Peter Uzzi
Product + Design Leader
Transforming commercial real estate transactions
From legacy IT to product-thinking industry leadership
Consulting for First American Financial, a leader in title insurance and commercial real estate transaction management, I led a team of designers and researchers on a quest to uncover the intricacies and pitfalls that users were navigating between a constellation of legacy applications. We streamlined First American’s operations by innovating a first-of-its-kind platform to unify workflows and optimize deal flow in a three-sided network serving insurance underwriters, sellers, and buyers.
Role: Design Director
Contributions: Systems Design, UI Design, Prototyping, Product Strategy, UX Research, Executive Storytelling
Team: Senior Product Designer, Product Designer, UX Researcher, Product Manager, Engineering team
Timeline: 13 months
Milestones: Discovery, UX Research, UX Interviews, Design, MVP launch, Validation testing, UX Interviews, Design, GA launch
The Challenge
I joined TheoremOne, the consultancy engaged by First American, a few months into this 13-month project. 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. While mentoring team members and hiring for backfills, I stepped into the gap with hands-on design and UX research. I helped an overwhelmed team to pause and take a systems thinking approach to the complex problem we faced of detangling seven legacy applications and unifying them into a single modern platform.
We audited seven legacy systems to map the system design and understand the key Jobs-to-be-Done.
I led my team in producing a detailed service map during our discovery process.
Execution
I led the team while contributing hands-on 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 MVP phase while managing parallel discovery and build tracks to scale the platform to more complex 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.
We reduced task times by designing intuitive search patterns, reducing many complex data tables into summaries and visualizations.
We also preserved and optimized tabular data views that are necessary to track complex financial transactions and associated documentation.
Simplifying mobile tasks to the few most critical jobs was an editorial undertaking. Ultimately, our users told us that document review and approval were central to their mobile needs.
Solution and Impact
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.
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.
