Rework during development dropped by about 90%. Years of quick fixes, replaced one piece at a time.
Context
The app had become a pile of quick fixes.
Palmtech is used by more than 40,000 home inspectors, and they don’t all work the same way. For years the team answered the loudest feedback by adding a button or a screen. That calmed the person who asked. It also made the next part of the job harder. The look of the app scattered, and it got hard to use and harder to build on.
I was brought in to undo that carefully. Clean up the screens a bit at a time, pull groups of features out, and replace them in an order we chose. Each change had to stay small enough that an inspector’s day still worked.
Outputs & Outcomes
Rebuild it underneath them, without making them start over.
I stopped reacting to one request at a time. We lined up the rebuilds: comments first, then navigation, then photos and video, then the rating lines. No release asks someone to relearn the whole app. Adding AI waited until those four were done, and it stayed small.
As each piece landed, I added settings so an inspector can choose how things work and look, instead of one default for everyone. I also built a working React prototype the whole team could open. You can step through each phase of the rollout, and look at an empty inspection or one filled with sample data. Product, engineering, and design looked at the same build, changed it together, and tested it with real inspectors before the React Native app caught up.
The main flows, queued in order. Comments went first, because that’s where inspectors disagreed the most. Then navigation, media, and ratings. Each release moves one group of features onto the new screens, and the rest of the day stays put.
Settings layered on the new screens. Settings go on top of the rebuilt screens as we ship them, so one inspector’s way of working doesn’t become the screen for everyone.
One prototype, many phases. The same React build can show each step of the rollout, empty or already filled in. That’s what product, engineering, and design use to build, review, and test in the field.