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
"Communication is nourishment for you and your teams, not just sustenance."
Laura Gatewood Laine ProkayBeyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication
September 23, 2024
"John Kolko said design is a way of organizing complexity or finding clarity in chaos."
Nick CochranGrowing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections
June 3, 2019
"Hiring team members with lived experience was key for authentic engagement and facilitating workshops."
Alexia Cohen Adriane AckermanIncreasing Health Equity and Improving the Service Experience for Under-Served Latine Communities in Arizona
December 4, 2024
"The difference between being nice and being kind is subtle but core; kindness means telling the hard truth to help."
Joshua GravesWe Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)
April 28, 2025
"We use Stacy’s matrix and James Garrett’s layers of user experience to filter which projects go into the self-service model."
Nora Tejeda Giovanna AlonsoScaling Design Capabilities at BBVA Through a Self-service Design Model
June 10, 2021
"The biggest mistake in any implementation is ignoring the emotional side of change management."
Sofia QuinteroBeyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
March 10, 2022
"Removing research from underneath UX has increased our ability to influence at Salesforce."
Christopher GeisonTheme 1 Intro
March 25, 2024
"We can't track actual benefit uptake after users click through to official government sites, only clicks and visits."
Alan Williams Rose DeebDesigning essential financial services for those in need
February 10, 2022
"Cultural safety is behavior at scale—the behaviors we incentivize shape culture."
Alla WeinbergPeople Are Sick of Change: Psychological Safety is the Cure
July 20, 2023
