Project information

CONSTRUCTCONNECT SAAS SOFTWARE

The Problem : Combining 8 Legacy Softwares

Eight legacy products lacked a shared infrastructure, leading to frustrated users, rising costs, and inefficiencies. The goal: streamline workflows and enhance usability. A new CEO, the pandemic, and rapid UX team growth forced a shift. Full unification wasn’t feasible, so we pivoted to a connected ecosystem, ensuring seamless platform interaction instead of merging everything. Scaling UX required expanding UI, UX, and UX Research to align products under a shared vision. The challenge: navigate transformation, keep teams aligned, and balance short-term impact with long-term strategy.

My Role: Scaling Teams & Driving a Connected UX Strategy

I drove UX strategy, team expansion, and product integration, transforming a fragmented system into a connected experience.

  1. Early Integration: As the first UX hire on my manager’s team, I led workflow mapping, redundancy reduction, and team alignment to create a unified vision.
  2. Scaling for Complexity: As UX demands grew, I helped expanded the team by 300%, ensuring strong UI, UX, and research capabilities to support a multi-platform ecosystem.
  3. Building Collaboration: As UX Manager, I fostered cross-team alignment to balance consistency with platform-specific needs, driving effective product integration.
  4. Leading Through Change: During the pandemic, I built a remote-friendly onboarding process and was part of the team that helped boost our Gallup engagement score from 3.83 to 4.58.
  5. Hands-On Execution: While in leadership, I remained deeply involved in product releases, ensuring business needs aligned with user experience. My work on ConstructConnect Takeoff modernized workflows and drove innovation.

Through strategic leadership, team scaling, and hands-on execution, I helped shape UX into a critical function supporting a scalable, multi-platform ecosystem.

The Obstacle :  Scaling UX for a Multi-Platform Ecosystem

The construction industry’s fragmented workflows—paired with eight legacy products—created inefficiencies and misalignment. Each platform had unique user needs and business priorities, making it difficult to standardize experiences while keeping products interoperable. Realigning the products required a scalable UX strategy that balanced consistency across platforms with the flexibility to meet individual product demands. View More

The Approach: Adapting to a Multi-Platform Strategy

At first, we focused on full unification, relying on deep user research to shape workflows informed by 26 detailed personas. However, as the company evolved under a new CEO and the pandemic reshaped priorities, it became clear that a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work. Instead of merging products outright, we pivoted to maintaining multiple platforms while ensuring they worked together seamlessly. This required shifting our UX approach to designing for connected experiences. View More

The Plan: Balancing Immediate Impact with Long-Term Scalability

With full unification no longer the priority, we took a pragmatic approach—modernizing UX for key workflows, strengthening cross-platform consistency, and refining research practices to guide future improvements. This approach enabled us to:

  1. Deliver immediate, tangible improvements across core workflows.
  2. Align products under a shared UX and data strategy while keeping them separate where needed.
  3. Lay the foundation for deeper integration when the infrastructure was ready.
By focusing on connected experiences rather than forced unification, we provided users with the tools they needed today while ensuring a scalable, multi-platform experience that could evolve over time.

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The Obstacle
Tackling a Fragmented Industry
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Wasted Time and Effort

Every construction project is unique, making standardization a challenge. With eight legacy products covering different processes, users had to navigate multiple disconnected systems, leading to inefficiencies, frustration, and lost opportunities.
Key Challenges

  1. No Standardization : Different processes, forms, and platforms made repeatable workflows impossible.
  2. Communication Gaps: Inconsistent information sharing led to misalignment and errors.
  3. Overhandling: Users had to re-enter data manually, wasting time.
  4. Unnecessary Complexity: Redundant tasks slowed productivity.
  5. Outdated Tech :Tools that did Takeoff, built in the 90s, lacked modern cloud capabilities.

The Impact: Data Silos & Frustration

Construction workflows involve many roles—estimators, project managers, subcontractors, and suppliers—each needing access to different project data. But our fragmented system forced users to rely on massive Excel workarounds to consolidate information. The top request? "Give me ALL the data." Users needed full access across systems, not just a better UI. Without it, they were stuck stitching information together manually, increasing errors and delays. One example: Invitation to Bid (ITB) & Takeoff Workflow Users reviewing ITBs had to analyze large volumes of documents. With no direct connection to Takeoff, they relied on gut instinct instead of efficient cross-checking. This lack of integration created bottlenecks across financial tools, supply chain management, and scheduling. Even when solutions were clear—integrating key tools—legacy platforms like Takeoff weren’t built for cloud connectivity. Retrofitting them posed major challenges, forcing us to rethink how we approached data flow across systems.

The Approach
Integrate into the User's Workflow

Bridging Fragmentation Through Connection

We started with an ambitious plan: create a unified platform that seamlessly connected all stakeholders. However, the pandemic and new corporate leadership brought about a pivot from full unification to a strategic integration model. This allowed us to maintain multiple platforms while ensuring they worked together seamlessly, striking a balance between scalability and usability.

Maintaining a Cohesive User Experiene Even as priorities shifted, we stayed user-focused. We designed workflows that worked for the majority of users while creating intuitive “off-ramps” for edge cases, ensuring that flexibility didn’t come at the cost of usability. Simplicity and ease of navigation became the focus of our approach.

Building Personas for Deep User Understanding We developed 26 detailed personas, representing diverse construction roles—from estimators to project managers to subcontractors. These personas reflected real-world workflows, pain points, and goals, ensuring our designs addressed actual industry needs rather than abstract assumptions.

All Persona

The Pivot: From Full Unification to Strategic Integration

As we progressed toward a unified platform, new challenges emerged:

  1. Scalability Concerns: Merging eight legacy products introduced technical and operational bottlenecks.
  2. Infrastructure Limitations: Some tools, like Takeoff, weren’t designed for cloud-based workflows, making deep integration difficult without a rebuild.
  3. Shifting Business Priorities: A new CEO emphasized faster time-to-market and incremental improvements.
  4. The Pandemic’s Impact: The construction industry’s rapid evolution required immediate value delivery, not years of development.

Reframing the Goal: Connecting Instead of Combining

Rather than forcing all products into one system, we pivoted to a connected ecosystem where tools remained separate but worked together seamlessly.

  1. Strategic Integration: Prioritizing key connections (e.g., improving how ITBs moved into Takeoff).
  2. Standard UI/UX: A shared design system ensured products felt cohesive without full unification.
  3. Backend Improvements: Aligned data structures reduced silos and improved cross-product workflows.
  4. User-Driven Flexibility: Users had control over navigation rather than a rigid workflow.

The Result: A More Agile, Scalable Approach

By embracing integration over unification, we delivered faster, more meaningful improvements while keeping the long-term vision intact. Users could work efficiently across platforms without disrupting their workflows—achieving the best of both worlds.

The Plan
Balancing Quick Wins with Growth

Balancing Immediate Impact with Long-Term Scalability

Initially, the vision was clear: one platform to rule them all. But building that kind of plane while flying it proved challenging. We shifted to a pragmatic approach—enhancing individual products while ensuring they connected where it made sense.

Instead of forcing unification, we focused on:

  1. Strengthening cross-platform consistency: Standardizing UI, UX patterns, and shared functionality across products.
  2. Modernizing critical workflows: Improving the most frequently used tools to increase efficiency and user adoption.
  3. Laying the groundwork for future integration: Addressing backend limitations and aligning data structures for long-term scalability.

This allowed us to deliver meaningful improvements quickly while preparing for a more connected ecosystem over time.

Product Breakdown:

We focused on driving value while preparing for the future, ensuring each product played a role in creating a more connected experience.

ConstructConnect Takeoff


Overview:
Takeoff revolutionizes the bidding and estimation process with:
  1. AI-Assisted Takeoff: Automating tedious measurement tasks.
  2. Digital Measurement Tools: Seamlessly integrating itemization and estimating.
Impact:
By minimizing manual work, Takeoff improved efficiency and bid accuracy, boosting project win rates.
Customer Testimonial
“We’ve become large enough where automation has been really BIG. Being able to have these automations built in and automatically fill my Takeoff is huge.”
— Estimator, ConstructConnect Takeoff

ConstructConnect Project Intelligence


Overview:
This tool helps users search, assess, and qualify projects with:
  1. Customizable tables for trade and project scope.
  2. A Match Score algorithm tailored to user profiles.
  3. A responsive design with easy document viewing.
Impact:
By optimizing data presentation, we increased user engagement and accelerated project searches.
Customer Testimonial
“When searching for bidding contractors, everybody I’ve found is through ConstructConnect, so it’s been like my encyclopedia.”
— Service Provider, Project Intelligence

ConstructConnect Bidder Management


Overview:
This tool streamlines the invitation-to-bid process by providing:
  1. Tools to find and manage bidders.
  2. Centralized communication for streamlined workflows.
  3. Risk management integration to evaluate contractors.
Impact:
By improving bidder selection, we reduced project delays and enhanced contractor collaboration.

ConstructConnect Bid Center


Overview:
This tool . . . Designed to help contractors manage bids effectively, Bid Center includes:
  1. Multiple view options (Kanban, Calendar, etc.).
  2. Quick visual indicators for project statuses.
  3. Customizable saved views for easy tracking.
Impact:
These improvements boosted workflow efficiency by ~10%, allowing users to focus on high-priority projects.

ConstructConnect Insight


Overview:
What started as a UI modernization project uncovered deeper backend issues. Insight’s infrastructure was fragile and outdated, requiring a full rebuild in 2024.
The Long-Term Fix:
  1. Instead of patching short-term UI issues, we initiated a full migration of Insight’s functionality into ConstructConnect Project Intelligence.
  2. This ensured a more scalable, future-proof solution while maintaining user trust.
Impact:
By addressing core technical challenges, we created a stronger foundation for future development—ensuring that the next iteration of Project Intelligence could fully support Insight’s core capabilities.

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