Stepping into a mid-cycle team restructuring, I inherited a standalone CMA creation flow that was one part of a larger, ambiguous goal of creating an integrated, cross-platform CMA tool. The goal of the CMA tool was to help agents price homes with confidence and build trust with prospective sellers. I quickly learned that though the teams were all aligned on the value that a CMA would bring to the organization, each team was building across three disconnected product tracks. Even more importantly, nobody was evaluating whether the overall CMA experience would be compelling enough to pull agents away from free MLS alternatives.

Still, teams were moving fast, and development was underway, pulling me into multiple directions across three product managers. While delivering designs that would otherwise block the teams, I began to tackle the larger challenge of direction and vision.

I designed and facilitated a series of cross-functional discovery workshops that forced trade-off discussions across the team. The riskiest assumption: agents would adopt our CMA tool despite free local MLS tools — tools with deeper data than we could reasonably build.