Context
I put this together for a product management interview. The prompt was a real problem at WealthTap, a company that offers homeowners a home equity investment (HEI) as an alternative to a HELOC or a refinance.
Homeowners couldn’t tell how long it would take to get an investment offer. That uncertainty hurt customer satisfaction, made sales forecasts unreliable, and had sales and underwriting spending time on deals that would never qualify.
What was going wrong
- Homeowners had no estimate of when they would hear back.
- Title and appraisal were the slowest and least predictable steps.
- Sales worked deals that later failed underwriting.
- Leadership couldn’t forecast revenue or staffing with confidence.
How I would diagnose it
- Pull historical deal timelines to see where the time actually goes.
- Interview sales, underwriting, and homeowners.
- Map the full workflow to find the handoffs where deals stall.
What I proposed
- Run title and lien searches at the start, so disqualifying issues show up before anyone spends time on the deal.
- Use third-party automated valuations to get an early property value instead of waiting on a full appraisal.
- Add a decision engine that scores risk and recommends investment terms, so unviable deals are filtered out early.
- Show homeowners live status and an estimated timeline in their dashboard.
Expected impact
- Homeowners get a timeline they can plan around.
- Sales spends its time on deals that are likely to close.
- Faster title and valuation decisions shorten the whole process.
- Forecasts improve because fewer deals stall halfway through.
What I took from it
Moving third-party data checks to the front of a workflow is often the cheapest way to make it predictable. Telling customers when to expect an answer also goes a long way, even before you make the answer faster.