The core Brivity product is a task and transaction management tool with a full fledged CRM and social media posting tools whose primary users are members of real estate teams (from brokers, to team leaders, to agents, to admins, and even office assistants), their clients, and external professionals in the real estate industry. The web application is both a B2B and a B2C digital product and service.

Read the Case Study here!

Brivity also includes additional interfacing products and services that target both real estate professionals and consumers.

My role on the team began as the first UX Designer and User Researcher. I had the opportunity to travel to events and trade shows across the US for sales and research opportunities. When the position of Product Owner, and then Product Manager opened up, it was a natural transition to represent the users' interests and balance them with those of the stakeholders when making decisions. As a company, Brivity has had some pretty impressive growth since I started.

Though most of my work was as a "UX team of one", I was very fortunate to have a supportive team who worked through the entire design process from research and interviews, task-flows to wireframes and through high fidelity prototypes with ease. I was responsible for writing development stories and acceptance criteria (per cucumber to aid in the development of tests) as well as prioritizing work with the project manager.

Early on, I instigated a much needed re-structuring of our self-help articles and better release notes to make content more consistent and easier to find, and more understandable, which has greatly improved the users' experience while lessening pressure on our support team.

We were lucky to have a large real estate team available for contextual inquiries right next door—with many individuals performing a narrow scope of work daily,—but 80% of real estate agents work individually or on teams smaller than three people, and many only work part time. I managed feedback from them, and our users on small teams online, with support, and at trade shows and other events.

As an enterprise system, there are multiple levels of permissions and user types within the product that allow moderators to limit access where appropriate for users on larger teams, while giving individual agents the flexibility to access everything. The system is completely customizable, as users create Action Plans that automatically generate tasks lists, set their own property types, and roles and titles for users based on their team an geographic area. They can customize details, marketing frequency, and advertising plans for transactions based on property types.

While many transaction management tools focus on documents, and CRM's focus on leads, Brivity's focus while I was there was on improving client/agent relationships, which allowed a brokerage to rely more heavily on referrals, in comparison to lead prospecting.

The key feature that separates Brivity from other tools of its kind, is that every item on a user's to-do list can be automatically sent to the clients (and professional collaborators like lenders and such) in a summary email without any extra work on the Agent's part. This improves communication and allows the agent to justify their commission, if only by the sheer volume of items on that list. Brivity also provides the customer with a login that allows them to see all completed tasks, links to where the property is posted elsewhere online, and any notes or showing feedback the agent has made visible to them on the transaction.

Though some of this work is proprietary, I am happy to talk more about it and my role in person.