My team and I transformed Procore’s platform communication and security capabilities to improve outcomes for everyone in construction. We launched Procore Conversations to achieve one of the Global Top Ten product outcomes in time for our IPO. Improved collaboration with product and engineering to transition product access control from RBAC to ABAC, improving customer experience within the platform.
Innovation at Speed
When I joined Procore Technologies, I managed a team of design, research, and content professionals focused on the core platform capabilities. We were uniquely positioned to collaborate with module-specific teams and our dedicated mobile division as we sat the nexus of how information, objects, and content flowed through the ecosystem of Procore’s many action-oriented tools. Fueled by the desire to uncover issues my team could solve, I led our team through a series of workshops with our product and engineering partners to identify our core areas of focus and purpose. These activities led to identifying the need for platform-specific capabilities that would serve our module team colleagues. Those capabilities included
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We were improving the permissions capabilities of our platform to enable greater collaboration for our customers in a construction project.
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We are improving the communication between all parties in a construction project to provide up-to-the-minute knowledge and direction from the field to the office and back.
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Improving security capabilities ensures the right individuals have access at the right time.
These foundational opportunities led to product enhancements and a new offering that greatly improved the Procore platform. It would improve customer outcomes by removing obstacles and increasing their time to take action.
Strong Collaboration Equals Better Product Offering
During my early days at Procore, I saw the disconnect between Product Management and Design, creating communication problems that hampered progress and innovation. I pulled together my design team and their product manager counterparts through a series of activities to build better relationships and communication to work together and create an environment of trust, safety, and innovation. Through team-building workshops and collaborative ideation sessions, my team and their cross-functional partners developed a micro-culture that enabled them to work tightly together and determine the best paths forward with product planning. I took these workshops to my partners and our immediate leaders, resulting in improved trust, radical candor, psychology-safe environments, and default towards action and innovation.
The way that our team began to work enabled us to work far enough ahead that collaborative partners would catch up to where we were operating, informing them of our work that then informed their product backlog and prioritization. Operating at the speed of innovation had the additional outcomes of a more engaged design team and individuals who led the work on several key platform enhancements.
Procore Conversations & Internal Procore Admin (IPA)
Two of my team members led the work on a new product offering, Procore Conversations. Procore Conversations was the communications hub between all parties in a construction project, from the field to the office and back. This communications hub enabled direct messaging between two or more individuals. It could have started conversations connected to objects within the platform, such as conversations in the context of a photo, a delivery, a project update, etc. These individuals led the ideation, testing, and refinement of the Procore Conversations work released just in time for our IPO.
Another pair on my team led the work on transitioning our complex permission system using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC.) In what was essentially an engineering-heavy platform enhancement, the two designers who worked on transitioning from RBAC to ABAC mapped out the multitude of permutations in creating roles and assigning attributes to objects within a project. This work enabled admins to have granular controls on individuals rather than roles themselves, which granted increased security and privacy within projects. As they developed the flows and product enhancements for profile creation and access control, these individuals worked with our engineering security team to improve the existing Internal Procore Admin tool. The IPA was updated to account for the updated ABAC implementation and was enhanced with new interfaces to account for user access traceability and reporting.
Outcomes
Upon releasing Procore Conversations, we booked nine onboarding sessions for current customers to educate them and understand how Procore Conversations could be implemented in their current projects. Three months post-release of Procore Conversations, we saw 50% of current customers utilizing Conversations in their current projects, which resulted in an estimated $1.2B in customer savings due to faster communication on the job site, savings that stemmed from improved scheduling for delivery and project management, improved safety protocols leading to fewer job site accidents, and improved financial accounting for office workers communicating with field supervisors.
The IPA increased customer satisfaction and reporting in projects. Improvements to access control and the IPA led to greater customer retention and expansion of modules, resulting in a $100M increase in sales and product expansion in its first three months.
Procore Conversations and the enhanced IPA were released before our IPO, where we raised $634.5M above range.
Team Credits
Design & Research Team:
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Jorge Brake
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Robyn Bautista
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Nico Quintero
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Tabby Jewett
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Taylor Klundt
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Madi Chatham
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Nick Tilden
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Mary Curren
Leadership:
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Annahita Varahrami
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Aaron Kettl
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Lee Hollingworth