The Compass Mission
Summary
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
"We risk deskilling users and overreliance, where people rubber stamp AI output without critical thought."
Christopher NoesselAI of the now: Designing for Agents
July 31, 2024
"Time constraints and budget limitations are the top obstacles to effective research today."
Caroline VizeThe State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022
March 9, 2022
"Flight is about adaptability – being ready to switch gears and pivot quickly in a global and changing environment."
Kate Koch Prateek KalliFlex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
September 30, 2021
"Create a UX brief with meetings and milestones so your PM knows where they need to be involved and where they don’t."
Jessamyn EdwardsSurviving Your UX Career in Enterprise Design
December 2, 2021
"Holding onto power too long might backfire because teams can make decisions without data, making you irrelevant."
Jemma Ahmed Steve Carrod Chris Geison Dr. Shadi Janansefat Christopher NashDemocratization: Working with it, not against it [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
July 24, 2024
"Discovery and delivery run parallel without a time dependency on each other, giving breathing room to think and act."
Sharbani DharBreathing Room for Delight
January 8, 2024
"There was a feeling at Brex that research was sometimes conducted for the sake of research, not resulting in impactful insights."
Ned Dwyer Emily Stewart James WallisThe Intersection of Design and ResearchOps
September 24, 2024
"Feel free to pelt our speakers with kind but tactical questions about how they got stuff done."
Bud CaddellTheme 2 Intro
September 30, 2021
"People don’t remember what you said to them, but they remember how you made them feel."
Michael WeirMixed Methods and Behavioural Science
May 26, 2023
