Orchard Internal Tools
For Orchard (real estate technology startup) to deliver on it’s mission of making home buying simple, transparent, and stress-free, we needed to make a big leap forward with our internal tooling to ensure 25+ different internal roles across 3 businesses (Brokerage, Lender, Title) were all on the same page.
This cross-functional, collaborative effort drove a 28% increase in satisfaction with our internal tooling and a 21% more efficient team.
My Role
As the Lead Product Designer for Internal Tools at Orchard, I split my time between leading the vision for internal tools, managing a team of Product Designers, and working directly on a cross-functional squad. For this project, I led the research, design, testing, and subsequent iterations.
Internal collaboration and communication (more on this later) was an important thematic area of investment for the business, and the work below is best understood as a series of projects that played out over a couple years and had many contributors, some of whom I’ll call out directly below:
Product Design - Me, Rye Bennett (Head of Design), Emily Porat (Sr. Product Designer), Julianne Walkiewicz (Sr. Product Designer)
Product Management - Rahil Esmail (Head of Product), Drew Mccalmont (Director of Product - Internal Tools), Sophie Mester (Lead Product Manager - Internal Tools)
Engineering - Will Deupree (CTO), Sam Weissman (Director of Engineering)
Stakeholders - Too many to name, but notable contributions from Natalie Westerberg (Sr. Operations lead)
Where We Were
Internal Inefficiencies. Poor Communication.
At the end of 2020, Orchard had validated Product Market Fit with its core offering “Move First”, facilitating customers buying their next home before they sell their current home - avoiding double mortgages or double moves, and was scaling into additional markets.
However, there were some issues that needed to be addressed. We were hearing reports that communication between our customers and our internal teams wasn’t always great, and our internal customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey resulted in a 64% rating for internal communication between teams, and our Transaction Coordinators were on average able to serve only 24 customers at a time (below our projections).
We needed to better address these issues before we scaled, but first we needed to understand them better.
“There were a number of scheduling and communication errors, and things that you just didn’t do or communicate that we think you should have.”
“Currently, communication, or a lack thereof, is killing us.”
User Research
What do we mean by “communication”?
To get to the bottom of what was happening, we kicked off a round of desktop research to get the lay of the land. After synthesizing the output, we decided to kick off a round of net-new generative research to develop a deeper, first-hand understanding of what was going on.
Phase 1 (desktop):
Reviewed past research
Analyzed customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
Analyzed internal CSAT surveys
Explored existing communication channels
Phase 2 (net new):
Customer interviews
Internal shadow sessions
Diary studies
Research Insights
For our internal teams, we were able to identify clear themes of problems and areas of opportunity for improvement:
Disconnected Systems - Communication spaces were team specific (like Salesforce Chatter, Atlas activity feed, or Qualia), while email and slack were the only shared systems across the entire organization.
Lack of Visibility - There was no one source of truth for Brokerage, Mortgage, and Title to find reliable information about the progress or status of a Deal and what the next steps were.
Ownership & Handoffs - Critical transitions of ownership were inconsistent and lead to anxiety for the customer and inefficiencies for Orchard, especially between Brokerage, Mortgage, and Title.
Designing as a Team
How do we get everyone on the same page?
With a better understanding of the problems we were facing, we continued to dig to better understand our existing position, the nuances of our service delivery, and we collaboratively ideated to develop potential solutions for our problems.
I led an exercise to map each tool that was being used by each team for key service delivery themes like internal communication, real estate decision making, and viewing deal details. This highlighted the extent of the “Disconnected Systems” problem observed through research. See below:
Diagram of what tools were being used by our teams to deliver our services. Some teams used up to 5 different tools for the same thing.
I then mapped our flagship service to understand key workflows, points of operational overlap, and key areas of collaboration and handoff.
Workflow diagram of our Move First service.
