Deep insights transformed Spruce from D2C MVP to B2B enterprise platform

key Expertise

UCD & Lean UX

Product Strategy

Service Design

challenge

Spruce had to pivot from a D2C product aimed at homeowners to a solution that caters to mortgage lenders and other parties involved in processing real estate transactions. 

Solution

We utilized wireframes to visually articulate the research-driven product strategy known as "Performance Pinecone." This strategy involved a complete redesign of Spruce's OS, transforming it from a simple table-based UI into an intuitive enterprise platform.

Impact

Overall processing times reduced by an average of 75%. Some processes were reduced by 83%. And artifacts from discovery activities were utilized for training and onboarding materials.

Why it matters

The implemented enhancements empowered the Operations team to effectively scale alongside the increasing volume of transactions and partnerships as the business expanded.

Key Insights

The exploration revealed that Pinecone, Spruce’s OS, was integral to the transaction. It became apparent that Operations were dealing with a vast array of tools, tasks, and data. We discovered that the existing state of the product was leading to preventable errors, such as math mistakes, overlooked details, and duplicated efforts. The product needed to provide an easy way to quickly grasp the details of a transaction and establish priorities, urgency, and next steps.

Main Outcome

Insights from the discovery activities were synthesized into a product strategy dubbed “Performance Pinecone.”

The objective was to evolve the product from referential tables that structured data to an intelligent enterprise tool that responded to the user’s context. 

We created wireframes of the ideal future state and partnered with Product and Engineering to develop a roadmap and design system.

Impact

Deep insights product development increased processing time by 3x.

Certain steps of processing a real estate transaction took half an hour to over an hour to complete. For example, initial processing took over 1 hour, which we reduced to 10 minutes. The research-driven design solutions enhanced performance and efficiency of the Operations team, enabling them to scale as the business grew in transactions and partnerships.

As well, through the practice of continuous discovery activities, non-technical team members, such as those in Finance, Operations, and Legal, had the opportunity to provide their deep subject matter knowledge and gain exposure to agile product development and design methodologies. Artifacts from these activities were used to generate training and onboarding materials.