ORIGIN

VTS is the technology backbone of commercial real estate — used by asset owners, asset managers, tenant reps, building managers, and tenants to eliminate manual processes and leverage real-time portfolio data.

By 2021, VTS had grown by acquiring multiple products — Wave, Lane, Marketplace, Rise, Marketing, and Sandbox — each with its own teams, design language, and components. The promise to customers was "one platform." The reality was six.

PROBLEM SOLVED

I led the design transformation in three sequenced phases — design system first, then design operations, then product architecture — each enabling the next. The promise to customers, finally delivered.

One promise. Six different products underneath it.

VTS had grown by acquisition. Customers were told they were buying "one platform." Internally, six product squads — Wave, Lane, Marketplace, Rise, Marketing, Sandbox — were each shipping their own design system, their own UI patterns, their own everything.

CRE personas chain — Asset Owners → Managers → Tenant Reps → Building Managers → Tenants — over the lifecycle (Planning → Cataloging → Marketing → Touring → Deal → Construction → Tenant Onboarding → Workorders).

THE AUDIT

An audit revealed 700 components and 300 styles spread across 6 separate libraries — 75% redundancy, 1/6 efficiency. Designers were rebuilding the same button six times. Project Terra consolidated everything into a single, governed system.

Three moves to unify the system.

• 01 · AUDIT
  Audit and unify. I initiated and led "Project Terra," a cross-functional sprint to audit every component and every style across all six products. The goal was ambitious — a single source of truth.
• 02 · PRINCIPLES
  Principles-led UX. I spearheaded the creation of new UX principles — Clarity, Efficiency, Intelligence, Connection, and Polish — to ensure the new system had a strong, modern aesthetic foundation.
• 03 · GOVERNANCE
  Governance and contribution. I established a clear governance model that defined how the core TDS team would work with product squads — a process for contribution, so the system would evolve with the products, not stifle them.

Terra.vts.com landing showing the design system in production.

90 categorical color options → 4 intentional choices.

Instead of designers picking from dozens of overlapping palettes, the new system gave them 4 semantic decisions — Primary, Subdued, Critical, Success. Pre-defined consistency. No more "which red?"

Process of converging the design system across all products.

THE INSIGHT

Every squad had built its own search experience — "search tenants" in one product, "search deals" in another, "search buildings," "search work orders," "search amenities." Identical interaction patterns. Five different UIs.

Feature-first organization vs Platform-first organization, with the common interaction patterns extracted.

Build a center of excellence — without freezing the squads.

• 01 · BENCHMARK
  Benchmarking. I led a workshop to identify what the company needed and what each team needed. We co-created KPIs — NPS, CSAT, CES, SUS, PURE — and built a scorecard.
• 02 · GUIDE
  Guiding & mentoring. I led brown-bag sessions across engineering and design to build shared knowledge of each component and UX pattern. The system became something everyone could speak to.
• 03 · INNER-SOURCE
  Inner-sourcing. I created an environment of contribution — every squad could propose new components or enhancements for universal acceptance. The system grew bottom-up, not top-down.

THE MOMENT

A user we interviewed told us flatly: "I am going to skip over VTS and use Excel instead. How do I make a decision for my property?" That was the moment. The product architecture was working against the user's mental model.

The moment we realized users were leaving the platform to do their core job.

Mental model vs. UI model — the mismatch was the entire problem.

Users think about objects — assets, tenants, deals. The UI was organized around products — Wave, Lane, Marketplace, Rise. The mismatch made every workflow harder than it needed to be.

VTS Products → Property inside-out architecture — The AHA-moment!

Three principles guided the rebuild.

• 01 · CONNECT
  Strive for Connectivity. End-to-end user journey maps to visualize the entire asset lifecycle. Identify drop-offs — pull them back in.
• 02 · MIRROR
  Mirror users' mental model. Redesigned the IA to be object-based — Assets, Tenants, Deals — directly mirroring how users think about their work.
• 03 · INSIGHT
  Design for Insights. Created "asset selector" and "tenant selector" views that surface key data from across the platform in one place — for faster, better decisions.

The new dashboard — the asset insights view with Space availability, Revenue, Popular amenities, and the cross-platform data summary.

Phase 3 — Headline Outcomes.

The Aha moment implemented and in action.

• 01
  System first. Then ops. Then product. The sequence mattered. Without Terra, design ops had nothing to govern. Without design ops, the unified CRE OS would have been a redesign without an organization to maintain it.
• 02
  The mental model is the moat. Users left VTS for Excel because Excel matched how they thought about their work. The biggest UX move was rebuilding the IA around objects, not products.
• 03
  Inner-source the system. Top-down design systems die. The squads that built the components had to be the squads that contributed back. Governance + contribution kept Terra alive after I left.
• 04
  Connect design to business outcomes. Every initiative was tied to a measurable business outcome — churn risk, platform adoption, customer NPS. Design without a P&L lens loses the budget conversation.
• 05
  The next frontier is agentic augmentation. Humans want agents to take actions on their behalf — but still prefer to lead. The next CRE OS isn't just connected — it's an intelligent layer that watches every asset.

• 01
  Sequence the platform roadmap. Don't compress it. Foundation (Terra design system) had to come before operating model (Platform Experience House) had to come before the integrated product (Unified CRE OS). Trying to do them in parallel would have failed all three.
• 02
  The mental model is the platform moat. Users left VTS for Excel because Excel matched their object-based thinking (Assets, Tenants, Deals) — not VTS's product-based thinking (Wave, Lane, Marketplace). Match the user's model and adoption follows.
• 03
  Org structure is product strategy. Six squads acting in silos couldn't ship a unified platform no matter what design system existed. The Platform Experience House was as much an org redesign as a product redesign.
• 04
  Tie every platform initiative to a business outcome. Churn risk, expansion revenue, platform NPS — every consolidation, every IA change, every component merge was tied to a measurable customer or business metric. That's what got it funded.
• 05
  The next frontier is agentic augmentation. Customers want agents to act on their behalf — but still want to lead. The next platform isn't just integrated — it's an intelligent layer that watches the portfolio and proactively surfaces decisions.