At the start of the project, I was aware that there had been a few other attempts before my time to get a construction network off the ground. It was my intent to keep momentum up as the project was kicked off. One of my goals early on was to simultaneously drive alignment and excitement internally within the organization to keep the project funded and moving forward.

I did this through rigorous documentation and making promo videos of what the construction network could be one day. As cheesy and cringe as some of these videos feel now, they played an important role in keeping the organization speaking the same language and moving in the same direction.

A few examples: Internal Strategy Document · Vision video

The Procore Construction Network was to be a marketplace, and I had never designed one before. So my very first step in discovery was dissecting other marketplaces — I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

I did a deep dive into the most successful marketplaces on the web, studying what was setting the standard for best practice. This was both to educate myself and to get my PM partner and engineering lead looking at the same strong patterns early in the process.

My goal was to identify the most important shared elements across these marketplaces — both for the searcher and seller experience, and for SEO.

Still in the discovery phase of the design process, we set out to better understand the real-world experience of our customers.

We did this through discovery calls that I ran, having our customers walk us through their journey, as it existed at that moment, of how they went about looking for new partners and new opportunities.

All of these calls were recorded and captured in visuals.

Unshared research is often wasted research.

We paired that with marketplace audits and what we already knew from Procore's company records—not just vibes from the calls.

Together with our PM and lead engineer, we worked at a very high level to map the key journey maps and flows in the Construction Network. The questions in front of us:
How will users flow through this experience?
How will they accomplish all that they need to accomplish?

Those high-level flows were put together with members of Product, UX, and Engineering in the room.

Before moving to high fidelity, I designed everything in grayscale. Introducing color and polish too early risks shifting the conversation away from what actually matters — whether the flows and features are right. These wireframes were shared internally for alignment and iterated on based on feedback.

The PCN sat between Procore's marketing site and the core app, which meant the design system did too. There was no clear system to inherit, and I knew that debate could become a distraction. Staying in grayscale kept everyone focused on the right problems until we were ready to have the visual design conversation.

For search results I leaned toward tight rows over big cards so GCs could scan and compare fast.