Unifying fragmented features into a cohesive customer experience with strategic service design
Company
Buildertrend
Timeline
2023-2025
Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
PM
The challenge
After 16 years of continuous feature expansion, Buildertrend's construction management platform had become a powerful but fragmented ecosystem.
Business units supported customers with different tools and terminology, lacking a unified understanding of the complete customer journey. This fragmentation was limiting internal alignment and customer success.
My approach
Extensive discovery process across the entire organization.
I conducted an audit of the entire platform and all existing features, including stakeholder interviews with leaders across business units, customer research with builders to map their actual processes, and competitive analysis.
The impact
The frameworks I created changed how Buildertrend approaches product development to focus on customer journey informed decisions.
The work aligned business units around customer value and directly led to new product development opportunities. It created long-term value by setting up an evergreen system to identify gaps and plan market expansion.
The results
100%
company-wide adoption
9
optimized journeys
3
new business opportunities (and counting)
A universal customer journey
This project unified disparate information and created organizational alignment through design strategy
The research: Each business unit used different language to describe the same customer actions and teams couldn’t effectively articulate how their features connected to the broader customer journey, impacting product development effectiveness. Customers were underutilizing powerful features due to discoverability issues and, therefore, opportunities existed in workflow gaps.
A universal design language: I created a comprehensive service design framework, mapping every touchpoint in a builder's workflow from sales to project completion. This unified the design language across all business units and created a shared approach that would enable cross-functional collaboration and development.
Actionable outcomes: The framework was adopted across all business units giving leadership visibility into the customer experience and enhancing internal conversations and collaboration. It became a strategic tool for goal setting and development planning, revealing workflow interruptions and highlighting areas for new product and feature development
Expanding the framework to Financial Services
Success of the unified framework led to a request for deeper analysis of Buildertrend's financial products—a critical revenue driver requiring specialized workflow understanding. I created detailed journey maps for each financial product, showing how they’re interconnected and where optimization opportunities existed. These became foundational tools for the financial services teams.
Actionable outcomes: Specific features requiring enhancement and journey gaps were identified that led to development opportunities and reorganized priorities (see additional case study). Financial services teams gained a shared understanding of customer workflows and insights from the journey maps directly informed strategies to increase financial product adoption.