Categories: Consulting, Leadership, Product Management, UI Design, UX Research, Prototyping, User Testing

Background:
First American Title Insurance faced disruption from competitors and struggled with outdated, fragmented systems that hindered internal operations and lacked a cohesive customer interface. They engaged Theorem to modernize their platform by replacing seven legacy systems with a streamlined, user-friendly enterprise application.

As Creative Director, I was tasked with leading research and design, managing co-development squads, to deliver an MVP that addressed business-critical needs, supported single-property commercial real estate orders and more complex multi-property transactions while using one unified visual language.

The challenge:
Taking on an existing team that had experienced significant turnover and was behind schedule, I was tasked with bringing the project back from the red. I led the team as a player-coach by:

• Conducting extensive discovery, including 50+ stakeholder and user interviews, heuristic evaluations, and data analysis, to identify priorities and develop a unified data-driven system design.

• Collaborating with business analysts and architects, focusing on foundational features like elastic search and view and edit capabilities for single-property and multi-property transactions.

• Leading iterative design and usability testing to refine the user interface for the initial single-property phase while managing parallel discovery and build tracks to scale the platform to multi-property transactions and additional functions, such as wire transfers and document collaboration.

• Developing task workflows, user story backlogs, and UX KPIs to align with roadmap milestones, ensuring stakeholder alignment and maintaining project momentum.

Result:
The new platform streamlined hundreds of legacy tasks, significantly reducing steps for users, and improving usability within a single application. C-suite stakeholders praised the intuitive design, and early user feedback highlighted its simplicity and efficiency. The platform positioned First American as a technology leader, with projected cost savings of tens of millions annually.

Key Impact Highlights:

• Delivered an intuitive MVP that minimized user training needs and impressed customers with its usability.

• Scaled the platform to handle multi-property transactions, supporting deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

• Unified seven legacy applications in a single app that served three user personas: Internal enterprise users, commercial partners, and customers.

• Transformed First American’s operations, enabling faster responses to market demands.