Michelle Parker

I work for Keller Williams in their tech department. They're obviously a real estate company, but they have a proprietary CRM and platform and suite of products that they offer their agents exclusively. So I'm a senior director of product at Keller Williams.

So about a year ago Keller Williams partnered with Stone Point Capital, which is a private equity firm. We've been working closely with some of their partner products and groups in there. They work with companies like Lone Wolf Technologies, Totality. We did have a round of layoffs recently and so we're working through some of those changes right now. And they did partner with Zillow on a pretty big partnership in the last week.

Yes, they did a partnership. It's with the market centers and it has to do with listing previews — something along that line. So yeah, they did make that announcement last week.

Yeah, so I currently am over what we call our enterprise shared services team. Our proprietary software grew really fast. We serve multiple audiences — the market center, which is the brokerage, the agent, and then the consumer. When we stood up the technology we were going really fast, standing up all these platforms and products. A couple years ago I stood up what's called our enterprise shared services department, and the goal of that is a few things. One, it's really going back through the platform and standardizing both the technology and the user experience design. So think XDS falls under me — anything like profile, settings, reporting, all of those cross-cutting kind of products that are comparable across all the platforms or used across all the platforms. Additionally, I own our launchpad, which is our integration. So anyone we're doing third-party integrations with to integrate with our platform — I cover all of those areas of the product.

Keller Williams agents — the way it works, again, is proprietary and exclusive. All of our agents pay a tech fee and the technology is included in that fee. So they're getting the full suite of technology products when they sign up to be a real estate agent with Keller Williams. Additionally, our brokerages — they have Command MC, which is their back-end software. And then we do have a consumer product, but that's essentially a product for the agents to use with their clients.

Yeah, I mean, they certainly have. Funny enough, even as I was driving in here, one of the guys on my team sent me an all-caps "I figured it out," because he's creating kind of agentic workflows for us in products to be able to use to accelerate our work days. So it's impacting how you're doing internal processes and streamlining some of the ways we do requirements, user stories, anything across that. You've got your internal products. And then of course you're seeing all of these AI-native products pop up, and they're doing software and product development in a way that — I mean, we've spent 10 years building something and they're building it in two days. So it's really shaking up how you approach new products. We of course have been infusing AI into everything just like every other person across the board.

But it spans deeper than that. We may need to go to a deeper level of essentially an AI-native platform as consumers start using AI more broadly and are used to more chat interfaces and things being done for them. So we're approaching any new innovation to infuse AI or be AI-native. It's completely changing both how we're operating in product and how we're building products.

Exactly.

So especially for us, we have a CRM, right? Where you go in and you have different applets and you do different functions within those applets. Honestly, a lot of what we've gotten over the last few years is "tell me what to do. There's so many things to do. Tell me what to do and when." And so now the shift is that they want to come in and just be told what to do. They don't want to have to go find the things to do.

So it's changing the psychology of how humans are interacting with technology, too. As opposed to going in, trying to figure out how to do stuff, they want to just go in and be told what to do. So it's really shifting how you're creating that experience. OpenAI did that — they made AI conversational. You feel like you're talking to a person, but it's technology. So it really shifts how you're building things, thinking about building things in a completely different way than just giving them tools to do stuff. You're giving them the tools and then the tools are doing the stuff for them as well.

Here's how I say it. I think with anything, any future technology, including AI — and we've just seen it over 30 years — everything that comes out makes you more convenient. Literally on the way over here, I was like, I can't get around Austin without my GPS in front of me on my screen. Whereas before, people used to use maps and then they knew how to get places. I think AI is the same concept, just in an accelerated way. 80% of people are just gonna use it for its convenience, and then the people that are really gonna accelerate are the ones who know how to leverage it in an efficient way, or build it, or know how to use it efficiently.

Being in product, candidly, part of your job is to make other people's lives more convenient. But for me, I always wanna ensure that I'm critically thinking and using AI because it's got powerful tools, but also still being able to think — think and do and figure stuff out. So there's a convenience in AI and all of the things it gives you, and that's great and it can make things more efficient, but don't lose your ability to critically think where it matters. So that's kind of my philosophy on it.

Yeah, so what excites me is the efficiency. When you're doing tedious tasks, the efficiency of AI and making things easier, whether it be conversationally with an AI or these agentic solutions that take some of that tedious overhead out of it. I love that. I love that it's new and there's new opportunities and new challenges that come with it. I'm a big fan of change and evolving to change. So those two things are exciting.

What keeps me up at night a little bit is — it's certainly scary to think about how much it could automate certain jobs out of places. People have been doing certain things their entire life, including myself. My whole professional career. And what does it mean for what that role looks like going forward? Does product remain the same? Or how much does it change from a traditional SDLC into — what does product mean post AI-everywhere world? Does it exist? So those are the scary things. Where does this take us? Where does this take me and my role specifically? Where does it take the world? As you talk about, if everyone's just doesn't know how to fish, like what happens? So I am excited by it, but also terrified by it.

Not a lot. I do live out on a farm, so again, not super. I do my job, I work, I try to keep focused, but as I mentioned, I have two kids and live on a farm. So I'm very much that person that's like, disconnect, but love it when I need it.

When I say I'm excited about it, I'm gonna lean in and do it in my job, but as far as my real world, just in case, we're kind of shifting a little bit more, if that's a reality.

So five years ago, COVID hit and everything went home. I was very against working from home. I loved being in the office and I loved the collaboration. I also had my first child at that point. My husband wanted to move out into the country. He's always been more off-the-grid. I was like, absolutely not, that will never happen. I will have to die or divorce before that happens. And fast forward five years later, two more kids later, returning to office in an oversaturated city of traffic, just constant bombardment. Even with kids, it feels like you have to be at a party or at a playground or whatever. And I was like, my brain — I'm pretty organized and my brain is getting way too over-stimulated. So I was like, yeah, let's do it. I really wanna see my kids grow up on a farm and not a phone. Going back to, I love the technology and I love it implemented when it's needed, but you still need to have that grounding. For my kids, I really wanted to provide more of a simple lifestyle for them to learn — actually learn some of those mechanical things behind the scenes, like raising chickens and things like that — and being a little bit disconnected from the world.

Being able to be forced to be disconnected — you just can't really force that in the city. So that was the choice my family and I made. It was made possible by the fact that we both could work remote. So it's interesting that we're taking advantage of some of the modern-day technologies, but also taking advantage of being able to live a more simple life. So we're walking hypocrisy. It's fine.

I think so. I mean, for the good of their psyche and their peace of mind. I am very happy with the decision I've made, and that I'm able to take the best of both worlds and enjoy both.