Freeing the American People from the Bondage of Joyless Mortgage Technology
Many of you who know me have heard me describe my mission – freeing the American people from the bondage of joyless mortgage technology. For many years, this has been my easy and immediate answer to the question of what I do and why I do it. There is entirely too little joy out there in the software world, and there are entirely too few days on the planet. I’ve had a lot of loss in life, as we all have, and as I age, it becomes that much more important to spend my days with people I love doing things I feel passionate about.
Much of the dominant mortgage technology out there is . . . of a much older vintage than the modern technology products that get so much attention from the product legends of our time. Servicing operators are among the most innovative users out there, simply because they have had to fashion a staggering number of workarounds required to serve customers and implement the mountain of compliance requirements inherent in the heavily regulated field of mortgage. The technology debt created by this fragile and complex ecosystem is felt most painfully by the operators, otherwise known as “The Business”.
I love my work. I love my clients, my teams, my partners. I love the problems I face every day with my customers. There is certainly no shortage of opportunity to fix things and make them better for users. That continues to be my focus. However, with the mass availability of generative artificial intelligence (genAI), I now also spend a small fraction of my time on my new passion project – putting joy and purpose back in software development with genAI based approaches.
As we’ve discussed before, this is both existential to my business and professionally fulfilling. I’ve had a lot of fun working with our small but mighty AI team on a product we are incubating at PhoenixTeam. Phoenix Burst started its life with a very practical problem: How can we rapidly plow through the massive body of regulatory requirements in mortgage, parse out the requirements, and automatically generate software requirements? Being in the mortgage technology business, this is a problem we face daily, across a diverse commercial and federal customer base. We have more than 100 people who tackle this challenge every day, so it seemed like a useful place to start. Enter Phoenix Burst.
We had many twists and turns along the way while testing our idea. None of our team members really had any experience developing around generative AI technologies, so we had a steep learning curve. We learned the fundamentals and managed to graduate from AI elementary school. We think we’ve stumbled onto something cool and, much more importantly, useful. We got some feedback along the way, although not nearly as much as we need, so we are planning to roll out the concept within the company. We have a captive audience of Phoenicians who need help, and we hope to get massive amounts of feedback and ideas from them.
One of the great things about what we are doing with genAI is that if we get it right, it will certainly work in mortgage for our persevering servicing operators, but our hypothesis is that it will also work in any domain space where people are trying to cut time to value in software development. And let’s face it, that’s pretty much every domain space. We are hoping to empower product development teams everywhere to make more valuable software faster.
So, what is next for us? We are thrilled to showcase the development version of Phoenix Burst at the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) AI Summit in San Francisco this coming Monday, June 3, 2024. Not only are we “bursting” with excitement to demo our MVP, but we are more excited for the feedback and ideas Burst will invite. From there, we will roll out a beta product to a small internal user group followed by a generally available (GA) release to all of PhoenixTeam, and our early adopter launch later this year. I hope to see you at the Summit, in person or virtually. Come find me, I will have stickers and post-it notes for you!
