Wells Fargo Home Mortgage · Financial Services
Getting the Right Problem Right Ended 12 Years of Friction
Broke a 12-year cycle. Redesigned around how teams actually work together.
Wells Fargo was in the middle of a technical replatforming effort — creating an opportunity to rethink an internal policy reference resource used by loan origination teams. But progress had stalled for years.
Before
Multiple attempts to improve the experience had failed to gain traction, and after more than a decade of trying, IT and business leaders still couldn't align on what the system should be.
At the same time, the organization was preparing to move forward with an approach that would have required an investment in the range of several million dollars. The risk wasn't just spending the money — it was investing further in a solution built around the wrong understanding of the problem.
Inside Looking Out
The prevailing vision was straightforward: build a centralized, static library of policy information.
The assumption was that better access to content would solve the problem. That assumption extended to how the system itself would be used — designed around the idea that employees would interact with information on a single computer screen, in a relatively contained workflow.
But this approach reflected how organizations imagine information gets used — not how teams actually work in fast-moving, collaborative loan origination environments.
Outside Looking In
We went into the field to observe how teams actually worked — not in conference rooms, but in their everyday environments.
What we found reframed the problem entirely. Loan origination wasn't an individual activity — it was deeply collaborative. Teams operated across experience levels, interpreting complex policies together, often in real time. They relied on each other — not just systems — to make sense of it all.
What mattered wasn't only access to information. It was relevance, context, and shared understanding.
We also discovered something deceptively simple, but critically important: virtually every employee had developed a multi-screen workstation configuration. People weren't working from a single contained interface — they were constantly moving between applications, documents, references, communications, and workflows simultaneously.
That changed everything about how information needed to be surfaced, prioritized, and navigated.
- Junior team members looked to more experienced colleagues for interpretation and reassurance
- Senior team members acted as informal guides, translating complexity into action
- Decisions were often shaped as much by conversation as by documentation
- Information usage was dynamic, spatial, and highly contextual — not static
The concept of a passive library didn't support how work actually got done. The gap wasn't information — it was how information and judgment flowed between people in the real working environment.
After
Instead of building a better library, we helped redefine the system around how teams actually operated.
We introduced interaction models inspired by familiar consumer platforms like Amazon and Spotify — where discovery, curation, personalization, and contextual relevance are built into the experience. This enabled:
- Individuals to quickly find relevant information based on their immediate needs
- Experienced team members to curate and guide content for others
- Teams to align around shared understanding in real time
- Information to function naturally within multi-screen, multi-task workflows
The result was a system that didn't just store policies — it supported decision-making in a way that reflected how people actually worked together.
And just as importantly, it helped break a 12-year cycle of trying to solve the wrong problem.
So What?
In high-consideration environments, decisions are rarely just technical. They're human.
Whether it's a customer choosing a complex product or a team navigating internal systems, the weight of the decision shows up in how people rely on each other — how they ask questions, check assumptions, and build confidence together.
The danger is that organizations often design solutions from a distance — based on assumptions about workflows, behaviors, or needs that feel logical internally, but don't reflect lived reality.
Sometimes the difference between years of friction and meaningful progress comes from observing something as simple as how people actually arrange their desks.
The opportunity is to ask:
- Are we designing around assumptions — or observed behavior?
- Do we understand how people really work together under pressure?
- Are we solving the visible problem — or the underlying one?
Because in high-consideration environments, success isn't just about solving the problem. It's about getting the right problem right.