Agent Tools: Strengthening the Agent-Client Relationship

B2B

Product Strategy

Delivered

Industry

Real Estate Tech

Client

Movoto Real Estate

The Setup

In April 2024, leadership kicked off a new initiative: how to better support the relationship between agents and their clients. For me, that meant a sudden pivot. I'd spent nine years at Movoto designing for consumers, a user I knew intuitively, almost reflexively. Agents were a user I understood conceptually but had never designed for directly. I had to rebuild my intuition from scratch. Their workflows, their pressures, their relationship with the app, none of it was where my instincts were calibrated. I was nervous. I leaned in anyway.

The Challenge

The data made the urgency undeniable. Warm introductions were 4–5x more likely to close than cold leads. Showings within 14 days were 20x more likely to close. In real estate, timing isn't just important, it's often the difference between a deal happening and a deal evaporating. Yet agents had no real-time visibility into what their clients were doing. When a client saved a home, requested a tour, or showed signs of serious engagement, the agent often didn't know until it was too late to act. The tools existed, but they lived on web, slow, fragmented, and disconnected from how agents actually moved through their day.

What I did

The first thing I had to design was my own understanding. Consumers and agents look at the same app and see two different products. A consumer is browsing; an agent is running a business. Every moment in the app has a cost attached to it. Once that distinction clicked, the design problem clarified into two connected gaps, visibility and action, and I designed a feature for each. The Client Dashboard gave agents a centralized view of client engagement, prioritized so they could see who needed attention without digging through individual profiles or relying on memory. The hard design call wasn't what to show, it was what to leave out. Every element on that screen had to earn its place against an agent's time.

Push Notifications closed the action gap. Agents were drowning in SMS alerts, repetitive, undifferentiated, easy to ignore. Claiming a referral meant opening a text, tapping a link, getting redirected to a browser, and navigating to the right screen. The redesign brought agent tools into the native app and replaced that multi-step redirect with a single tap that landed agents exactly where they needed to be. The harder design problem wasn't the UI. It was the notification hierarchy, figuring out which signals deserved interruption and which didn't. That decision required understanding how agents actually prioritize their day, which is the kind of thing you can't shortcut by reading a brief.

The Outcome

Two engineering-ready features that gave agents something they'd never had: a complete picture of client engagement and the ability to act on it in a single tap. Together they closed a loop that had been costing agents deals quietly and consistently. The project was paused due to organizational changes before launch. The design problem was solved.

The Tension

I had to unlearn what "good UX" looked like. The patterns I'd internalized over nine years were calibrated for a user with time, curiosity, and emotional space, someone deciding where to live. Agents have none of that surplus. Designing for them meant getting comfortable with not knowing, asking more questions than I usually need to ask, and trusting that craft would still show up on the other side of the discomfort.

What I learned

Systems thinking isn't just about how screens connect, it's about how people connect. The Dashboard and Notifications weren't valuable independently. They were valuable because together they closed a loop: an agent could finally see what was happening with a client and do something about it in the same moment. Designing that loop required holding two very different users in mind at once. That's a muscle I didn't fully have before this project. I do now.