Back-Office Platform Redesign
My Role
As the Senior Product Designer, I led the end-to-end design of a unified back-office platform supporting teams across the lending process, from Business Development Representatives (BDRs) and Loan Officers to Underwriters.
I partnered closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and business stakeholders throughout discovery, design, validation, and implementation. I also mentored junior designers and established and maintained a Salesforce-based design system to create consistency and improve collaboration across Design, Product, and Engineering.
The Challenge
Leadership approached our team with two ambitious business goals:
Increase transaction speed by 20% and increase sales by 20%.
Rather than immediately designing a solution, I started with the Discover phase of the Double Diamond framework to understand what was actually slowing employees down and where opportunities existed to improve the customer journey.
Discovery & Research
I conducted user interviews, mapped end-to-end workflows, analyzed employees' day-to-day journeys, and audited the multiple tools and platforms they relied on to complete their work.
The research revealed four major problems:
Fragmented tools — Employees relied on multiple applications to complete a single customer journey.
Lost communication — Important conversations and customer information were scattered across different systems, forcing employees to spend valuable time searching for information.
Broken handoffs — Moving between platforms increased the risk of missing information when customers transitioned from one team to another, creating delays and additional clarification.
Technology overhead — Maintaining multiple platforms increased development complexity, operational costs, and dependency on specialized resources.
The Opportunity
The research shifted the problem from simply "How do we make transactions faster?" to:
How might we create one unified platform that gives employees the information, communication, and tools they need to move customers through the lending process faster and with fewer handoff failures?
BDR / Customer Service
The Business Development Representative (BDR) is the first human touchpoint after a prospective customer submits their information online.
Their role is critical: quickly understand the customer's needs, collect accurate information, pre-qualify the opportunity, and create a seamless handoff to the Loan Officer.
For this workflow, speed, information quality, and visibility were essential.
Research Questions
To understand how the platform could better support BDRs, I focused the research around five questions:
• What information does a BDR need before accepting an inbound call?
• What information is most valuable before contacting a prospect?
• What motivates BDRs to make more outbound calls?
• What helps BDRs capture higher-quality information before handing a prospect to a Loan Officer?
• How should BDR performance be measured—lead volume, information quality, conversion rate, or a combination of metrics?
These questions helped us identify the information hierarchy, workflow requirements, and performance indicators needed to design a faster and more effective BDR experience.
After multiple iterations, user testing, survey, and feedback from users. Below is the design that we implemented.
Key Insights
Research showed that the biggest barrier wasn't the individual tools—it was the fragmented experience between them.
Employees were spending too much time switching platforms, searching for customer information, and clarifying incomplete handoffs. This slowed transactions and created unnecessary friction for both employees and customers.
01 — Too Many Tools
Users relied on multiple platforms throughout the lending process, creating unnecessary context switching and increasing cognitive load.
02 — Information Was Fragmented
Customer information, notes, conversations, and loan details lived across different systems, making it difficult to establish a single source of truth.
03 — Handoffs Created Bottlenecks
Incomplete information between BDRs, Loan Officers, Processors, and Underwriters frequently resulted in follow-ups and delays.
04 — Visibility Was Limited
Users lacked a simple way to understand where a customer was in the loan process, what had already been completed, and what needed to happen next.
From Insights to Design Decisions
The research led us toward a clear product strategy:
Create one unified back-office experience that allows employees to manage the customer journey without constantly switching between platforms.
I focused the design around four principles:
Centralize information
Bring customer information, communication, documents, tasks, and loan status into one experience.
Design around workflows
Instead of organizing the product around internal systems, organize it around how employees actually complete their work.
Improve handoffs
Make critical information visible and structured before a customer moves to the next stage.
Prioritize action
Surface the information users need to quickly understand: What happened? What needs my attention? What should I do next?
The Solution
I led the design of a centralized CRM experience that supported the customer journey from initial contact through loan processing and underwriting.
Rather than requiring employees to navigate multiple systems, the platform brought critical workflows into a single experience.
Customer 360° View
We created a centralized customer profile that gave employees immediate access to:
• Customer and loan information
• Communication history
• Tasks and follow-ups
• Documents and application status
• Previous activities and notes
• Ownership and handoff information
This reduced the amount of time employees spent searching across different systems before taking action.
Smarter BDR Workflow
For BDRs, we prioritized the information needed before making or receiving a call.
The experience helped them quickly understand the prospect, capture required information, document conversations, and prepare a structured handoff to the Loan Officer.
Better Handoffs
We standardized the information required at each stage of the customer journey.
Instead of the next employee having to search for context or contact the previous team member, critical information followed the customer throughout the workflow.
Design System
In parallel with the product work, I designed and maintained a Salesforce-based design system shared across Design, Product, and Engineering.
The system established reusable components, interaction patterns, and design standards that helped us:
• Maintain consistency across complex workflows
• Reduce repetitive design work
• Accelerate design-to-development handoff
• Improve collaboration between Design and Engineering
• Give junior designers a scalable framework to work within
As the senior designer, I also reviewed work and mentored junior designers to ensure the experience remained consistent across the platform.
Validation & Iteration
Prototypes were tested with employees who worked within these workflows every day.
Usability testing focused on whether users could:
Find information faster → understand customer status → complete key actions → successfully hand the customer to the next team.
Feedback from each testing round was incorporated into subsequent iterations before development.
The Impact
The redesigned experience reduced friction across critical back-office workflows and helped employees complete important tasks more efficiently.
30% Faster Contract Generation
The new workflows resulted in a 30% improvement in the speed of generating contracts, exceeding the original stakeholder goal of a 20% improvement.
Beyond the measurable result, the project created a more unified foundation for the organization by reducing fragmented workflows and establishing reusable product patterns.
My Contribution
As Senior Product Designer, my role extended beyond creating interfaces.
I helped define the problem, shape the product strategy, lead discovery, translate research into product decisions, establish the design system, mentor designers, collaborate with engineering, and validate the final experience with users.
