In 2020, we built a custom autodialer that connected to a highly-configured instance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, hit a custom lead scoring algorithm, and connected to an agent working inside of Cisco PCCE 12.

Insights

• Leaving voicemails is a big waste of time for employees. People feel much more fulfilled if their time is spent talking to customers, and not having to grind through voicemails and non-answers.
• Cisco PCCE engineers have a very unique skillset, and therefore could charge a high hourly rate. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.
• Using Twilio's TwiML Bins, we were able to build a pretty full-featured portfolio of automated tests.

Details

The first product I built using an external development team at Veterans United was a B2B CRM that focused on standardizing the communication between lenders and real estate agents. The app supported Veterans United Realty and Alliance Realty Network, which were heavily investing and innovating on how real estate agents interact with their referral partners.

The app, AgentDash, is a progressive web app (PWA) built using Angular, that runs natively in iOS using Ionic.

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Insights

• Big organizations often have low-hanging fruit that simple technology can help improve. In this case, we were able to transition status updates and lead distribution from being full-time jobs to being lightweight and technology-driven.
• Progressive Web Apps are great on Android, and pretty miserable on iOS.
• When a team is starting from scratch, they can make one core concept work well in the first two months. Product Managers need to decide if that one core concept is good enough to ship an MVP.

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To support the gap between development supply and demand, I'm working to build out our strategy to use remote and outsourced development. My role has included company research, contract negotiations, project selection, and product ownership. I'm also trying to standardize our process around incorporating third-party teams into our flow, which includes helping to define our technical and product standards.

Insights

• As a product manager, external development teams can be great to work with. They force you to be intentional about the context you're providing since they normally don't have a business context like full-time co-workers.

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Veterans United, like the rest of the financial service industry, is heavily investing in technology to make their products less expensive and easier than ever before. Our goals here are ambitious; we want to automate as much of the mortgage as possible.

There is quite a bit of competition, but we've got a great balance of third-party integrations and home-grown innovations that are making a significant impact on the number of employee hours it takes to fully close a loan.

While I'm spending most of my time working on other business verticals, mortgage automation is near and dear to my heart. My contributions have included [rebuilding our internal task system](#taskmanagement) to support new integrations, implementing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to help automate the check-in of documents, and coordinating efforts as a product manager across our customer, sales, and operations-focused development teams.

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