Context

🧭 Why are we here?

Tom Ferry International is a leading real estate coaching and training company that empowers agents to achieve their professional and personal goals. As the company grew, there was an opportunity to elevate the digital tools supporting their coaching, feedback, and learning processes—ultimately helping agents stay engaged and perform at a higher level.

Over the 6 months, I worked as a UI/UX Product Designer, focused on enhancing their B2C SaaS platforms related to performance management, agent feedback, and educational engagement.

🤝 Who I collaborated with?

Throughout this project, I closely partnered with a product manager, engineering leads, and front-end developers to ensure our solutions were both technically feasible and strategically aligned. I also worked with internal coaching directors and training specialists to deeply understand the real-world needs of agents and their mentors—helping us design tools that truly supported their day-to-day growth conversations.

Problem

🚩 What are we trying to solve?

Real estate agents and their coaches were relying on outdated, fragmented tools that made it difficult to deliver meaningful feedback, track evolving goals, or celebrate day-to-day progress. This friction turned what should have been motivating coaching moments into administrative hurdles.

As a result:

Coaching sessions slowed down, often bogged down by manual data entry or searching for scattered performance notes—leaving less time for high-value strategy discussions.
There was a growing disconnect between coaches and agents on clear expectations, with agents unsure of exactly where they stood or what to prioritize.
Without frequent, bite-sized, actionable feedback, many agents felt overlooked, which gradually eroded motivation and ownership of their growth.

Tom Ferry needed a more intuitive, continuous feedback ecosystem—one that could effortlessly scale across thousands of agents yet still feel tailored to individual journeys. It had to make coaching easier, more consistent, and ultimately more human.

Evidence

🔍 How do we know it’s a problem?

Through a mix of user interviews, platform analytics, and direct observation, it became clear that the existing feedback tools weren’t supporting effective coaching. Coaches found the system outdated and overly manual, which limited their time for meaningful conversations. Meanwhile, data showed infrequent feedback entries and inconsistent goal tracking, pointing to deeper engagement issues. Altogether, it signaled that the platform was falling short in fostering the continuous growth and accountability critical to real estate success.

Qualitative signals: Feedback from coaches and internal teams revealed frustrations with outdated scorecards and one-off review sessions.
Quantitative indicators: Engagement metrics showed lower frequency of feedback entries, plus inconsistent tracking of goals and milestones.
Observations highlighted how much time coaches spent writing evaluations manually, which could have been spent deepening relationships.

My Role

🔨 What are my key responsibilities?

As the designer, I owned the effort to lay a strong foundation that would improve collaboration, efficiency, and user experience across teams. This will help start building the right Lego set for Thrive.

Key responsibilities included:

Designed and optimized the UI/UX for a new performance management tool to promote continuous feedback, not just periodic reviews.
Collaborated closely with product & engineering to transform insights into scalable design systems.
Created experience flows and interactive prototypes to validate new models for feedback delivery, coaching conversations, and goal tracking.
Worked with internal trainers and sales enablement to ensure the tools supported real-world coaching needs.

Solution

💡What’s the suggested solution?

We launched a revamped platform with:

A continuous feedback model, making it easier for coaches to deliver quick, in-the-moment evaluations and for agents to see actionable insights.
Simplified dashboards and visual scorecards that highlighted key progress metrics for agents, coaches, and managers.
Embedded educational content tied to performance, nudging agents to take recommended courses or attend targeted sessions based on gaps.
A scalable internal structure that helped senior managers coach their own coaches, reinforcing performance management across the organization.

Impact

🚀What are the impacts we measured?

Quantitative

Reduced time spent on writing feedback by ~30%, dropping average input time from 6 minutes to about 4 minutes per session. This efficiency gave coaches more bandwidth to focus on strategic, relationship-building conversations.
+42% increase in feedback submissions per agent per month. The simplified UI and inline feedback prompts encouraged coaches to deliver more frequent, bite-sized evaluations rather than waiting for quarterly or monthly reviews.
Monitored engagement through metrics like:

📈 Goal creation and updates rose by 35%, indicating that agents were more proactive in setting and refining their targets.
🖱 Clicks on engagement goal screens increased by 28%, showing deeper interest in tracking progress.
🎯 Average progress updates per session grew from 1.2 to 2.0, meaning agents and coaches were consistently revisiting goals together.

Qualitative

Coaches and managers shared that the new system felt less like an administrative requirement and more like a true coaching tool. They reported being able to have richer, more meaningful discussions because feedback was now structured, quick, and always accessible.

gents expressed feeling clearer on expectations and more motivated, frequently noting that the regular check-ins and visual progress cues helped them celebrate small wins. Comments like “I finally see how my day-to-day work ties back to bigger goals” became common in follow-up interviews.

Belief

🧠 Why do we believe it will work?

When feedback is easy to give and tied directly to an agent’s growth journey supported by intuitive tools, it shifts from being a compliance task to a motivational driver. By building solutions that prioritize real-time coaching, progress visibility, and educational nudges, we anchored the platform in the behaviors that make high-performing agents thrive.