Turning “Is it working?” into Who should I call?
Replacing email open rates with a signal LOs could actually act on.
An approved analytics dashboard told LOs their emails were getting opened. It didn't tell them who to call. I replaced open rates with Lead Status — a signal LOs could actually act on — and named leads converted at more than double the rate of a generic summary link.
- Product
- B2B2C platform for real estate + lending · Property Insights — Lead Status
- Scale
- 180K+ loan officers
- Outcome
- 77% opened a named lead within 1 hour · Dashboard shelved · Lead Status shipped
- Role
- Sole Product Designer
- Team
- Product Owner · Product Manager · Engineering
Confidentiality Notice: This case study has been anonymized. Visual details, content, and identifiers have been modified to protect confidential information while preserving the underlying design challenges and decisions.
01 — Problem
Activity isn’t an action
Property Insights already had a dashboard — a table of clients and the reports sent to them — and a weekly email that functioned as an activity feed: “John Doe viewed a listing at 1234 Maple Street,” “Sara Chen used the affordability calculator.”
Both told you what happened. Neither told an LO what to do.
Support heard the same complaint from the customer side: people opened emails that just restated their own activity back at them, with nothing to act on.
Leadership’s proposed fix had already been prototyped with AI and had cleared multiple approval gates: a polished analytics dashboard tracking email click-through and open rates.
It looked credible. But an open rate wasn't actionable for an LO. It could tell them how the email was performing, but not which customer needed their attention or what they should do next.
The dashboard was well-designed and measuring the wrong thing entirely.
02 — Role & contribution
Passing review isn’t the same as being right
By the time I looked at it, the CTR/open-rate dashboard had already made it past multiple approval gates.
The basic question hadn’t been asked: what does an LO actually do with these numbers?
I asked it, and the honest answer was nothing. It wasn’t tied to any action an LO could take.
I proposed replacing the analytics dashboard with Lead Status: which leads are worth a call?
The status could live in the two places LOs were already using — the weekly email and the existing client dashboard — rather than creating another dashboard to report on email engagement.
The idea met resistance for being simpler than what had already been approved. What settled it was pointing out that “already approved” and “actionable” weren’t the same thing. Every version we’d reviewed, including the one that had cleared the approval gates, still had no action attached to it.
"Already approved" and "actionable" aren’t the same thing.
03 — Outcome
Specificity beat the aggregate, by a wide margin
The redesigned email surfaced three named leads individually, with a “Review all hot leads” link at the bottom for everything else. Both were in front of the same recipients, in the same message, which made the comparison clean.
- The aggregate link: 604 unique clickers, but only 34% drilled into a specific lead within an hour, rising to just 48% after a full week. More than half never went beyond the summary.
- The three named leads: 77% opened the specific lead within an hour — more than double the aggregate rate, and in a fraction of the time.
Fig. 01 — Revised weekly email
The proposed analytics dashboard was never built. Instead, we shipped Lead Status across the two surfaces LOs already used: named lead recommendations in the weekly email, and Hot / Warm / In Nurture status in the existing client table.
Fig. 02 — Lead Status UI
“I am ‘geeking’ out over Property Insights and the hot lead tool. It’s one of the best tools to stay top of mind with past clients and also grab new contacts for your database. I’ve got a lot of great ideas for my LOs... Excited to get some bigger things started with this. I’m selling it like a crazy person.”
“The AI support has made it even better. It takes the information Property Insights provides and helps turn it into meaningful, natural follow-up opportunities, making it much easier to stay connected with clients without constantly trying to figure out what to say or when to reach out.
Property Insights has become more than a marketing tool for our team. It's a relationship tool—and one we genuinely believe helps us provide more value to our clients and Realtor partners.”
04 — Reflection
The entry point is part of the product
The mistake wasn’t that the dashboard had the wrong metrics. It was that we were treating reporting as the goal when the user really needed help deciding what to do next.
The weekly email wasn’t just a notification about the product. It was the first step in the journey, so it was also a place to test the product itself.
That changed how I approached the problem: before building a new surface, use the surfaces you already have to learn what the new one actually needs to do.