Super LO

Point of sale experience

Context:
Mortgages are one of the most complex lending products in the world, and Loan Officers sit at the center of it all.

Their daily workflows were fragmented as they constantly jumped between systems, juggling internal coordination, client communications, and managing multiple deals all at once. Most of the tools they relied on were dated, slow, and not built for how they actually worked, especially on mobile.

Encompass and Optimal Blue were antiquated, legacy tools that LOs relied on

There was no overarching system. No holistic thinking. Just a collection of tools that didn’t talk to each other, and that resulted in a reactive, scattered, and inefficient process for our most important users.

The Problem:
Loan Officers at Guaranteed Rate were relying on a patchwork of disconnected tools to manage their pipelines.

There was no single place where they could track deals, prioritize work, or easily move loans ahead to closing.

Anything they needed to do required context switching. Even basic tasks meant bouncing between systems, piecing together information, and reacting to whatever came next.

Objective:
Super LO was an effort to bring structure to all the chaos surrounding the core of the mortgage business: our Loan Officers.

The goal was to build a single, unified experience where LOs could manage their pipeline, prioritize work, and take action from anywhere without relying on multiple tools.

At the same time, it allowed us to move away from expensive third-party software and build something custom-tailored to how Guaranteed Rate actually operates.

Approach:
I worked closely with Loan Officers and their support teams to understand how they operate on a daily basis, how mortgage jobs flow across the different supporting roles, where things break down and what efficiency would actually look like in practice.

From there, I mapped out the key, high-value loan workflows and figured out where we could reduce friction, surface the right information, and help guide their decisionmaking.

Mapping key loan scenarios across the full lifecycle

Early mapping of the handoff moments between LOs and Borrowers

Early journey maps and system diagrams became the foundation for the product, helping align our cross-functional triad around a shared vision before we started building.

Early system framework that shaped the larger interactive prototype

This simple framework later evolved into a much larger interactive prototype that documented Super LO’s core features, flows, functionality, and UI in enough detail for Product, Engineering, and stakeholders to stay aligned as the product came together.

Explore the full interactive framework.

System Design:
Solving all these various problems didn’t call for a series of features, it called for holistic thinking and an end-to-end system.

We brought pipeline management, communication, task prioritization, and loan-level actions all together into one cohesive experience.

Pipeline views organized work by status and priority

Our goals were consistent: reduce context switching, surface what matters at just the right moments, and make it easy to quickly take action.

Everything is designed to work seamlessly across devices with full feature parity between desktop and mobile.

Challenges:
I faced a handful of key challenges on this project.

The first was full mobile parity. Executive Leadership mandated that we not deliver a stripped down mobile experience. Every feature needed to work across devices, which forced me to think deeply about layout, hierarchy, and interaction patterns at every step.

Unified desktop and mobile views for managing assets, liabilities and more

Next was dealing with legacy system constraints. We had to integrate with and build on top of several different existing tools and workflows that weren’t designed to work together, while still delivering what felt like a single, cohesive experience.

The last was balancing standardization with flexibility. Every Loan Officer works differently. The challenge was creating a system that delivered structure and prioritization based on business rules without feeling too restrictive.

Adoption:
The response from our Loan Officers was immediate and overwhelmingly positive.

Early feedback from Loan Officers during our beta rollout

They finally had a single place to manage their pipeline and take action without jumping between systems.

The mobile experience changed how they worked day-to-day, making it possible to manage deals from anywhere without losing functionality.

Credit could be pulled and Pre-approval letters could be shared from anywhere

We launched with a small beta group of about 50 LOs, which quickly grew to more than 700 active users as adoption spread organically. Our Loan Officers were largely free to leverage the toolsets of their choice, and they quickly chose to use Super LO.

Outcome:
Super LO successfully replaced a fragmented workflow with a unified system, effectively reducing reliance on disconnected third-party tools and centralizing loan origination workflows in a single suite that we actually owned.

This shift led to improved efficiency, visibility, and responsiveness across the pipeline, while positioning Guaranteed Rate to move away from our reliance on Ellie Mae Encompass – software our users genuinely hated that cost over $7M per year in licensing costs – all while delivering a faster, more flexible experience.

HolyFax!

We’re well into the 21st century, the internet is ubiquitous, everyone has a smartphone and I still need a landline, a fax machine and paper to send an important document? Ridiculous.

That’s where HolyFax! comes in. A pet project turned startup idea that my good engineering bud and I cooked up in our free time.

The service lets you send a fax over the web from any modern computing device. Snap pics of your docs with a cameraphone or choose files to upload from your computer, enter a fax number and hit send.

Voilà! They’ll be miraculously printed out of the receiver’s fax machine on the other end, all for the simple rate of one dollar per page.

I loved this idea because despite their antiquity, offensively beige appearance and distaste for trees, faxes are still important for one key reason: they’re more secure than email.

Our goal was to take the ugly duckling called faxing and turn it into the slick, communications-age swan we knew it could be. A faster, easier experience than finding a physical fax machine or using other online faxing services.

Taking bad user experiences and turning them on their head is beyond satisfying, and when the bar is this low, it’s a layup.

The project had good potential as existing players in the online faxing space required subscriptions, creation of an account, adding and saving a payment method or purchasing ‘blocks of pages to fax’ just to get started. They also suffered from clunky workflows and incredibly dated UIs none of which were mobile friendly.

We saw an opportunity to put ease of use and our customers first by foregoing all of those dark servicing patterns in exchange for a modern, breezy solution for those who just needed to send a single, quick fax with no strings attached.

HolyFax! was also fun to work on because, as its co-founder, I was able to have complete creative control over every aspect of the brand and marketing, coining the name, designing the logo, crafting the value prop and writing all of the content myself.

I also got the chance to do all of the front end work, writing the markup, CSS and even the jQuery for the document upload UI. Plus, since we’ve built it, I’ve never had to use another fax machine, which is the best part of all.

Want to see more? Check out the live site.