Built a production project management platform from 0 to 1 for PMO leads and executive leadership at RealPage.
TL;DR
RealPage's PMO team was managing a growing portfolio of enterprise projects across spreadsheets, email threads, and five disconnected tools. I designed and co-built PMOrbit — a role-aware portfolio management platform — from zero to production. It eliminated 5+ hours of weekly reporting per PM, cut PDF report generation from 2 hours to one click, and is actively used in production today.
Background
RealPage is an enterprise software company serving the real estate industry. Its internal PMO oversees a portfolio of concurrent technology projects spanning multiple business units — each with its own stakeholders, dependencies, and delivery timelines.
When I joined, the team had no dedicated tooling. Project health lived in spreadsheets. Status updates travelled by email. RAID logs were maintained manually in shared documents that quickly fell out of date. Executive reporting required a PMO lead to spend a full afternoon each week assembling slides from multiple sources — every single week.
Project health & RAID logs
Status updates & escalations
No single source of truth
Contribution
I was the solo PM and a contributing builder on this project. I ran all product discovery, defined requirements, made prioritisation calls, and worked directly in the codebase alongside the engineering team throughout the build.
This gave me an unusually tight feedback loop: I could validate assumptions by shipping a change and observing behaviour the same day, rather than waiting for sprint reviews.
Research
Before writing a single requirement, I ran four weeks of structured discovery across four methods. Expand each to see what we found.
Synthesis
Three insights from discovery shaped every major product decision that followed.
PMs weren't struggling because existing tools were bad. They were struggling because no tool spoke to all their stakeholders, so humans became the translation layer between tools. The product needed to eliminate that layer, not replace one tool with another.
What a PMO lead needs on their screen at 9am is completely different from what an executive needs before a board call. A generic dashboard serves no one well. The product had to know who you were and surface the right things first.
Stakeholders had stopped trusting spreadsheet data precisely because anyone could edit it without a trace. Any automation we built needed to be transparent about what it did and when — otherwise we'd replace one trust problem with another.
The Product
PMOrbit is a web-based portfolio management platform built on a .NET Core API with a React + TypeScript frontend. It serves four distinct user roles from a single application, each with a role-aware default view.
On login, each user lands on a dashboard configured for their role. PMO leads see portfolio health and delivery velocity. PMs see active projects, RAID items, and milestones. Executives get a clean summary — no noise, just signal. No configuration required.
Why this decision
“The initial instinct was a single universal dashboard. After two rounds of feedback, it was clear that a PMO lead's 9am view has nothing in common with what an exec needs before a board call.”
Trade-offs
The first version of the backlog had 34 features. Every stakeholder had something they wanted at launch. Scoping the MVP was the hardest product decision I made, and the one I spent the most time defending.
The hardest cut was the document hub. PMO leads wanted it badly — a centralised repository for project artefacts and sign-offs. But it didn't address the core trust or assembly problem, and building it well would have delayed the dashboard and RAID log by two sprints. We shipped it in v1.1. The dashboard adoption created the forcing function for document hub adoption later.
I also decided to ship AskOrbit as a constrained feature rather than scope it out entirely. The interview data was unambiguous: the most common PMO support request was “What's the status of X?” We launched with status queries only and expanded from there.
Impact
0+
hours saved per PM per week
on status assembly and reporting
Executive PDF report generation
0%
faster dashboard load times
from 8s+ to under 500ms
0%
reduction in handoff friction
across sprint cycles, measured via survey
0%
delivery reliability restored
on notification workflows
Live in production today
Actively used by PMO leads, project managers, and executive stakeholders at RealPage
Retrospective
We had good qualitative signal from interviews but almost no quantitative data in the first three months of production. That made prioritisation harder than it needed to be — I was making calls based on stakeholder feedback alone, without usage data to validate or challenge it. I'd ship telemetry alongside the first feature, not as an afterthought in month four.
The hardest part of this project wasn't building the features — it was getting the team to trust a new system over the spreadsheets they knew. Every release required a short demo and a clear answer to "what's in it for me?" A structured rollout plan from the start — champions in each team, guided onboarding, an explicit deprecation timeline for old spreadsheets — would have accelerated adoption significantly.
We built AskOrbit as a feature and it quickly grew to feel like its own product — with its own user needs, failure modes, and feedback loop. It warranted its own discovery sprint. I'd treat it as a product-within-a-product from day one, with a dedicated scope and a clearer definition of what it should and shouldn't answer.