Escrow Transactions

After the kick-off, I gathered the key stakeholders and held a service blueprint workshop to better understand the end-to-end workflow from the finance team’s perspective. I used my initial hypotheses as a framework to determine the next steps, specifically focusing on:

• “What happens when a new order is opened?”
• “What occurs at the end of the lifecycle?”
• “What are the steps for reconciliation when something goes wrong?”
• “What does a ‘successful’ fully funded order look like?”
• “Which external apps or tools are being used outside of the platform?”

This exercise served as a knowledge check. By asking these questions, we were able to map out the business process, uncover hidden inefficiencies, and ensure we could trace issues back to their source if they occurred.

(Fig. 1 — Collaborative Service Blueprint Exercise)

The workshop was a foundational piece that guided me to continue exploring ways to close gaps in my understanding. It became clear that the current flow and UI were performing suboptimally and weren’t up to industry standards.

With a bird’s-eye view, it became easier to generate and test ideas to determine which changes had a positive impact on users without risking the business.

I identified a need to visualize multiple processes and their sequences within a single document. Ultimately, this enabled us to have better conversations, increase efficiency, and provide proper documentation for the team.

(Fig. 2 — Flowchart)

During these sessions, I noticed that critical order details were often captured on sticky notes and kept on desks.

To find specific data, accountants relied on “Cmd/Ctrl + F” to scan long, continuous lists of transactions.

Another key insight was the urgent need for collaboration tools to streamline tasks, set reminders, and manage comments within the platform itself.

(Fig. 3 — Observation sessions with the accounting team)

With competing priorities at play, we leaned toward solving for the business risks we had recently uncovered. After a prioritization session, I conducted a UX audit of the existing UI to map out broken processes. This gave the team a clear roadmap for where to iterate and how to inform future decisions.

Previously, the Real Estate Ops team had to manually input every incoming transaction and outgoing disbursement on a per-order basis. Much of this data was already captured elsewhere in the platform. This repetitive work was a major bottleneck and prone to manual error. After extensive interviews with the Ops team and funders in both New York and Texas, we identified this as the most urgent feature needed to streamline the workflow.

(Fig. 4 — UX Audit, Feature Roadmap Prioritization)

I synced with the engineers after the workshop to align our design goals with the realities of a complex microservices setup.

One drawback of microservices is that the entire system is more complex, and it becomes harder to track down issues without additional tooling; monolithic applications, by contrast, are self-contained and typically easier to debug.

With the new insights from users in mind and alignment with engineering, we (product + design) prioritized work accordingly.

(Fig. 5 — UX Audits & Iterations)