Ask a community manager which package a closing needs, and they won't give you its name.
They'll give you the address.
A company running ninety communities ends up with hundreds of packages on the shelf. A resale here, an estoppel there, a lender questionnaire, a rush variant, one association that insists on its own wording for everything.
Four hundred products is an ordinary Tuesday.
And every one of them was named by a person, in a hurry, two years ago.
Nobody searches a catalog for the thing they're selling. They search for the house that's closing.So the catalog's own search box takes whatever the person actually has in front of them. Fuzzy text, yes — but also the property address, the lot and the block. It's the forgiving box we built for buyers back in post 05, turned round and pointed at staff.
The old index for this was a spreadsheet on somebody's second monitor. Completely accurate, right up until the morning somebody added a community.
Then bundles.
Sometimes four products get sold as a single product. So they can be grouped into a higher-level bundle carrying its own price — one line, one decision, one number to defend.
Building the package is the other half of the problem. Seven kinds of item, each with its own settings. From an empty screen that is a lot of boxes.
Describe it in a sentence. Then spend two minutes arguing with it.The builder reads that sentence and lays out the structure it heard. Then you fix what it got wrong, which is the entire point of letting it go first.
A five-step meter shows what's still missing. If Save is greyed out, it tells you why rather than sulking.
And if you wander off mid-build, it stops you at the door.
Losing half an hour of work to a closed tab is the kind of thing nobody ever reports. They just quietly stop trusting the software.
A catalog you can't search is a warehouse with the lights off.Next: why the person running the company and the person running one community can't share a dashboard.