Industry

CRE Tech

Product

GatherGov

Local government meetings turned into actionable insights for CRE Tech

View from a desktop or laptop

This case study will highlight I helped close an enterprise customer by delivering a great User Experience

Context

About GatherGov

GatherGov scrapes local government meetings from all over the US, processes them and delivers highly relevant reports for Commercial Real Estate that help them forecast the approval timeline for their projects, identify risks for new projects, know about zoning and legislative decisions before they are passed. There are many high value use cases apart from CRE.

The Problem

GatherGov had a screen called “Reports”, all the different types of reports like rezoning, projects, bonds etc., were presented in a tabular format with each row being a meeting. When the row is expanded, users will be able to see what exactly was discussed, along with the citations.

Now, for an enterprise customer whose sole purpose of using GatherGov was to track different projects, what specific to the projects were discussed on the meetings, what was the sentiment, timeline etc, the expanded row started to get very busy. Upon doing some competitor research I understood that Project Tracking is a much deeper use case and products exist to solely serve that purpose, and that it wouldn’t fit our generic “Reports” layout.

Pre-design Process

I went through a few user interviews, our customer also forwarded us their strategy and what they really want to know from tracking projects in a municipality.

Persona understanding:

We designed this majorly for the entitlements team. This is what the entitlement team does:

  • Research whether land can legally be used for industrial projects before the company even buys it.

  • Understand the rules, approvals, and government processes needed to build on a site.

  • Track meetings, hearings, and decisions from planning commissions and city councils.

  • Identify risks, delays, and political factors that could impact whether a project gets approved.

  • Predict timelines and complexity so the company knows how long it will take to get the green light to build.

Insights uncovered from user interviews:

1. When working in municipalities they already understand

  • They want a quick, high-level scan of projects before deciding which ones deserve deeper review.

  • Key details like project name, asset class, approvals sought, and filed date help them assess relevance instantly.

  • Only if a project looks important do they dive into its full history and meeting-by-meeting progression.


2. When working in unfamiliar municipalities

  • They open every project to understand how it has progressed and whether it's relevant to their interests.

  • They take notes, evaluate government and community sentiment, and learn the jurisdiction’s behavior through existing cases.


3. Time is money — literally

  • They often take loans to acquire land and build infrastructure, which creates significant carry costs (interest on borrowed capital).

  • Longer entitlement or construction timelines mean higher costs, sometimes reaching tens of millions.

  • Even a one-month reduction in timeline for a single project would justify their investment in GatherGov.


4. When they explore a project in depth

  • They want to see every meeting where the project was discussed, along with clear outcomes and decisions from each one.


5. They look for patterns across similar projects

  • They compare the approval timelines of related projects to understand how long entitlements typically take for the same asset class.


6. They need ways to revisit and share key projects

  • They want to save, bookmark, and share projects that matter to their team.

  • They also need PDF exports for internal discussions—many reviews happen in physical conference rooms where printed packets are still the norm.


7. They need clarity between facts and AI inference

  • They want a clear separation between verified data and AI-generated insights.

  • For any AI inference, they expect proof—citations from meeting audio, video, minutes, or patterns from similar projects.

  • Over time, as trust builds, citations may become less critical.


8. They want to stay updated on active or relevant projects

  • For projects they care about, they want to monitor upcoming meetings and know the agendas ahead of time.

  • They also want weekly alerts or reports about major events—new filings, ordinance approvals, or other meaningful shifts.

Solutioning

Decision to create a new screen for Project Tracking

I realized that the depth and complexity of the requirements couldn’t be supported by a simple expanding-row table. The existing Reports screen introduced several limitations:

  • The table could comfortably display only 5–6 columns, while the project use case required 11+ key data points, which would force a horizontal scroll and make scanning difficult.

  • Each row represented a project, but projects contain multiple sections of analysis, numerous meetings, citations, and related project links—far too much information to fit into a small expanded row.

  • Users needed to download a project as a PDF and have the layout closely mirror what they see on screen, which isn’t achievable with an expanding table format.

  • They also wanted to share a project easily, which becomes awkward when the project lives inside a collapsible row.

  • The lack of isolation created text overload, since expanded content competed visually with other rows still visible in the table.

  • Most importantly, placing project tracking inside the Reports section made it feel like “just another report,” diminishing the importance and depth of this workflow.

Because of these, it made sense to bring Project Tracking out of the reports and position that as a separate feature.

You can look at this like building reports with lego pieces vs custom sculpting it for a specific purpose.

Technically you can build a Hermione with Lego

But she won’t correct your Leviosaaa

Even though our customer was content with the table view, I needed to give them a much better user experience to seal the deal.

Final solution

Since the prospect was evaluating us directly against a competitor for UX, we went all in and delivered the solution options in 2 days. This is a walkthrough of the final design that sealed the $1m deal.

A rejected option that I preferred

We proposed two split views, one that had very few project data points and one that had it all. The tradeoff was the dedicated space on the right side for the project deep-dive. I thought the rejected option below would let them skim through the projects faster and decide which ones they wanted to dive deeper into. But they were okay with having only a few details but have more space dedicated to the project deep-dive.