.

Turning the Idea Into a Focused Utility

I defined the product requirements, MVP, feature set, priorities, and selected user flows while leading a small team consisting of an iOS developer, designer, and CTO. We intentionally kept the experience centered on the core job agents needed to accomplish rather than expanding a straightforward utility into an unnecessarily complicated product.

The resulting native iOS app used mapping and location services to help agents identify useful locations for open house signage, record where signs had been placed, and navigate back to them when the showing ended. One of the most useful features calculated a pickup route across the saved locations, turning what could become a frustrating search through an unfamiliar neighborhood into a guided recovery process.

From Product Definition to Launch

The CTO and developer led the underlying technology selection while I remained focused on product and delivery. I worked across design and development, managed priorities and implementation decisions, participated in QA, and helped carry the product through App Store submission, launch, and subsequent updates.

SignPlacer was publicly released for iOS and received recognition outside our own team, including a recommendation from a real estate industry publication highlighting its ability to remember sign locations and help agents determine where to place them.

It was a comparatively small product, but that focus was part of its strength: identify a specific problem through conversations with the people experiencing it, define the minimum product necessary to solve it, align a small multidisciplinary team, and get a useful tool into customers' hands.