In an increasingly-automated world, many professionals are still manually inputting data into computers — or worse, filing cabinets.
Before the Orchard team began cross-functionally working on a project that would unify all parts of the home-buying process, employees were tasked with filling out necessary legal contracts one field at a time. Such contracts can be lengthy, sometimes several dozen pages long.
The kicker? The information team members were using to populate the pages often already existed elsewhere in the system.
And employees weren’t the only ones feeling the clunkiness of the old technology.
“Our customers weren’t getting a consistent experience throughout a process that is, by nature, already stressful,” Software Engineer Claire Durand said.
So recently, Durand and her team remedied the issue: They centralized all information regarding customer listings and properties of interest, built contract-signing abilities into the customer dashboard, and ensured that stored data self-populated into appropriate documents.
“Instead of sequestering ourselves away and taking a year to build the entire dashboard with all of the bells and whistles we think users will want, we built out the simplest version of the dashboard we could release,” Durand said. “That way, we were able to get it in front of users and start collecting feedback we could integrate as we continue development.”
Below, she shared the inner workings of that development so far and where she sees the project headed.
Tell me a bit about your background. What brought you to Orchard?
I graduated from college with a degree in electrical engineering but very quickly switched to software engineering. I loved how creative it could be and how close you can get to your user. I’ve worked for a couple of startups in New York City, mostly in the world of media and content analytics. I really enjoyed my time there because of the broad impact and the interesting data that we were working with.
But after a while, I decided that I wanted to move out of the B2B space and get to work on a product that affected consumers directly. That’s when I learned about Orchard. I was drawn to the successful, seasoned leadership team and the engineering culture I saw there.
From the development side, what was involved in streamlining the contract signing process? What were the problems that existed before this solution?
From the start, we knew that a good contract-signing experience meant two things: that our team could generate a completed contract with minimal effort, and that our customers could sign all required documents for their transaction in a single place.
Before we started working on this project, building out the contracts was a very manual process for our internal operations teams. Home purchase contracts can be really long and verbose. Our internal employees were filling out fields, sometimes across several dozen pages, with information we often already had recorded in the internal tool we use to track deals.
It was important for us to automate repetitive work.’’
On top of that, we used a couple of third-party vendors to send out different types of contracts, which meant that some employees were having to log into several different tools to generate and track contracts. Our customers weren’t getting a consistent experience throughout a process that is, by nature, already stressful.
Our work involved picking a single third-party vendor for contract signatures and integrating their tools with our internal deal management system. That strategy allowed our operations team members to work out of the tool they’re already using. With a few clicks, they are now able to generate a contract that populates empty fields with all the current information our company has on file.
How did you leverage certain languages, frameworks and methodologies to complete this product?
In general, we try to build tools using a consistent set of languages and frameworks for the sake of interoperability between our systems. That method also allows our engineers to easily work across our different tools. All of our back-end services are in Python, so we used Python to build a new microservice responsible for managing and generating contracts. We also use it to interface between DocuSign (our e-signing vendor) and our other services that manage the state of any given deal.
We leverage the deal data we already store in PostgreSQL, our relational database, in order to pre-populate the many fields in the contract. We also use Kafka, an event-streaming platform, to update the dashboard with information about transactions, such as when new contracts to sign are available or an old home’s listing is live.
How is leadership structured for a project like this?
Recently, engineers have been taking turns acting as project leads in any given quarter. For each project, one engineer will work closely with our product manager, our designer and other stakeholders in order to vet the suggested solution for technical feasibility and spec out what we want to build. Over the course of the project, the engineer who is “epic leading” the project serves as the liaison between the engineers implementing the feature and the product and design team. They serve as a point of contact for questions about the feature and are responsible for getting answers to any open questions. They work with product and design to make sure that the feature is properly tested before launch and are responsible for overseeing the release of the feature.
Engineering a strong leadership model
Why did your team decide to roll this product out to users now? What is next on your agenda?
Our customer base is growing along with our company. Manual processes tend to scale up poorly, and members of our internal operations teams were finding themselves working longer hours in order to continue to deliver a great experience. It was important for us to automate repetitive work.
That work also fit perfectly into our goal of providing users with a unified place to track their transaction, taking any necessary action (such as signing contracts), and providing them with all relevant information so that they not only benefit from their home advisor’s specialized attention but feel that the rest of Orchard is backing them as well.
