How Blend brings simplicity and transparency to consumer finance

In the book Attacks on the Press: Journalism on the World's Front Lines, President of the Pew Research Center and former Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal Alan Murray is quoted as saying, “What you saw in the crisis was... people may have had access to information, but if we can't access it in a way anybody understands then it doesn't make a difference."

The folks at Blend saw an opportunity to make that difference, setting out to build a platform that would bring simplicity and transparency to consumer finance. It was a lofty goal, but the product resonated with lenders or financial institutions looking for a simpler lending system, and the company flourished, tripling their workforce in two years. As it grew, information sharing became a pain point across teams — the sales team wasn’t getting marketing assets, product marketers couldn’t access the most recent product specs, and there wasn’t a central repository for institutional knowledge.

People Ops and HR use it to organize documents and share policies. The Product Teams use it to document and share specs. The Support Team shares troubleshooting and how-to guides for specific product issues. Blend’s Customer Success Team creates Confluence pages for each customer to track project statuses (usually the implementation of Blend), share meeting notes, and document product feedback.

As a Product Marketing Manager, Terrence works closely with the Sales Team to create assets and marketing materials. He also works with the Product Team to track features and updates that have been committed to clients. All this cross-functional communication was a slog before Confluence. The Sales Team wasn’t getting crucial updates about when assets or features would be available in a timely or accessible way.

“So, we created a central dashboard in Confluence for our product roadmap and what would be released over the next few weeks,” explains Terrence. “It became the single source of truth for client-facing teams and helped them track the things customers expected/looked forward to being released. All the client-facing teams use this dashboard to stay up to date on when things are releasing and also any materials (documentation, marketing collateral, demo videos) created to support the release.”

The Product Team also uses Confluence to keep the entire organization looped in. Every week they share staff-wide status reports on new features, pilot programs, and changes to a major project.