Agent Advantage

I ❤️ Hackathons! So much freedom and fun. They’re great for people, products and teams and they’re one of best things about being a product designer.

I’m a firm believer in designers owning their product from end to end but that doesn’t mean we have eminent domain over them.

Just as it takes a village to raise a child it takes a whole team owning their product to truly make it something great. That’s why regular Hackathons are so important for a healthy product culture. We in product are people who love to build things and Hackathons let us get together and jam like jazz musicians. They let us improvise and use challenge our talents to bring the ideas we are most passionate about to reality.

That’s where this feature arose — in a five-person, cross-functional team on a two-day Hackathon in the spring of ’22.

In the retail mortgage sector, the relationship between Agents and Loan Officers is the engine that drives business. Most loans we originate come from Agent referrals who bring us more borrowers than all other intake channels combined.

Guaranteed Rate had built individual systems for both Agents and Loan Officers, but these two pillars of our loan manufacturing platform were completely siloed from one another despite the importance of the Agent / LO relationship.

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Our goal was to design, build and deploy a workflow that let our LOs invite their referral partners to join Agent Advantage or connect with existing Agents already on the platform. Once there, Agents were given new tools to track the progress of any loan they refer and even speed things along by uploading key documents like the purchase agreement, which usually comes from their office anyhow.

The scope was ambitious but we had a feisty team and breaking down the wall between these two core systems was a no brainer. It utilized existing platforms and added a ton of value. Moreover, it wouldn’t likely have happened without the pure collaborative nature of Hackathons bringing together people and products who are usually separated most days simply because of how the org chart is structured.

We took home 2nd place but people took notice and we got it on the product roadmap anyways. Check out this quick walkthrough I recorded to get our LOs excited about the feature at the annual company-wide retreat.