The Compass Mission
Summary
Greg Petroff, the SVP of Design at Compass & UXR, talks about the Compass mission and how User Research and Design play a crucial role in building a groundbreaking platform for real estate agents.
Key Insights
-
•
User research plays a fundamental role in shaping meaningful experiences on technology platforms, especially those integrating machine learning and cloud services.
-
•
Compass focuses on deeply understanding real estate agents as a unique user community to tailor products that fit their specific mental models and workflows.
-
•
Platforms can offer strong business advantages by driving user affinity and repeatability but risk alienating users if not designed empathetically.
-
•
Compass’s business model aligns its success directly with the success of individual real estate agents, creating a unique incentive for user-centric product development.
-
•
The real estate market is highly fragmented and diverse, making it a rich environment for user research with many behavioral, demographic, and regional differences.
-
•
A flat company structure at Compass allows researchers direct access to senior leadership, including the CEO, enabling faster impact and alignment.
-
•
Compass fosters a culture of transparency, vulnerability, and openness where employees are encouraged to focus on outcomes rather than ownership or egos.
-
•
The pace at Compass is fast and entrepreneurial, requiring comfort with change and negotiating the tension between speed and quality, especially in research.
-
•
Research teams at Compass are growing rapidly and work closely with product teams in a squad model, with cross-product research to understand broader customer journeys in development.
-
•
Greg Petraff’s background spans architecture and UX leadership across multiple large organizations, shaping his advocacy for user research and culture-building at Compass.
Notable Quotes
"If agents do well, we do well. The more we know about you, the more we can make you better or fulfill your goals and aspirations."
"There is an enormous amount of diversity in the real estate agent community, from demographics to technology savvy to regional differences."
"Platforms need researchers and designers to make them meaningful and intentional for the people they are designed to serve."
"We want to know agents better than they know themselves to drive tailored, contextually relevant solutions."
"Compass is a pretty frank place where people feel safe to speak their minds, even at leadership levels."
"We focus on delivering high quality but also moving fast—being comfortable negotiating that tension is important."
"Real estate transactions are among the top five life events in terms of emotional significance for people."
"Our researchers talk regularly to the CEO and are closely involved in product decisions, making research highly impactful here."
"We are building cross-product research capabilities to curate a holistic understanding of agents across all workflows and touchpoints."
"We want our culture to be about the outcome, not about who owns what or who’s doing what on a piece of work."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If you lose the human relationship aspect, then you’re not really doing design operations."
Meredith Black Elyse HornbacherBuilding Community and Common Trends to Look for in 2021
December 17, 2020
"Companies parachuting in to 'study' marginalized groups often do more harm than good when they don't build local capacity."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"You don’t want so much governance that people can’t be creative, but you need just enough to help their process."
Michael LandEstablishing Design Operations in Government
February 18, 2021
"Risk doesn’t usually happen out of the blue; there are driving forces you can watch for."
Bassel Deeb Will OsbornDo More With Less: Equip and Lead Design Orgs Through Adversity
October 2, 2023
"We herded all of our unicorns and named them appropriately with clear, meaningful titles."
Tanya SnookDesigning the team experience: Building culture through onboarding
November 4, 2021
"Showing a clickable prototype beats still wireframes and style guides where people have to copy hex codes."
Allan LowsonRehashing the Double Diamond: Collaborating across functions with AI-assisted prototyping
June 9, 2026
"We can make this thing go faster, more people can access it, but we can have benefits for the planet as well."
James ChudleyDecarbonising User Journeys: How minimising enables us to do more with less
February 19, 2025
"I didn’t invest enough in slow and steady relationship building early on, and that led to major shifts."
Scott Jensen Sarah Delaney Carmen LiuShort Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"Maker time was the most difficult project I’ve ever handled, but it made a huge difference."
Brennan HartichCommunicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
November 7, 2018
