Dealtrack
Real estate app for iOS and web streamlines WeWork’s lease pipeline, enabling rapid expansion
The problem
WeWork’s real estate teams had no single source of truth for their location pipeline data, referring to different internal and external systems. This led to data discrepancies, lack of trust in the information, and hours of manual compilation of data for executive approval of lease signings.
Our approach
We began as a 3 person research initiative, and eventually grew to 3 cross-functional teams of ~25 collaborators. I led design for the platform from it’s inception, to launch, and through continuous research and iteration over the next 18 months.
Through extensive interviews and journey mapping, two distinct personas emerged, and it was clear that we needed to enable seamless communication between these two groups.
Tours new buildings / Communicates externally
Synthesizes deal info / Communicates internally
The solution
It was clear that John needed a mobile solution, and the importance of reliability in low connectivity environments led us to a native iOS app, rather than mobile web.
For Leah the big picture was key. So for the web app, we prioritized experiences that made it easier to digest large amounts of information quickly, like the automated deal summary and configurable reports.
By scraping uploaded documents and leveraging APIs to external systems, we were able to greatly increase data completeness and accuracy over the manual data capture used in the past. To build trust in the integrity of the data, we tracked all revisions, and displayed attribution for key data points.
We organized all this info into a single view for each deal, with information grouped and prioritized based on sorting exercises with users from different regions globally. This automated summary is supported and managed through a timeline of comments, revisions, and key milestones, keeping everyone in sync.
New deals are pre-populated with 3rd party data, and updates and comments are tracked in a chronological timeline.
It all comes together in the deal detail view for automated executive summaries and asynchronous lease approval.
The Dealtrack iOS app makes it easy to add new deals while touring buildings, leveraging google's location APIs
The Dealtrack web app enables customizable reports, tracking deals from all the real estate teams globally.
Impact
With the release of Dealtrack, WeWork was able to achieve 3X increase in lease volume, replacing in-person meetings with dozens of attendees and hours of preparation, in favor of asynchronous evaluation of deals.