Project
Mortgage Fulfillment
Client
Bee
Overview
Bee is a startup that’s streamlining the mortgage process, making it simple enough to complete from your phone. Bee’s mobile app offers tools to easily shop, get approved, and close on your loan without uploading tons of documents or dealing with loan officers.
At the beginning of the year, the leadership team at Bee got together to set goals and a roadmap for 2022. With limited startup resources, we had to define a clear path towards our goal of launching in Q4. The customer facing touch points of the experience were defined at this point, with the main objective of delivering on our main value prop: an automated, mobile mortgage experience. The challenge was to make the process feel as automated and friction-less as possible, even if we were completing manual tasks behind the scenes.
What I did
I organized a 5 day design sprint, loosely based on Google's Design Sprint methodologies. The first half of the sprint was focused on team alignment, goal setting, and establishing requirements/constraints. The objective of the second half was to create a future state service blueprint which outlined the people and systems we needed in place for launch. The blueprint then informed a budget and resourcing plan for the year.
Due to the complexity and length of the mortgage process, we weren't able to test this prototype during the design sprint. The validation of the process we blueprinted took place in the following months with live beta testing customers in Florida.
The problem we had was obvious: we were lacking a clear, unified vision for our Q4 launch. Everyone on the team had thoughts for what it might look like and a workshop format seemed appropriate for bringing together everybody's ideas and knowledge.
I felt that a service blueprint was going to be the best tool for the job - it would bring together our defined customer experience with all of the backend processes needed to support it. But in order to get there, it was essential to rally behind a shared vision and define the constraints we'd work with. That's where I borrowed from the Google Design Sprint methodology.
What I did in the 2 weeks leading up to the sprint:
- Created a sprint brief and agenda
- Invited participants
- Lined up a few presenters
- Prepared a deck and Miro board
The workshop was done remotely with five participants: the CEO, COO, product manager, business analyst, and myself (the designer). I'll admit there was a bit of skepticism and difficulty keeping the participants engaged, but it was overall a success.
By the end of the week, we had accomplished:
- Established a shared knowledge base
- Defined the big goal and obstacles that we may face
- Created an end-to-end future state service blueprint
- Created a hiring and resource plan with high level budget for the year
