A committee member reviewing figures on a laptop at a boardroom table beside printed summaries

Portfolio · Commercial real estate association · member firms

Competing firms submit, and the committee sees only the numbers.

Brokers submitted award transactions in spreadsheets, and review and judging were handled by email. Competing firms needed a guarantee that their deals stayed private from each other.

The work

What we built, and why

The problem

The association runs an annual awards program for its member firms. Brokers entered their transactions in a spreadsheet template and emailed them in. Review inside each firm happened by reply-all, and the judging committee worked from printed packages.

The firms compete with each other. A deal list in the wrong inbox is a real exposure. The program needed confidentiality it could state plainly, not a request that everyone be careful.

What we built

The portal is invite-only. Each person signs in with a work account or a verified guest account, and MFA is enforced. What they can see is decided by a permission engine tied to their firm and role.

Brokers enter transactions in a guided form or import the familiar template. The portal checks the figures before anything is submitted. A reviewer at the firm approves or returns each package, and every step is recorded on a timeline.

The committee view is where the design matters most. Names are removed by the server before the data leaves it, so a redacted package cannot be un-redacted in the browser. The program owner runs invitations, rules, and announcements from the administration pages without a developer.

The screens

What the people using it see.

Drawn illustrations with sample figures. They show the layout and the measures, not the client's data.

Portfolio summary. Each broker's starting view: what is in scope, what still needs fixing, and the award level the current figures point to.
Review queue. The reviewer at each firm approves or returns a package with a note. The committee receives approved packages only, with names removed.

The result

What changed

Submissions, review, and judging now run in one place with a record of every decision. Firms can see their own packages and nothing of anyone else's, and the committee judges on the figures alone.

More work

Other projects

The full portfolio

Client names and client data are withheld. Every screen on this page is an illustration drawn with sample figures, not a screenshot of a live system.

Your turn next

Start with a written assessment.

Each of these projects was scoped from an assessment of the systems the company already ran. The assessment is yours to keep either way.