Product development
Dealtrack CRE platform
Streamlining WeWork's lease pipeline
Client
WeWork REDtech
Role
Lead Product Designer
Collaborators
Amal Muzafar (Product), Bryan Migliorisi (Eng)
Problem
WeWork's explosive growth was being hampered by a surprisingly analog real estate evaluation process. Different team members would unknowingly tour and reject the same locations because there was no structured way to track evaluations. For the few locations that were worthy of further consideration, these same team members would spend hours cross-referencing their notes and photos with third-party data to create evaluation presentations. By the time deals reached the legal team for lease negotiations, critical information was often missing, incorrect, or buried in someone's email, leading to poor deal terms and missed opportunities.
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.
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. The system became a comprehensive database of all evaluated locations, preventing duplicate visits and creating an invaluable knowledge base for future expansion planning.
Impact
3x increase
in annual lease signings
The new system transformed WeWork's real estate operations. Duplicate site visits were eliminated, saving countless hours of valuable time. The time required to compile location proposals dropped dramatically, and lease negotiations improved thanks to better information availability. Most importantly, the approval process accelerated significantly while actually improving decision quality through better information sharing.
