Modernizing a securities trading platform and building a strong design culture
Role: Director of Design | Design Team: 1 Product Designer
TL;DR: At Rocket, millions in mortgage-backed securities were being managed through fragmented Excel calculators and legacy tools, creating significant operational risks and limiting business growth. A single calculation error could cost millions in incorrect pricing or market forecasts.
I co-led the evolution of a 100+ legacy workflows and unified them under one platform - Rocket. Exchange, alongside a talented senior designer, and incredible cross functional partners. The result was 75,000 hours saved annually, significantly reduced trading risks, and enabling expansion into new trading markets.
Rocket's secondary market process, anchored in excel templates was inefficient and fraught with risk.
Before: Manually created Excel templates used for documentation and calculations
"We're really good at what we do. But all it takes is one miscalculation and suddenly we've lost millions of dollars. This happened to me not too long ago."
— Senior Market Trader
A legacy secondary market trading process, exposed Rocket to significant operational risks. This created both financial exposure and operational anxiety.
Beyond the immediate risks, these legacy systems were limiting Rocket's ability to expand into new types of secondary market trading, effectively capping potential business growth in an industry where diversification equals resilience.
Before: 100+ workflows were distributed between 8 legacy tools and excel sheets
Excel Expertise Had Become Our Greatest Vulnerability.
Capital markets specialists, analysts, and traders worked in isolation with no visibility between groups. Expert knowledge trapped in proprietary spreadsheets created technical debt and stifled innovation.
Secondary market trading required a unique design approach. We assembled a cross-disciplinary team between my senior designer, our Director of Product Management with capital markets expertise, and key engineering leaders. Together, we catalyzed a reimagining of how mortgage-backed securities were traded and managed across Rocket.
A Jobs To Be Done approach helped our teams understand the trading ecosystem, agnostic of legacy thinking.
Before: A legacy technology focused system
After: A job to be done and value delivery focused system
"Our data team insisted they were separate from the framework until we discovered they were actually setting the entire trading strategy. That changed everything."
— Senior Software Architect
I guided the team in implementing a Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework, coaching product and engineering team members on how to frame and think about these jobs in ways that transcended traditional system and team boundaries.
The framework created unprecedented clarity in goals and priorities. Teams understood their work's importance with alignment across stakeholders. This dramatically improved collaboration as everyone operated with shared purpose.
Our transformation focused on prioritizing critical areas where product innovation eliminated risk and created new business value.
Cross-functional teams were organized around the critical Jobs To Be Done for the trading lifecycle, co-defined by key stakeholders and domain leaders.
We automated volume forecasting, revolutionized document review with AI, and unified the fragmented trading platform into a single interface.
Below are 3 examples of how we applied human centered design to lead this effort.
Before: Drift forecast tool designed by developers
Traders needed to adjust forecast volumes granularly, without affecting overall volume to simulate the forecast.
After: Drift forecast redesigned to allow granular adjustments of volumes
The fields included semantic arrows that instantly conveyed trend direction, allowing traders to absorb critical information before even processing the numbers. The final touch was updating the language so match the mental models of the traders than the technologists.
Locking volume percentages prevented upstream updates from cascading adjustments
"We would've never thought to ask the kind of questions you (design) did. And just a couple right questions led us to a game changing insights!"
— Senior Software Developer
We delivered significant impact by making simple updates to the forecasting experience:
Transformed a 30-minute manual task into a 5-minute automated process
Eliminated calculation errors and improved trade accuracy
Saved approximately $1.1M+ in risk mitigation compounding YoY
2
Rocket Review
Increasing productivity by automating audits
Document review was a major bottleneck in trading. The system had numerous flaws: cluttered interface with poor navigation and overlapping windows, limited viewing options, no client communication tools, and poor visibility into audit metrics.
Each of the 3 audit pipelines had its own tool and auditors spent hours staring and comparing screens with 50-200 documents per loan. The audit teams felt constantly understaffed and overworked.
Before: Rocket Review had multiple tools for different pipelines
Before: A tedious stare and compare auditing experience
Before: A cluttered multi-document view with overlapping windows
We identified an opportunity to simplify the audit workflow and automate 62% of audit tasks with AI and design.
Working with our senior designer and product partners, we reimagined the document review process. Our automation approach focused human attention where it added most value, and we created a clean, integrated experience for the remaining manual tasks.
After: A permission based single tool for all pipelines
After: An exception resolution based experience eliminating 62% audit tasks
After: A multi-document window that make it easy to navigate documents from one place
"I love how it compares all the documents, spots the differences, and even asks you questions like 'Hey, this loan amount doesn't match - which one is correct?' It's like having another colleague!"
— Senior Auditor
Our transformation yielded dramatic results:
Reduced audit time by 76% (from 8 hours to 1.6 hours for 1,224 audits)
Decreased documents viewed per audit from 13 to 5
Saved approximately $40,000 in compensation per team member
Improved accuracy through AI-powered validation
3
Rocket Exchange Homepage
Streamlining experience by unifying workflows
The trading ecosystem's fragmentation was most evident in its interface – four separate applications forced traders to navigate between different entry points, causing confusion and inefficiency. The system provided no visibility into trade cycle status, health, or technical incidents that could impact accuracy.
A key breakthrough came through fostering creative collaboration. At a company event, my senior designer connected with frontend developers about interface challenges. This casual conversation sparked inspiration, leading to an overnight redesign of the Rocket Exchange homepage.
Rocket Exchange homepage redesigned
"The moment we saw the demo, all our jaws dropped. We couldn't have imagined having something so elegant put together so quickly. The vision became clear to everyone and the bar was set"
— Director of Product Management
This organic collaboration unified four separate applications into a single, intuitive starting point. The result was a cohesive, personalized dashboard for all Rocket Exchange users. It provided quick visibility into trade system status, health, and issues, and served as a highly polished "front door" to our platform.
Our technical transformation required equal attention to cultural change.
We faced initial resistance, particularly from engineering teams questioning the need for change in their frontend framework and adoption of our design system.
The common refrain was, "Why should we do all this work just to make it look pretty?" – a natural response to design systems that, while problematic, was familiar.
My senior designer and I developed a multi-faceted approach to build trust and demonstrate value:
Orchestrated hands-on workshops on design systems and frontend development
Led educational sessions on the Laws of UX with practical examples
Deployed our technically-skilled designer to help solve complex styling challenges
Built one-on-one relationships across teams to create a network of design advocates
A section of the interactive presentation from the Laws of UX workshop
"I think having you guys (design) in it with us, speaking our language really built trust with our teams. The engineers are now holding each other to a higher standard of the front-end implementation."
— Frontend Developer
The homepage redesign catalyzed a broader shift in engineering culture. It democratized and created shared ownership of design implementation, with the frontend community functioning as an extension of the design team.
Our transformation initiative delivered significant quantifiable benefits.
"This work served to set the standard for all frontend user experiences that followed. Many other developers were inspired and stepped up to build new features at this same level of quality."
— VP of Engineering
Strategic design leadership transformed both our systems and culture. By focusing on users and collaboration, we converted a risky manual operation into a streamlined platform serving traders and the business alike.
The Jobs To Be Done framework continues to influence how teams work, with the creation of Work Streams maps and service blueprints per execution type structured around the Jobs To Be Done.