RealKey

Case Study

FinTechReactJSDjangoMortgage

The Backstory

RealKey's CEO is a working mortgage loan officer with a love for technology and optimization. He saw a problem in his industry and wanted to solve it for mortgage lending generally, not just for his own desk. He had a conference in a few months and needed a working web application to demo there, with a limited feature set but real functionality behind it.

Rapid Planning

Defined the MVP scope for a working demo on a tight conference deadline: a functional web application, not mockups.

Rapid Design & Dev

Designed and built the core mortgage workflow interface in parallel, prioritizing the features that would demonstrate the platform's power.

Demo & Feedback

Presented the working prototype at the industry conference, gathering real-world feedback from mortgage professionals.

Agile Sprints

Expanded the platform through iterative sprints based on conference feedback and industry requirements.

MVP Launch

Shipped the production platform with document processing, real-time updates, and secure transaction handling.

Handoff

Transitioned the platform to RealKey's internal team with comprehensive documentation and architecture guidance.

Our Challenges

Minimizing Technical Debt

With a tight deadline, we knew that we would incur some tech debt. The goal was to work quickly but not have to throw out the demo project and start from scratch for the MVP.

Team Setup

RealKey's stakeholders included the subject matter expert CEO, a CTO, and a product consultant who previously worked at a Fortune 100 company. We worked at their direction and provided full transparency into our processes and code.

The Dress Rehearsal

We worked with the client-side stakeholders to quickly put together a demo product in just a couple of weeks. The interface used a very minimal style guide and basic frontend components from third party libraries so that we could focus our energy on making sure the backend functioned properly

The Real Show

After gathering valuable feedback from the demos at the conference, we worked in agile sprints to design and develop the product for MVP launch. In addition to creating a polished interface, we built custom document tools that allowed easy organization and export.

RealKey was early enough that every week of build had to earn itself. Their CEO was in San Francisco and their product lead in San Diego, so we ran the work as full-day sessions at our office in Los Angeles: the two of them in the room with our designer, engineering lead and project manager.

We told them where things stood as we went rather than at milestones, so they could move their own priorities while there was still time to act on it.

Taking it in-house was always the plan. When the MVP was done we handed over the code and the documentation, and helped them work out who to hire to carry it.

“

I like the fact that the owners were so involved in the project.

Christopher Hussain, CEO & Founder

Learning from Experience

One important lesson we learned was that the third-party UI Kit we used to launch the demo version did not hold up. We had to throw away more code than we wanted, and were boxed in to certain design decisions that we didn't want to have to live with later on. RealKey's challenges were a major force in our decision to create the Starter Kit, so that future projects could be set up quickly using components and our own design system for less tech debt.