Super LO

Background:
Mortgages are one of the most complex lending products in the world. That means Loan Officers have complicated jobs with many responsibilities that scatter their focus across different parties and tasks from within and outside their organizations.

This leaves Loan Officers, also known as LOs, constantly shifting gears and being largely reactive rather than proactive, far from ideal for making the most efficient use of their time.

For LOs to be effective in their role at Guaranteed Rate they must shuffle through a half-dozen or more disparate systems each day. To make matters worse, many of these experiences are dated, slow and mobile-hostile.

Objective:
Super LO came about in an effort to streamline our Loan Officers’ key workflows and optimize them for multiple breakpoints in completely responsive, mobile-first UI.

The primary goal was to ensure LOs could easily service and efficiently grow their pipelines from anywhere. Our secondary goal was to limit our organization’s reliance on third party, one size fits all software solutions and the annually recurring financial burdens that accompany them.

We wanted to control our own destiny and custom tailor our LOs experience to best fit the Guaranteed Rate way of doing things, known as The Proactive POD Model.

Process:
I loved working on this project. It required massive collaboration and big systems thinking while solving countless smaller problems simultaneously for multiple different viewports.

Hanging in the balance were huge productivity gains for high-octane users — LOs who were already generating hundreds of millions in loan origination volume and doing it with software that might as well be from the stone age. This was a prime opportunity to free them from a series awful, antiquated, inefficient tools that they were dependent upon to earn a living.

To start, I conducted user interviews with over a dozen LOs and their entire support staffs. I learned about their process, the order in which they operated, how they communicated and kept track of everything amongst themselves, their customers and what the biggest pain points were.

From those conversations, I sorted the findings and worked with my product leads to outline a core feature set and put together this early journey map below. It wound up serving as our cross-functional team’s northstar while we kicked off the sizable task of piecing this exciting new experience together from scratch.

I used this simple journey map as a basis for a far more elaborate interactive framework overview that documented much of Super LO’s core features, functionality and UI with just the right level of detail. It wound up evolving as we built out the app and served as a key reference point for my product and engineering partners, alike.

It was also incredibly useful in shopping the concept around for initial feedback from both LOs and business stakeholders while building a genuine buzz for it that would ultimately help us gain traction and user-adoption once we were ready to launch the beta.

I proceeded to wire out a myriad of different workflows, pages and interactions across the entire app, always looking to solve for simplicity, speed and fully-responsive UIs.

Super LO wound up with well over 150 screens and each had to be designed for 3 individual breakpoints. I was more thankful than ever that we’d worked as a team to stand up a rock-solid design system to rely on.

I built an end-to-end, clickable prototype and used it to conduct user testing with our LOs, looking to ensure that we were still on the right track after miring myself in all the gritty details.

Pairing closely with my product and engineering leads, we used the results of these feedback sessions to establish scope, prioritize features, set requirements and build a timeline for delivery that we tightly adhered to.

Hurdles:
This project had no shortage of challenges from the outset. First was the fact that my stakeholders insisted on complete feature parity between the mobile and desktop experiences rather than delivering a stripped down version for a phone. Talk about fitting an elephant through a keyhole, but hey, I do this job for the love of solving problems like this.

Next, was the fact that we were required to build upon and integrate with many existing, fragmented systems and service design patterns despite the fact that almost all of them came with plenty of their own baggage to account for.

Another was the fact that our goal was to take the LOs daily operations, which are largely unique to each user, and attempt to homogenize and organize them into a system that prioritizes the most important work at all times and points across the loan manufacturing process.

This resulted in a balancing act between the needs of our users (“Let me work how I want to work!”) and the operations vision of the business (“We know what’s best and we’re trying to run a well-oiled machine, here!”) It proved to be quite challenging at times, but nothing that wasn’t surmountable through transparency, pragmatism and communication.

Results:
Upon release, the response was overwhelmingly positive. We nailed the foundational features and the overall structure of the app was really well received. The LOs were genuinely excited. Not only at the prospect having a single point of sale experience for all their loan origination needs, but that it was built to suit their needs and that it was a completely fully-featured experience on mobile, as well.

We opened to a small beta group of about fifty LOs and the word spread. The folks in the GR product group had created something truly focused on helping our Loan Officers sell more effectively and earn more money. It didn’t long to eclipse 400 unique daily logins, with our beta group eventually ballooning to over 700 users with a company-wide launch planned for Q2 2023.

If the success of the beta is any indication for how successful the full launch to be, Super LO will allow us to stop licensing Ellie Mae Encompass, resulting in upwards of $7 million dollars of savings per year all while providing a vastly improved, more nimble experience.

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