Zillow Home Loans is scaling fast. Mortgage revenue hit $190M in 2025, up 37% year-over-year. Purchase loan origination volume surged 67% in Q4 alone. Enhanced Markets now account for 44% of all “connections”, up from 21%.
More and more Zillow users are flowing through the mortgage funnel, and the growth engine is clearly working. But it seems like the operational backbone is not keeping up.
Today, every operator at ZHL navigates a fragmented stack:
Core Problem: There is no unified layer that tells an operator what to do next and why it matters. Work gets discovered through tribal knowledge, manual pipeline checks, and ad hoc Slack messages. This is why you are hiring a **Senior Product Manager, Work Discovery →* building an intelligent, unified work inbox for every operational role at ZHL*
From my research, here are most of the roles that exist at ZHL. The work inbox must serve all of them with role-specific views, shared context, and a consistent "what's next" pattern.
| Role | Core Function |
|---|---|
| Mortgage Loan Officer (MLO) | Originates loans, manages leads, guides borrowers from inquiry to close |
| Mortgage Origination Support Specialist | Partners with Premier LOs on lead management, borrower/agent engagement, contract input |
| Mortgage Production Assistant (MPA) | Pre-screens incoming files, reviews income/AUS/credit docs, submits complete files to underwriting |
| Mortgage Loan Processor | Reviews documents for data integrity and program eligibility, updates LOS/POS, coordinates with LOs and underwriters |
| Mortgage Loan Underwriter | Conducts thorough loan file analysis for investor & company compliance. |
| Mortgage Loan Closer | Prepares closing documents, confirms Closing Disclosure compliance, coordinates with underwriters & title companies |
| Manager, Mortgage Funding | Oversees wire funding, post-closing activities, warehouse banking partner relationships |
| Mortgage Disclosure Analyst | Reconciles final Closing Disclosures including post-funding revisions for compliance |
| Senior Insuring Specialist | Oversees insuring process for FHA, VA, USDA, and conventional loans |
| Senior Loan Delivery Specialist | Audits loan docs, ships files to investors, resolves ULDD errors via Encompass Investor Connect |
| Investor Suspense Analyst | Resolves suspense issues and audit findings from investors, MI companies, and agencies |
| Compliance Analyst, Control Testing | Executes file-level compliance control testing across the mortgage lifecycle |
| Business Process | Technology | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| CRM (Agent-side) | Follow Up Boss (Zillow subsidiary) | ✅ Confirmed |
| POS / Digital Application | Blend | ✅ Confirmed |
| Loan Origination System | Encompass | 🔶 Very Likely |
| Investor Delivery | Encompass Investor Connect | 🔶 Very Likely |
| Asset Verification | Plaid | ✅ Confirmed |
| Title/Escrow/Closing | Zillow Closing (Zillow subsidiary) | ✅ Confirmed |
| Workflow & Queue Management | N/A | 🔴 Gap |
| AI Underwriting | N/A | 🔴 Gap |
Other teams at ZHL own the underlying platforms: task and workflow engines, routing and capacity systems, and mortgage-specific point solutions. What no one owns today is how those capabilities are assembled into a single operator experience that hides the seams between systems.
The work inbox must consume events from every system in the stack and surface one prioritized next action per operator: