Open Book is a series of interviews where you get to meet members of the Opendoor design team.

What do you do at Opendoor?

I’m the Head of Research and Consumer Insights. My team is in charge of making sure that our company deeply understands customers’ problems, motivations, and reactions so that we’re building things that people actually want, need, and love.

How did you get your start in research and insights?

It was a bit of a winding road. I started my career believing that I would be a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. However, after completing a post-baccalaureate program where I learned to do functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research and then my master’s degree, I realized academia wasn’t the right fit for me. I dropped out of my PhD program at Harvard and endeavored to figure out if an academic researcher could make herself useful in tech. I was drawn to tech by its promise of high-leverage work with global impact and a more open culture.

My first role out of grad school was in engagement marketing at Trulia, and it was there I became aware that user research and consumer insights functions existed. My first thought was, “oh, I see … there are people who study people in an industry. I’m in!” I took a role as the founding member of the research team at MyFitnessPal, loved it, and have been in research ever since.

How does your background influence the way you approach research and run your team?

I probably insist on a higher bar for the rigor of our research. Our team works with a startup mentality, so we move fast and are scrappy. But because of my and my team’s academic training, we’re also painfully aware of all of the confounds and biases that can creep in when research moves too fast or your sample sizes are too small. When we run into a research question that’s going to require a lot of time and resources to answer accurately, we align with our collaborators that we’re either going to take the time to answer it right, or we’re not going to answer it with research. In those instances, we coach the team to use logic, analytics, and their good judgment instead.

My background also probably influences how I structure my teams. At Opendoor, we have combined the disciplines of user research (which often sits within product or design teams) and consumer insights (which often sits within marketing teams). I prefer this structure because I believe that both disciplines have the same core: deeply understanding people. This quirk in my perspective is probably because I grew up as an academic vs. industry researcher, but from where I’m sitting, user research and consumer insights teams use many of the same tools, many of the same methods, and answer many of the same underlying questions. To me it’s just a difference of packaging — you can frequently take the same insights and form them into design requirements for the product team and positioning pillars for the marketing team. I do recognize that this amount of overlap between the two isn’t the case for all companies, but for now, it works for us at Opendoor. And I like having the focus being on deeply understanding the customers we serve vs. which internal team we collaborate with most.

What are some of your team’s biggest accomplishments?

As our Chief Product Officer Tom Willerer put it the other day “when the Research team at Opendoor speaks, people listen.” I’m proud that we’ve built our team such that every member is trusted and respected as an expert. We conduct extremely high-leverage and high-impact work, so we’re taken seriously, and our findings have a huge impact on our company roadmaps. Opendoor is different from every other company I’ve worked at in that it doesn’t take much researcher time to “get buy-in” or have people act on our insights. If anything, it’s almost the opposite — we sometimes have to run after people because they want to act on our insights and recommendations before they’re fully baked. I think this is a good problem to have.

One recent example of the research team’s leadership came when COVID-19 first hit the U.S.. In the first week of April, the world was still swirling in shock and confusion, but our team had already conducted 50+ interviews to understand how buyers, sellers, and agents were reacting. We also spun up what we called “Project Pulse” which gave us both qualitative and quantitative data to help us understand how consumers’ perceptions and needs were evolving on a daily basis.

It sounds obvious now, but one of the things we discovered was how top-of-mind health and safety had become for everyone, almost overnight. Suddenly just agreeing to have your home inspected or going to check out a property you were interested in buying could be putting your community’s lives at risk. Our product, marketing, and operations teams immediately doubled down on safety, updating our processes, protocols, website, emails, and in-app messages so we could keep serving customers safely.

What are your passions outside of work?

My “framily.” My actual family lives in Florida, and I miss them terribly. Luckily, I’ve got some really close friends in the Bay Area who I consider my chosen family. Some of us actually moved in together to ride out the pandemic in a way that felt safe but less socially isolating. Over the holidays to make up for the fact that none of us could travel to be home with our families, we transformed our living room into a ballroom and held a masquerade ball. It was a great way to ring in the new year!

What areas are you most excited to investigate next?

EVERYTHING. I’ve never met a question I didn’t want to answer. I’ve been at Opendoor for over two years now, and I continue to find every day exciting because there’s still so much to learn. It’s one of the most complicated and fast-moving businesses I’ve ever seen. It’s impossible to be bored.

Right now, I’m most excited for my team to continue figuring out how to virtualize every step in the home buying and selling process. This was already part of our company’s long-term vision — to take residential real estate transactions entirely online and make them as easy as a few clicks online — but when COVID-19 hit, we saw the need to accelerate this work to keep our employees and customers safe, as I mentioned earlier. We did an incredible job of streamlining a contactless experience; and now that we’ve got the foundation laid, I’m looking forward to continuing learning from our customers and dreaming up what the future of residential real estate looks like. How do you build a process that makes people feel comfortable and confident making the biggest purchase of their life through a website? I don’t have all the answers right now, but I’m really excited to figure it out.

Other entries in the series:

• Evie Alexander, senior product design manager
• Gavin Johns, product designer
• Annie Tang, product design manager
• Nicolas Solerieu, senior brand designer

P.S. If you liked what you read and are interested in learning more, check out our jobs page! We’re always hiring.

Open Book: Brandi Luedeman was originally published in Opendoor Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Opendoor, the design team plays a valuable and strategic role in creating the products consumers across America use to buy and sell homes. Along with our partners on product management, engineering, and operations, we are redesigning the home buying and selling experience, and with that always comes unique and interesting challenges.

Recently, when COVID-19 made its impact known, our team was presented with a new set of challenges — and opportunities — to make big, bold changes to the way people buy homes.

I sat down with our Buyer Experience design team to discuss how they updated Opendoor’s product to make home buying possible during coronavirus. The team includes:

• Evie Alexander, Senior Design Manager
• Eli Showalter, Product Designer
• Daniel Lee, Product Designer
• Katherine Chen, Senior UX Researcher
• Joshua Carpentier, Senior UX Writer

How did Opendoor’s home buying product work before COVID-19?

Evie: At a high-level, buyers could browse, tour, and buy homes with the Opendoor product. The app contains a feed of all the homes for sale in their area. Before, when customers found a home they loved, they were able to either schedule a private tour of that home or, if Opendoor owned the house, they simply showed up and “self-toured” by unlocking the front door with their app.

If the person decided to purchase the home, they simply tapped a button to start the offer process. We connected them with an expert to answer any questions, talk about pricing, and walk through all steps. It’s easy, seamless, and fully-digital.

Daniel: People loved the ease of touring homes with our product. We provided a hassle-free experience, didn’t pressure people to buy, and gave guidance for next steps. We were seeing record tour levels each week.

But once COVID-19 hit, our touring process needed to change. We updated the way the product worked in each market, based on the shelter-in-place regulations rolling out, the safety of our customers and teammates, and the concerns we were hearing from customers.

What were the problems the team needed to solve to make Opendoor safer during the pandemic?

Katherine: In April, we took the time to listen to our customers. We conducted a study and learned that many people had completely paused their home search due to health concerns as well as uncertainty in their own finances and the economy.

Eli: But we also realized that even in this time of uncertainty, consumers who were really serious about buying their next home still wanted to figure out how to make it happen.

Katherine: And Opendoor already appealed to people as a safer way to buy. Our self-tour feature, which provides customers with the ability to tour vacant, Opendoor-owned homes, stood out as inherently safer than touring owner-occupied homes or touring homes with an agent.

So we decided to build more features that would provide customers with a safer home buying process.

What were some of the updates you made?

Evie: First, we focused on contactless touring. We started capturing 360° content of every Opendoor-owned home. This makes it easy to do a virtual walkthrough at any time, from anywhere, through our app. We also productized video tours, where an agent from Opendoor visits a home on the buyer’s behalf and does a video walkthrough over FaceTime or a similar service.

We shifted to self-tour scheduling in order to make the process safer and ensure there was only one prospective buyer in the home at a time. We created a feature allowing buyers to sign up for time slots and gave visitors push notifications when their time was up so they could safely vacate the home before the next visitor arrives.

Eli: We also found ways to better connect buyers with experts from our customer experience team. We added features into the flow that allowed people to call our support team, who helps them figure out ways to tour homes and navigate all the different shelter-in-place regulations. This gave customers a more personal experience to better guide them through all the uncertainty.

We were already working on a new chat feature that we initially thought would only be valuable for really serious buyers far along in the process. However, with COVID-19, we saw people start to ask a lot of general questions at all points of the customer journey. As a result, we opened up the feature to everyone who downloaded the app, to make it easier for everyone to connect with our experts on staff.

Evie: There were also many “softer” updates focused on helping buyers feel comfortable and confident that Opendoor provided a safer experience. Our UX writer, Josh Carpentier, spearheaded this work, ensuring it was consistent and resonated with buyers. We looked at the messaging throughout the entire funnel and updated the content. We reiterated that our experience was contactless, there would not be anybody else in the home, and we were cleaning homes on a regular basis. This work was more about peace of mind than functional changes, but was equally important. It involved heavy design work and collaboration across the team.

Josh: And that entire funnel is more than people probably realize. It wasn’t solely creating a few new screens or updating words on existing screens in the app. But it was hitting every possible place a customer would see or engage with messaging — this includes our website, emails, text messages, notifications, physical signage in the homes, and more. Our goal was to make sure everything was clear, concise, and consistent for the consumer — and, since this was an ever-changing situation, we needed to be flexible and figure out things in the moment.

This effort required a lot of collaboration across all the functions within our design organization and with other teams outside design. How did everyone work together to create the new experience?

Daniel: One great example is how we collaborated with our Customer Experience team. They forwarded crucial feedback from our customers and our research team gathered insights. Both of these components helped us understand how our buyers were thinking about their home buying journey during COVID-19. All this gave us not only guidance on what to do, but also the confidence in the adjustments we made in our product during these uncertain times.

Evie: I joined the company after quarantine had already begun, and I was amazed at how seamlessly collaboration was happening across teams. There were no dividing lines and everyone was moving in perfect sequence. Every designer working on the product was looking across the whole end-to-end experience, which I think is something that often you don’t get with subteam orgs.

Research played a huge role in really helping bring our users’ concerns to life in a very tangible way. Katherine did a great job of talking with buyers on a regular basis — testing prototypes, doing remote interviews, and getting reactions to some of our modified touring ideas. All to better understand how people are feeling, which is such a delicate thing during this time.

Josh: A big benefit we have is that we work at a company that clearly sees the value of research and design. Even if certain teams haven’t had a chance to work together on things, they’re happy to partner with everyone who wants to help because we all genuinely care about our customers’ experience.

Katherine: One other thing to add here is our close collaboration with the Operations team. We had to work so closely with them to update messaging for each different market since each city had various regulations around what real estate activities were and weren’t allowed.

We also had to collaborate with Ops to figure out what that new in-home touring was like. They had to update the process for cleaning and other maintenance work to keep both customers and our employees safe, so, in turn, needed to update the customer experience. We worked with support teams on Ops to update their scripts to include safety messaging, explaining why things were different and how we were keeping people safe.

What was the process you followed? How did shelter-in-place affect the way you all worked?

Katherine: Luckily, the research team was already pretty well equipped. We conduct a good amount of remote work since we’re in 21 markets across the U.S., and those housing markets each have different dynamics.We leveraged our existing user base and also used online survey tools to get a pulse on the general sentiment of changing consumer behaviors. As a result, we were able to learn a lot about how people were feeling about home buying, and it wasn’t too different from how we normally conduct research.

Eli: Honestly, for me, it’s taken a while to get used to remote collaboration. In the office, it was so easy to spin over to talk to your engineer or PM. It took me a little time to adjust to always calling Daniel and saying, “Hey, I’m thinking about this thing. Can we just chat through it,” or calling the PM for an ad hoc video chat whenever I need to work through something.

Evie also implemented a couple more official times for our team to work together, which was helpful. Some meetings are structured like a crit, and some are more of a jam session where whoever has projects they need to talk through can show up and get feedback. It’s time for us to see each other and work together online. Getting used to that new workflow and being okay with doing those things ad hoc has supported the transition.

Evie: Our team also leaned into all of the amazing features that Figma offers for collaboration. From being able to watch a teammate’s screen by clicking on their thumbnail to leaving comments directly on the design file, it’s been a huge game changer for us. To be honest, I don’t think we could have done it with any other design software.

Daniel: One big component of our culture is an “ambitiously chill” vibe we all share. While we are a team that’s super capable of adjusting and working quickly, we also all enjoy working with each other. Initially, it was tough to adjust to remote work as the new norm, but our workplace manager has been active about keeping us all engaged via team games or different activities. It helps us by providing a space to take a break and to have some fun during these crazy times. It reminds me how lucky I am to be working with this group.

Josh: Because I work in a different location than the rest of the team, it wasn’t too different for me. I’ve used some of my time to help others learn how to work remotely. Things like consistent structure to your day, taking breaks, etc. And to Evie’s point, having the right tools definitely makes it easier — not just iterating on visuals and content with our own team, but giving teams outside of design the ability to collaborate with us all in the same place.

That’s great. So how is the product doing now? How’s everything performing now that we’ve launched all these new features?

Katherine: After launching the new experience, we saw a rapid increase in touring right in the first week. And when we followed up with those people, we heard so much excitement. Customers had feedback such as, “Oh, we were waiting for tours to come back on again because we feel safe.” and “This is our preferred way to shop for homes.” Our visits per home have now returned to where they were pre-COVID-19.

I think this is because we provide people with more resources to view a home, beyond photos. With a live video tour, home shoppers can get a sense of layout, the condition of the home, what rooms are on different floors, and the surrounding neighborhood. We are ushering into a new age where home buyers feel more comfortable using digital tools to make the kinds of decisions they before would only make after seeing a home in person.

Evie: Even once we go back to a more “normal” reality, many of these behaviors are going to stick around. There’s always going to be people who will benefit from this new remote process. Features like the 360° touring give people a sense of whether or not it’s worth going to visit the home and help people waste less time driving to showings and open houses. It’s a much better product flow and something that even after COVID-19, we’ll continue to develop.

Katherine: Providing these new ways of virtual touring also gives people more flexibility and access, especially for older people with mobility challenges, people with accessibility issues, or people with scheduling constraints due to work and or childcare. So regardless of COVID-19 we’re widening access to home buying to people who have constraints in their daily lives.

Any learnings or advice for other design teams who are undertaking similar efforts, whether it’s redesigning a product experience to work during the pandemic or figuring out how to work together as a distributed team?

Evie: I’d recommend asking yourself and your team, “how can we build something that isn’t only focused on today’s problems, but will stand the longevity of time?” Think about how the world will change and look different a year or two years from now. Build for that world. Don’t only react to the things happening at this current moment.

Eli: And don’t assume that other teams have a full view into how everything should connect. When there are so many changes to make, all at the same time, that work can start to happen without a clear, shared vision for how it all fits together. The design team needs to help map everything out and create that vision.

Josh: If you’re newer to a company, or even if you’ve been there a while but haven’t done this yet, go on a meet and greet roadshow. Get to know people across teams and departments — even ones you think you might not work with. Understand what they do, and educate them how you can help them. There’s probably more crossover than you realize. Make sure your team has the best tools in place to help get the job done. And above all else, talk to each other — hop on a quick call to get feedback on something, share an idea, or chat about nothing. Staying connected is important, both for the work and your sanity.

How we redesigned our homebuying experience for COVID-19 was originally published in Opendoor Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hypergrowth startups — those mythical unicorns that have found product/market fit and need to scale as quickly as possible — provide especially difficult environments for design teams. These companies experience a dizzying pace of growth, a continually morphing mix of new hires joining the company, near-constant changes to the organization, and the need to scale existing business lines while simultaneously inventing new ones. These challenges add an additional layer of complexity to the already difficult task of designing products people love.

Working at one of these startups can sometimes feel stressful, confusing, frustrating, and many other flavors of not fun. But, in my experience, it’s worth it. I’ve spent the last six years leading design teams in the hypergrowth worlds of both Uber and Opendoor. I’ve seen both companies provide their design teams with unparalleled opportunities to tackle big challenges, create massively impactful work, and grow people’s skills and accomplishments faster than possible in other types of companies.

If you’re working in a similar high-growth environment, you’re thinking of joining one, or you’re just curious — here are five lessons I’ve learned about overcoming the challenges of hypergrowth in order to create great work.

1. The big problems aren’t always design problems

The hypergrowth stage introduces another set of challenges for startups. As the company grows, coordination becomes more difficult. It gets harder to communicate across teams, align the growing workforce on the same set of priorities, and keep from crashing into one another. Design teams can feel thrashed by disorganization. They can feel slowed by a lack of process, too much bureaucracy, or some combination of both. They can get confused by a lack of priorities between different initiatives. Often times, the bigger challenge isn’t doing design, but understanding what design needs to be done in the first place.

Tackling these “non-design” problems often feels outside the realm of responsibility of the design team. However, when left unattended, these challenges can become so overwhelming they get in the way of the work. It’s important for everyone on the team, especially the leaders, to pay attention to the working conditions within the startup as it scales.

Drive to align and focus teammates on the right set of priorities. Ensure everyone is operating on the same understanding of mission, vision, and plan. Put in a little process to help teams collaborate and execute better. Pay attention to the flow of information and make sure people are communicating as well as when the entire company could fit into one conference room. Solve all the problems, not just the design ones, in order to create the conditions necessary to do great work.

2. There’s no trade off between speed and quality. You need to do both.

Hypergrowth startups need to move fast. They must keep up with growing customer demand as the product becomes popular, stay ahead of the competition, and become profitable before the venture funding runs out. The pressure to ship is strong. It’s tempting for design teams to prioritize speed over quality in order to keep pace. It’s easy to fall into the habit of quickly handing off mediocre work, checking the box, and moving onto the next urgent project.

However, these startups need to ship quality products for all the same reasons they need to move quickly. Releasing mediocre designs risks not satisfying your customers and losing them to the competitors you’re trying to stay ahead of. It risks requiring significant rework to bring the product to a successful state, which takes a lot of time and runs counter to the original goal of rushing the project.

I’ve learned to have my teams strive for both speed and quality. It’s important to recognize the need to push for both. Don’t slow down, but don’t rush so fast that the work gets sloppy. Be thoughtful in de-scoping projects to only the most essential. Focus on bringing the smallest amount of work to the highest quality possible as quickly as you can. Get smart with workflows and design systems to accelerate the way work gets done. Build a culture that values both speed and quality and doesn’t need to trade one for the other.

3. The seat at the table requires more than just design skills

Doing great design, especially within hectic hypergrowth startups, requires some setup work. The right projects need to be prioritized, and those projects need to be structured in a way that provides the team with whatever they need to be awesome. It’s crucial to get involved in the strategic decision making so the company sets the conditions for great work to occur. These conditions won’t arise naturally from meetings with no design representation. You need to claim the proverbial ‘seat at the table’ and advocate for design in all crucial conversations about vision, strategy, planning, and ideation.

Success in this area requires members of the design team to flex outside their core competencies. You need to inject yourself into planning conversations, understand and speak to business objectives, and most importantly, articulate how the output of the design team will achieve important company goals. Show how you will drive growth, conversion, engagement, revenue, or any other critical business metric. Doing great design “just because” is a noble goal, but one that will rarely get prioritized over all the other demands of hypergrowth. Connect the dots between what the startup needs and what the design team can provide.

4. It’s okay if designers and product managers overlap

In hypergrowth startups, the lines between disciplines can blur. People wear many hats. They trade responsibilities, work on things outside their core competencies, and do whatever it takes to make the company thrive. Especially at the beginning of projects, I often see designers and product managers working on the same set of tasks. Both define problems to solve, brainstorm ideas for solutions, and determine which projects get prioritized on the roadmap.

Rather than try to divide up these responsibilities, embrace the overlap between design and product management. The best work comes from a tight and sometimes messy partnership that ensures a solid strategy behind the design. Don’t offload the up-front work to product managers and expect them to formulate a perfect plan that gives the design team everything needed to be successful. Roll up your sleeves and create that plan together.

5. Design forms the connective tissue of the company

In the beginning, startups are small. The entire company works together on one set of things. It’s easy to understand what everyone else is doing, see the big picture, and create cohesive products and experiences. But as startups enter the hypergrowth stage, the number of people and projects increases. Companies often need to divide up the work to keep pace with the scaling business. They split into multiple groups and focus each one on a different piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, the pieces don’t always fit together seamlessly. Coordination becomes more challenging and groups become isolated silos that collectively create a fragmented user experience.

The design team can counterbalance this fracturing effect of hypergrowth. Designers naturally pay attention to the holistic user experience and often think beyond the boundaries of their individual projects. They function as the connective tissue of the company — smoothing out the seams, identifying areas for collaboration between groups, and ensuring everyone’s work connects flawlessly to create cohesive products and experiences.

Keep your design team as connected as possible, even if individuals are embedded within different cross-functional groups. Strong connections between your design team members will counteract the silos that appear in hypergrowth and help create a cohesive customer experience. Work together even when the company wants to pull you apart.

Whether you’re in a startup right now or thinking about joining one in the future, I hope my guidance makes it a little easier for you to overcome the challenges of hypergrowth and do great work. Although these companies can create tough conditions, they also provide tremendous opportunity to rapidly grow the ability and impact of the design team.

Designing in hypergrowth startups was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The problem with real estate

The way we buy and sell houses hasn’t changed much in the past 150 years. Most people still use agents to facilitate the sale, following a process established in the 1800s. Sellers still repair, stage, and hold open houses to sell their homes. Buyers still fill their Sundays with open houses to view homes for sale. Completing a sale still requires an overwhelming amount of correspondence, coordination, paperwork, and in-person appointments. Nothing is easy, nothing is seamless. Nothing meets the one-click expectations of our modern digital world.

Inconvenient at best

For sellers, the traditional model is especially painful. In many areas of the country, people need to create a “show-ready” home by paying upfront for repairs and renovations before putting their house on the market. They must stage the home and keep it pristine while it’s being shown. They must vacate the home every Sunday and whenever else a potential buyer wants to view the house. And after all that, there’s still a chance the offer could fall through due to problems with financing, issues found during inspections, or a buyer change of mind.

At best, this is incredibly inconvenient. At worst, it traps people in their home and prevents them from moving when they want to.

More than a transaction

The importance of this sale makes the pain more acute. A home is often the most valuable asset that people own, their largest and sometimes only investment. For most, this is the biggest financial transaction they will make in their lives.

But a home holds more than just monetary value. It also holds the memories of the people who dwell within it. Homes are where children take first steps, where backyard birthdays are celebrated and photographed, where friends and families gather for the holidays. Moving typically signals a major life event like a new job, a marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child, or even the passing of a loved one.

This significance adds stress to an already stressful experience. Opendoor aims to reduce that stress by easing the transition from one home to the next. Moving will always be emotional, but it doesn’t need to be hard.

The Opendoor mission

Our mission is to empower everyone with the freedom to move. We strive to take away the pain of traditional real estate and replace it with convenience and certainty. Whether buying, selling, or trading one home for the next, Opendoor wants to make the process radically simpler and available to everyone.

The role of the design team

As designers, writers, researchers, and producers, we’re responsible for creating the tools, experiences, and products that ultimately add up to a better experience for our customers, external partners, and team members. The Design Team creates everything from consumer-facing products to internal tools for our operations teams to all of our marketing and advertising across the country. The challenges are daunting, but the opportunities are massively inspiring.

Opendoor’s better way to buy and sell homes

We revolutionize the way real estate works by buying homes directly from people and then putting those houses back on the market to resell ourselves. This model allows us to create experiences for our customers that are massive improvements on the old way to do real estate.

The seller experience

With Opendoor, people can do everything needed to sell their house in just a few days. They enter their address in our website, answer a few questions about their house, then we send them a competitive offer. If they like the offer, we’ll send an Opendoor specialist to verify the condition of the property. After the assessment, we finalize the offer with any adjustments. The seller has the option to let Opendoor handle any necessary repairs and simply take the cost out of the price of the home.

Sellers fill out all the paperwork digitally and actually get to choose their own close date. No more needing to stress about coordinating the timing of the next move. If they need to leave quickly, they can. If they need to wait a bit longer for the financing on their next house to get finalized, for their kid’s school year to finish, or for any other reason, they can do that too.

All in all, this model provides a massively better experience than anything else in real estate. People can sell quickly and easily, with certainty that their buyer’s financing won’t fall through. They can control the timing of their sale in a way that wasn’t possible before. And they can do everything via a seamless, digital experience that eliminates the hassle of paperwork and in-person appointments.

The buyer experience

Since we own and completely control the homes we sell, Opendoor can provide a radically better experience for buyers as well. Each house gets equipped with smart locks and security systems, so they’re available for viewing all day, any day of the week. Buyers simply download the Opendoor app to activate the keyless entry system.

The app shows all the other Opendoor homes available in the city. Buyers can browse and visit houses at their own pace and on their own schedule. No more lost Sundays spent visiting open house after open house. No more coordinating with selling agents to find times to visit houses when the owners aren’t home. Opendoor provides a more convenient, more twenty-first century way to shop for homes.

The agent experience

Almost everyone buying from Opendoor has an agent. We only own a small fraction of the homes on the market, so buyers need an agent if they want to see all the options available in their area. We embrace this and build products to make the agent experience seamless and easy.

Our agent products organize and consolidate all the information that the real estate agents need to do their job. It helps them coordinate all the tasks and paperwork related to the purchase of the home. By simplifying their work, we simplify the experience of the buyer as well.

The internal tools that make Opendoor run

Our innovative model creates complex logistical challenges. Some of the hardest design problems at Opendoor aren’t customer facing, but involve building the behind-the-scenes workflows and tooling to make everything run efficiently and effectively. We create many of our internal tools in-house rather than use third-party enterprise solutions. Our needs are often too specific and too important to rely on someone else’s software. In fact, we strive to make our internal tools so good that they’d be considered best-in-class if we turned them into a enterprise product to sell externally.

Logistical tools

Opendoor is buying and selling thousands of homes across the country. We visit each one before we buy it to verify information about the house and ensure we accurately priced it. After we purchase each house, we do varying levels of repairs and renovations. We equip each home with a security system, a smart lock, and signage before we put it back on the market. Then, we monitor and maintain the condition of each home until it sells.

This takes a lot of coordination and communication. We design tools to schedule site visits, verify construction work, and manage invoices for vendor partners who specialize in things like foundation repair and roof installation. Every improvement we make in efficiency results in cost and time savings. This helps us lower our fees and provide a better and faster customer experience.

Field tools

We design the apps Opendoor specialists use when visiting homes before and after the purchase. These mobile products help them do their jobs faster, more efficiently, and more accurately.

The apps have a heavy online/offline component. Their digital interface and workflows need to complement real-world workflows like climbing on a roof to inspect the shingles or crawling under a house to view the foundation.

Our field tools shorten the feedback loop between the field and our operations offices. Instead of transcribing handwritten notes into a data entry portal back at the office, operators use these mobile products to directly upload information to our servers the moment they gather it. Our operators are more efficient, our operations are more efficient, and our customers get their offers faster.

Financial tools

In addition to complex logistics, Opendoor’s operations involve complex financials. We build tools to help specialists determine home value based on all the data we gather, dashboards to help company leaders understand the state of the market in their city, and data visualizations to provide our finance team with realtime information about the overall health of the business.

These powerful tools allow expert users to understand complex data sets quickly and fully. They’re highly customized to Opendoor and the company’s specific needs. They keep our business running, keep our business running quickly, and keep our business running efficiently.

Opendoor’s trusted brand

We’re not just designing new products, we’re also designing a new brand. The design team creates the strategy and guidelines to express our brand in every product, experience, and advertisement created by Opendoor. Our brand pillars are simplicity, empowerment, and trustworthiness. We infuse those values into everything we create.

Marketing and advertising

We market and advertise our business across a variety of channels. We concept, write, and design for digital, print, experiential, radio, out-of-home, and television.

Our marketing builds awareness of our business and lets people know why we exist. It differentiates Opendoor from traditional real estate and highlights the value we provide people buying and selling homes. We make our ads relevant and resonant by considering the medium, the audience, and the stage of business in that location.

Environmental signage

We also design all the signage required to guide people to and through our homes. This includes the for sale signs in front of homes, the instructions about how to download the app and unlock the front door, and a variety of signage inside the home.

Our self-service open house doesn’t require an agent to show the home, so the interior signage does a lot of important work. Some of it is functional, telling visitors what lights to leave on and what doors to keep locked. Some of it is experiential, welcoming visitors to the home and setting the tone for our unique Opendoor experience.

Brand principles and standards

Our brand guidelines align our teams strategically and provide tactical rules for different mediums, touch points, and experiences. They provide the foundation for every effort across the design team. They help Opendoor feel simple, empowering, and trustworthy in everything we create.

Winning that trust is crucial to the success of our business. We’re dealing with the most important transaction of our customers’ lives. We’re asking them to buy and sell homes differently than how their parents, their friends, and their neighbors bought and sold homes. If people don’t trust us, they simply won’t use us.

Consistency and quality are incredibly important in achieving that trust. Our brand principles and standards drive those outcomes. And our entire design team plays a crucial role in building trust through all the products, marketing, and experiences we create for our customers.

Opendoor’s design team

Redesigning real estate takes a top-notch design team. Our rapidly-growing group of product designers, brand designers, researchers, copywriters, content strategists, and producers work together to constantly improve the functions and culture of our team. We believe that by being the best team, we’ll be able to create the best products and experiences for our customers.

Opendoor is our home, and it’s busy inside this house. There’s a lot to design over here — from radically simpler customer experiences, to cutting-edge logistics tools, to ultra-powerful financial dashboards, to a world-class brand. If you’re interested in tackling any of these challenges and helping us empower everyone with the freedom to move, you’re welcome to come over any time.

Interested in learning more? Send me a note at paul.smith@opendoor.com

Redesigning Real Estate was originally published in Opendoor Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UberEATS is on a mission to make eating well effortless for everyone, everywhere. Our service connects customers to Uber-speed delivery from restaurants in over 80 cities around the world. We give people more options when choosing how to eat. We help restaurants reach more customers and build their businesses. We give delivery partners another way to earn good money, with or without a car. And of course, we weave everything into the smooth, magical experience people expect from Uber.

We’re designing improvements to the way people find their food. It’s an exciting challenge. Smartphones have only been around for a decade, but people have been preparing and selling food for millennia. On UberEATS, we get to combine brand-new technology with the very old, very fundamental, very universal activity of eating and enjoying cuisine.

Designers on the UberEATS team love food culture, logistical challenges, and the demands of a fast-growth startup. We take pride in our ability to move quickly, build empathy with our customers, and make complex services run smoothly. Our designs reach many different types of people with very different needs, but the same approach guides our mission to make eating well effortless at any time, for anyone.

We Immerse Deeply

UberEATS operates in over 80 cities globally, each with its own food culture, city infrastructure, and unique set of logistical challenges. Our customers include delivery partners wanting flexible ways to earn money, restaurant workers interested in improving and expanding their businesses, and everyday people looking for a bite to eat. The service connects these different types of people in experiences that are both digital and physical. Designers on the team arrange the elements of each screen, but also influence how people and objects move about the real world.

To understand all our different markets and how our products fit into the physical conditions of each city, we constantly immerse ourselves in the places where our customers live, work, and eat. Sitting in our offices in San Francisco or New York, we can’t truly understand the experiences of a person on the streets of Bangkok or London. We need to go there, move about the city, experience the food culture, and watch how people use the things we’ve designed.

The Walkabout Program forms the foundation of our immersion initiatives. Every quarter, designers visit an UberEATS city and dive deeply into that market. They learn the city’s food culture. They study the transportation and logistical infrastructures. They interview delivery partners, restaurant workers, and consumers. They eat and eat and eat. Upon return, they share their learnings with the entire team. Each visit helps build a comprehensive understanding of our different markets and customers.

Order shadowing allows us to observe our designs in use. We follow partners on deliveries, visit restaurants during the rush, and sit in people’s homes while they order dinner. Watching our products in the wild helps us better understand the needs of our customers, how well our designs address those needs, and and what challenges exist in the real world that we can’t replicate in the office.

Fireside chats give us the opportunity to hear from customers directly. As much as possible, we invite delivery partners, restaurant workers, and consumers into our offices to discuss their experiences with UberEATS. These sessions provide a lightweight way to empathize with users and bridge the gaps between deeper immersion activities like Walkabouts and order shadows. And while we don’t have fireplaces in the Uber offices (yet), we do take advantage of the plethora of looping fireplace videos on YouTube.

We Iterate Quickly

Our products are new, complex, and require the tight coordination of people and objects in the real world. It’s impossible to replicate these conditions inside our offices, so we test designs as quickly as possible in the real world. We observe and iterate as soon as we identify opportunities to improve the design.

Speed is crucial. Our business is a marketplace that needs to quickly reach critical mass to provide value to each of our different customers. Delivery partners and restaurant owners need to receive enough orders from consumers to earn good money. Consumers need a wide range of restaurants to choose from and a large network of delivery partners to deliver the food quickly. We need to build products quickly so that our customer base can grow quickly. Swift iteration allows us to move fast and ensure we get the design just right.

Rapid field testing helps us see how customers respond to designs in progress. Our researchers and designers take mock-ups and prototypes into restaurants, inside delivery vehicles, and into people’s homes to test our products in the places they’ll be used. Getting out of the office is essential when designing for real-world problems like finding parking, delivering to large apartment buildings, or speeding up workflows in the kitchen during the dinner rush.

A/B testing lets us simultaneously test multiple versions of a feature and quickly determine which performs the best. We use this method when designs have clear success metrics that we can measure with data analytics. This often means completing a specific task like rating an order or choosing a dish recommendation. Shipping multiple options at once rather than iterating on one version sequentially allows us to find the best performing design faster.

Operations team experiments test concepts and designs in a single city to quickly gauge their opportunity. Our colleagues on the ground in each market interact closely with our customers, have great ideas for products, and aren’t afraid to hack together a quick experiment to prove out the value. The first versions of features like the “Most Popular Items” category in our UberEATS menus started as an operations team experiment in Toronto before later iterations were released to all users in all cities.

We Innovate Constantly

Our app is little more than a year old and just beginning to innovate on the experience of restaurant delivery. Technology makes things easier for everyone involved, but the process works the same way it has for decades: People order food the moment they need it, delivery partners deliver one order at a time, and restaurants provide the same menu options for delivery as they do for dining in.

We see a huge opportunity to innovate and evolve from the traditional model of food delivery. We’ve started by providing driver partners the option to do both rides and deliveries so they can stay busier and earn more money while online with Uber. We designed a restaurant sales dashboard to let chefs monitor the demand of individual dishes and tweak recipes to improve their menus. And we created the “Under 30 Minutes” menu for people who want to leverage the speed of Uber to get food fast. The design team constantly seeks to generate innovations like these and provide new ways for people to eat, for restaurants to run their businesses, and for delivery partners to earn money.

Innovation workshops stimulate novel solutions to the problems and opportunities we address on UberEATS. When we need to develop a new idea, we gather representatives from other disciplines and use design thinking methodology to look at our challenges in new ways. Together we research and share experiences from similar services to generate insights and inspiration, then run creative exercises to generate a wide range of ideas. These structured brainstorms shake up the mindset of the team, push our creativity, and spawn innovative ideas like pooled deliveries and ‘virtual’ restaurants only available on UberEats.

Conferences, meetups, and talks related to the future of food keep us informed about the latest trends. Members of the team regularly attend events related to cuisine, cooking, food technology, and the restaurant industry. They report back their learnings to the team and we all discuss how those insights relate to UberEATS. These share outs often generate ideas for new products, services, and features.

Field trips to food innovators show us how other companies are shaping the future of food. We’ve visited IOT startups developing connected cooking products, artisanal farms mixing new technology with old farming expertise, and companies that allow chefs to beta test menu concepts before opening new restaurants. Seeing how others are innovating in similar problem spaces helps us think differently about ours and generate new ideas about our products and services.

Immersion, iteration, and innovation power the UberEATS design team on our mission to make eating effortless. Our approach allows us to solve complex logistical challenges with brand new technology that complements people’s deep connection to food.

The results have been gratifying. In just a short time, we’ve expanded to over 80 cities worldwide. We’ve provided restaurants with new ways to reach customers and build their businesses. We’ve created another, often easier option for delivery partners to earn money with Uber. We’ve invented new ways for hungry people to find and enjoy the food they love. As designers, we get to solve complex problems, positively affect people’s lives, and shape the future of eating.

We’re hiring designers, writers, and researchers in San Francisco and New York. If you’re interested, email me at paulclaytonsmith@uber.com.

How We Design on the UberEATS Team was originally published in Uber Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’d never heard of a growth team when I joined Uber. When the company created one, our CEO emphasized the importance of focusing one team on driving the growth of the business. Intrigued, I volunteered to lead design. We started small, just two designers with a few engineers, product managers, and analysts. In two years we’ve grown to a 300 person organization, with a 30 person design team.

Design plays a pivotal role in the growth team’s mission to accelerate the growth of the business. We touch all parts of Uber — product, marketing, and internal tools. We design for riders, drivers, and operations teams across the 68 countries where Uber operates. Everything we do gets tested, tracked, and measured to ensure we’re maximizing growth in all areas of the company.