Cross-functional Collaboration
As a team, our Product, Design, Engineering, and Operational stakeholders spent time unpacking problems, reviewing research, sharing insights about our customers, generating ideas, producing prototypes, and ultimately developing a vision for where we wanted to take our internal tools.
Screenshot of one of many remote, ideation sessions.
Where SHOULD things get done
We also built a perspective around which tools should be leveraged to accomplish which tasks and by which teams.
Diagram of our vision state of which tools we wanted our teams to be using to reduce disconnected systems and stay on the same page.
Undoubtedly you won’t be able to read all the boxes in the image above, but the purple boxes represent the decision to ensure the following work is done in one system across the organization:
Internal Communication - How are people collaboratively problem solving unforeseen challenges?
Task Management - What needs to get done next and who is responsible for that work?
Deal Visibility - What progress has been made and what is the status of the Deal?
Acquisition of Preclose
The clarity developed around our internal tooling deficiencies and the vision state of where we wanted to go helped the business make the decision to acquire the real estate task management platform, Preclose, which dramatically accelerated our progress in the task management dimension, but left us needing to make progress on Internal Communication and Deal Visibility, as well as plan for a broader integration of this new tool into our ecosystem.
…but how will it fit in?
I explored various approaches of how to best integrate this new tool into our existing systems as well as an ideal future information architecture for a unified internal tooling experience. This required developing a short-term approach to unlock value from the acquisition, while setting us up for success long term.
High-level IA from day 1
Option 1: Keep product experiences separate, but sync databases
Option 2: Integrate product experiences, leaning on strengths from each system.
Developing a Vision State
Feedback on the Direction
Based on the needs of the team, and with our newly shared understanding of the core elements we needed to communicate (Deal, Transaction, Stage, Status), we developed high-fidelity designs and prototypes with which to gather feedback from our operation stakeholders, executive team, and colleagues who would be using this future product.
Deal summary page highlights key information, dates, and previews progress across the active stages.
Each independent stage could be viewed to provide focus and granular detail relevant to specific stakeholders.
List view of assigned tasks provide helpful context about the Deal’s stage and due dates.
Balancing Working Styles
We learned a ton from our research sessions, most importantly that we needed to balance the working styles of two distinct approaches to work within the company:
Our two “personas” of internal users.
Self-Serve Statuses
To make progress on ensuring that anyone on the team could quickly and easily get the answer to the progress, or lack thereof, for any key task within the process, we developed a “closing dashboard” which highlighted these pre-defined statuses. We didn’t get full coverage of every service out of the gate, but we prioritized the most impactful moments in our flagship product, Move First, to drive visibility and alignment.
The application’s “hub” screen allowed for an overview of progress made and context into the work remaining.
Progress Towards Stages
To make it very simple and clear to internal teams where the customer was in their experience, what had already been done, and what needed to happen next, we started to introduce the concept of Stages.
Again, the work to fully realize our vision would take time, but we’ve been able to iterate in that direction with a side bar element, which doubles as a navigation tool and a way of communicating progress.
The Impact
With the acquisition of Preclose and the iterative improvements we’ve been able to make, we’ve driven meaningful business impact and a much better experience for our internal teams.
Shared tooling for Brokerage, Mortgage, and Title
+28% CSAT score for internal communication
+21% efficiency for our “quarterback of the deal” - Transaction Coordinators
Takeaways
This project spanned a couple of years, and there’s a lot more work to be done to realize our vision, but the impact has already been meaningful, and the clarity with which the team operates now that we have a shared vision is exciting.
I’ve learned a few things that I’ll bring with me on my next project and here are a few:
Don’t underestimate the work required to integrate another product/company
It’s important to know when to launch iteratively and when to take a more “waterfall” approach
Design collaboratively as much as possible, and share the same message more times than feels normal to drive alignment and change
Working on internal tools may not always be as glamorous as consumer-facing work, but it can be just as, or more, rewarding when you solve problems for your colleagues!