Sales Performance & Coaching Platform for Loan Officers

Long conversations before any wireframe existed.

Understanding the platform required extended sessions with the client and coaches — spreadsheet by spreadsheet, field by field, asking what fed into what and why. They knew their methodology deeply. But translating it from isolated files into a connected product was a completely different challenge. In a spreadsheet, each tracker lives on its own. In a product, every action has consequences somewhere else. We needed to be crystal clear on the data logic before touching the design — because getting it wrong here would have broken everything downstream.

The insight that changed everything came from reading the spreadsheets themselves.

The existing Activity Tracker wasn't just a log — it was a cascade of calculations. Marketing Inputs fed into Sales Inputs, which produced Outputs, which drove Results. Each section was color-coded, each row had a Target and a live Metric percentage. The logic was solid — but entirely implicit, encoded in cell formulas and column order, invisible to anyone who hadn't built it themselves. A new loan officer opening this for the first time just saw rows. The methodology was buried under the mechanics of a spreadsheet that was never designed to teach anyone anything.

That became the core design challenge: preserve the cascade logic, but make it legible.

The product also had to work across four distinct user profiles — not just roles, but levels of experience and business maturity:

Replicating spreadsheets was the wrong goal.

The real opportunity wasn't digitization — it was connection. The platform's core value proposition was that actions in one part of the system would automatically update everything else. Tag a referral partner in a Sales activity, and their last contact date updates instantly. Log a new lead as an Output, and it appears in the Lead Tracker already linked to its source. Lock a deal, and a loan gets created automatically. Users log once — the system does the rest. That was impossible in a spreadsheet. It became the reason to build the product at all.

A gradual exit from spreadsheet thinking.

The coaches and loan officers knew the spreadsheet structure inside out — and that familiarity was an asset, not something to eliminate. Rather than forcing a complete mental shift on day one, I designed the transition deliberately: some table-based views survived, column structures were preserved where they aided recognition, and new interactions were layered on top of familiar patterns. The goal wasn't to make the product feel nothing like a spreadsheet. It was to make it feel like a better version of one — until users naturally stopped thinking in spreadsheet terms at all.

The Activity Tracker — the daily operating system.

The cascade logic of the original spreadsheet — Marketing → Sales → Outputs → Results — became the structure of the Activity Tracker, but made visible and legible instead of hidden in cell formulas. Numeric inputs keep daily logging fast. Direct tagging of referral partners triggers automatic updates to last contact dates across the Relationship Tracker. The weekly progress visualization lives in a persistent panel so users always know where they stand without leaving the page. The streak indicator — small, unobtrusive — was the first gamification hook, present from day one.

Mobile first, with a companion app in mind.

Despite being a web app, I designed every screen mobile first. Loan officers are rarely at a desk when they need to log an activity or check a referral. Designing for the smallest screen forced better prioritization — if something didn't deserve space on mobile, it probably didn't deserve space at all. The web experience expanded from those constraints, not the other way around. And it positioned the product for a natural next step: a dedicated mobile companion app down the line.

Choosing an aesthetic that felt like the product.

Before any UI work started, I put together three moodboard directions for the client to evaluate. The goal wasn't to pick a color palette — it was to align on the emotional register of the product. A performance platform for competitive loan officers needs to feel different from a generic SaaS dashboard.

They chose the spatial, high-contrast direction: dark backgrounds, glowing data visualizations, a sense of precision and ambition. It matched the competitive culture of the program and the aspirational identity of the users — people who track their numbers because they want to win.

The Relationship Tracker as an emotional CRM.

Beyond contact details and performance metrics, the referral partner profile captures spouse name, kids' names, hobbies, and a “what's important for this person” field. In the mortgage business, relationships are the pipeline. Designing space for that information was a way of encoding the coaching methodology into the product itself.

Guardrails, not just inputs.

Preventing retroactive data manipulation was one of the least visible but most important decisions. In an accountability product, the integrity of historical data is what makes coaching conversations meaningful. Building guardrails wasn't a technical constraint — it was a product principle.

Persistent context panel.

In both Lead detail and Referral Partner detail views, key contact information lives in a fixed right panel outside the editable form. The context stays visible. The form stays focused. Two different jobs that shouldn't compete for the same space.

Gamification as a layer, not a feature.

Coaches wanted motivation hooks. Engineering wanted an MVP. I designed the gamification system — leaderboards, streaks, weekly progress visualization — as optional layers that could be activated progressively, without blocking the core product from shipping. This wasn't a compromise. It was the right architecture: prove the core loop first, add motivation mechanics once the behavior is established.

The Coach Experience

A completely separate set of views — different design, different information hierarchy — built entirely around one job: tracking and supporting student progress.

The Coach View — designed for the conversation, not the spreadsheet.

The coach experience was built around preparing for a weekly accountability call. From their view, a coach can see at a glance how each student is tracking against their weekly targets, when they last logged data, what their call pick-up rate is, and what action steps are still open from the previous session.

The most important design decision here was showing not just where a student stands, but whether they're moving in the right direction. A student at 60% of their weekly goal on Thursday tells a different story than a student at 60% on Monday. The coach view was built to surface that distinction without the coach having to do the math themselves.

Coach experience designed around weekly thinking.

Coaches don't think in individual days — they think in weeks. Every coach view was built around that mental model: weekly snapshots, temporal context always visible, team and individual breakdowns that made it easy to spot who needed attention without micromanaging. Coaches can also view the leaderboard across all their students, filter by level — Foundations, Accelerator, Elite, Peak+ — and see at a glance who's excelling and who needs a more focused conversation that week.