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Tracking WeWork's Real Estate Deals
On Oct. 10 2019, WeWork had 622 locations open in 123 cities across the globe. There was a huge opportunity for technology to support WeWork’s real estate team during this expansion.
This project was a zero to one effort to design software to support the workflows and collaboration across the team.
The Situation
It didn’t make sense to build proprietary technology to facilitate custom workflows of internal WeWork teams when teams were still forming and the work was evolving. It was not a priority for the team and mostly third-party tools filled the need.
When I joined WeWork, the company was moving into a new stage. Patterns in ways of working across teams and continents were emerging.
This was a strong enough signal for leadership to prioritize building proprietary applications to support the internal teams.
Design Challenge
Our team needed to model out activities, mindsets, goals and workflows agnostic of corporate titles and team-based responsibilities in order that we designed a system that supported the global workforce.
Approach
This effort focused on mapping the workflows and modeling its users. The second stage was designing the software based on what was modeled.
My role was to design and execute end-to-end UX research across the product development cycles. I collaborated alongside a team of product designers, engineers, data scientists, product managers and SME’s from the real estate team.
I also led the design strategy, facilitating workshops to align the team around priorities based on user and business insights and to ideate around the solution space.
During this project, I introduced the team to design sprints and the concept of using design provocations to conduct lean research.
Understanding the Problem
One of my favorite parts of this work was getting out into the field with the cross-functional team.
Observing the users in their environment was particularly important for this project because of the environmental considerations.
For example, deal managers were often walking sites under construction with tenants. This required gloves, hard hats and paying attention to avoid hazards.
We observed a deal manager walking a site with a potential client and the construction team on an open roof on the 10th floor while simultaneously participating in a legal call about another deal.
Team members not out in the field were often doing dictation of information from people walking sites, jumping into planes, trains and automobiles. These same people were doing a lot of the manual deal tracking and dictating back to those in the field when a change happened throughout the day.
Define
After completing the initial discovery, the team synthesized observations, interviews and other data collected during the discovery phase.
Problem Statement
We are going to build a scalable workflow solution for real estate deal management that increases efficiency and collaboration across a global workforce so that the business can continue to grow effectively with integrity.
To model personas, we first created behavioral continuums and plotted our interviews along the continuums. Then, we captured clusters of participants, looking for patterns in those clusters.
People’s titles did not necessarily translate to universal truths about the activities they did.
Mindsets and activities were variable depending on the team’s size and maturity.
Personas
We modeled two personas: John and Leah. John represents the customer-facing part of deal management, which is a lot of relationship building and closing. Leah is more behind the scenes supporting John and only involved in some parts of the deal process.
Experience Maps
To compliment the personas, I designed a day in the life experience map which helped people see the relationship and dependencies between John and Leah.
We also mapped the deal process which became the foundation for the workflows in the application.
Ideate
I designed workshops to communicate what we learned to different audiences in different ways.
For our designers and engineers, I facilitated sketching sessions based on the persona opportunity statements.
For product managers and our senior leadership, I facilitated prioritization meetings that gave them space to use what we learned to make decisions about upcoming roadmap features.
Design
Results
Our team delivered two personas and two experience maps in a friendly “Meet Your Users” guide. Video below.
The User Guide gave the team:
- A way to communicate with each other and stakeholders about design decisions.
- The tools to stay connected to the user throughout the product development process.
- Signal for impact measurement and instrumentation by knowing what should be measured as successful behavior
- An easier way for people to relate to the work being done and empathize with the people the team was helping.
We went through several iterations of the personas and designed them to be easily used in team conversations.
Product managers started their demos and kickoff meeting talking about “John” and “Leah.” They also included them in presentation decks and grooming sessions.
Personas for presentations.
Persona for the user guide.
The Product: Dealtrack
Ultimately, this work propelled the team forward to deliver a successful product, Dealtrack, with confidence and clarity.
Reflection
Experimenting with Experience Mapping
The UX lead and I worked very closely on the experience maps. It was an opportunity for each of us to lean into our strengths but also push each other through constructive, actionable feedback.
We started out sharpie to paper, iterating quickly on the design with feedback from the team. Both maps were original, innovative and communicated different cuts of what we learned in a compelling way.
I focused on mapping the "day-to-day," highlighting information needs.
The UX Lead, Sam Carmichael focused on tensions along the deal process as well as what channels people were using to complete a task.
The Team
Carson Andrews, Product Designer
Laura Cochran, UX Researcher
Sam Carmichael, UX Lead
Amal Muzaffar, Product Lead
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More than 15 Years of Experience
Over my 15+ year career I've worn many hats. The case studies in my portfolio thread the needle across my experience as a research and design practitioner and people leader.