Two years ago, I wasn’t entirely certain how design should fit into such a metrics-oriented team. Since then, my teammates and I have developed an approach that achieves speed, quality, and impact in a fast-paced, hyper-growth environment. Here’s how we do it:

We get scientific with our art

Designers on the growth team take an empirical approach to every project. We start by identifying the criteria that will prove the design successful. This criteria could be something quantitative (like an increase in rider or drivers signing up), something qualitative (like ease of use), or some combination of both. Once we’ve defined success, we hypothesize how to achieve it and design around that hypothesis. When the design is done, we run a test. This could entail conducting a user study with our research team, shipping the design to a small segment of our user base, or launching to everyone and monitoring the performance closely. If we achieve our goals, we consider the hypothesis valid, fully roll out the design, and move on to the next project. If we don’t achieve our goals, we iterate on the solution using the insights from our invalidated hypothesis.

The process feels more like a chemist methodically working in a laboratory than an artist whimsically flinging paint at a canvas. Very little happens by chance. We base our design decisions on proven facts and learn from our mistakes. This approach allows us to drive growth in a controlled and understood way.

We dive into the data

Designers on the growth team love data. We work closely with data analysts and product managers to dig into the metrics that relate to our projects. We don’t do the actual analysis, but we grasp concepts like click through rates, cost per acquisition, and statistical significance. We constantly review the numbers and use the insights from analytics reports to inform our design decisions.

When beginning projects, we look for trends in the data that corroborate our own observations and what we learn from user research. If we’re advocating to put projects onto the roadmap, we’ll always use data to strengthen our case. This ensures we always focus on the right problem, not a best guess of what to do next.

After a project ships, data validates the impact of our design. We measure key metrics to ensure our design does what we intended. For example, if we work on a new signup feature, we’ll monitor things like button clicks, conversion rates, and the number of accounts created. If we don’t see improvement in those metrics as we test our designs, we’ll iterate further before rolling the feature out to all customers. This ensures we maximize the effectiveness of our work and get it right before moving on to the next project.

We do more

Our approach relies heavily on a/b testing, so we design more than one solution to each problem. This doesn’t mean throwing a few random options against the wall to see what sticks. It means carefully crafting multiple variations, each based on a clear hypothesis. Always fully designed and high quality, each option “works,” but for a different reason. We test these variations on a small segment of customers and iterate if necessary before fully launching the strongest solution.

For example, when we design ads for Facebook to attract new driver-partners, we always test multiple headline options that tout different benefits of signing up to drive. We often try different visual directions to find what will attract the most attention — photography, illustration, copy-driven, etc. Every option stays true to Uber, but each emphasises a different aspect of the service and brand.

Testing in this way does two things. First, it maximizes the impact of our design. If we simply shipped what we believed to be the best solution, we would risk leaving the actual best solution pinned to the concept board. If we fully develop and ship multiple concepts, we stand a better chance of releasing the best design to our customers. Second, it helps us learn. Tracking what performs and what does not provides insights about what resonates with different customers and on different mediums. We take those learnings into future projects and build an even smarter suite of options the next time.

We do less

We design very efficiently to minimize our effort and maximize our impact. If a small change will bring a big improvement, we don’t completely overhaul a product or feature. We always start by looking for the simplest, easiest, lightest solution to the problem.

For instance, when looking at ways to improve access to our give a ride / get a ride invite feature in the rider app, we started by simply changing the menu link from “share” to “free rides.” Shifting from describing the action to describing the value of the feature significantly increased the number of people who invited friends. This improvement required zero design hours, so our designer was able to instead invest her time in building a different, brand new feature.

This bias towards doing less allows us, paradoxically, to do more. We can do more variants in our a/b tests, more iterations of each project, and more projects in general. Doing less doesn’t mean that we don’t take on big, meaty design projects (just look at the cash feature in India). It means considering the easiest solution first and not wasting time overhauling a feature that doesn’t need overhauling.

We move fast

Moving fast amplifies our impact. The quicker we ship, the quicker we learn from research and a/b tests. These learnings influence future iterations and help our projects find success faster. The faster we find success, the sooner we can move onto the next project and create impact in other areas.

Speed is also strategic to the success of Uber. The ecosystem gets better as more people use the service. More drivers on the road means shorter wait times for riders. More people requesting means more rides per hour for drivers along with less down time between trips. We grow fast to improve the experience for all our customers.

The challenge is moving fast while still thinking deeply about the problem and fully refining the design. We do this by working together to supercharge our process. We start many projects with cross-functional brainstorms that leverage the brainpower of the entire team to generate ideas and solutions. We sketch together constantly, exploring multiple directions in low fidelity before investing more time on refinement and polish. We review work early and often to safeguard against wasting time going down the wrong path.

We don’t forget the magic

Despite the focus on data and metrics, we still aim to create emotional impact with our work. One of Uber’s cultural values is “make magic,” and we don’t consider a design successful unless it both achieves our growth goals and feels magical. This could come from a superb visual refinement, beautiful illustrations and photographs, or delightful animations and interactions.

Magic isn’t an easy metric to measure, but we value it just the same. We constantly strive to find ways to weave a little something extra into the work. It’s the best part of working on this team.

We’ve grown considerably since I started on growth design two years ago, and we’re not stopping anytime soon. We need great designers, writers, and researchers to help us continue our mission to drive growth around the world. Do you want to rapidly ship products and experiences, impact people worldwide, and make cities more productive and efficient? If so, check out uber.com/design to see our latest career opportunities.

How We Design on The Uber Growth Team was originally published in Uber Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.