BuildWise: Knowledge Sharing Platform for Google Real Estate
Google's real estate teams span dozens of campuses globally, managing complex construction, commissioning, and facilities projects. Yet when one team solved a critical problem—like preventing HVAC commissioning delays or coordinating between controls and facilities teams—that insight rarely reached the next team facing the same issue. Lessons learned were scattered across email, confluence pages, and individual notebooks. When new projects began, teams reinvented solutions, repeated mistakes, and lost months to redundant problem-solving.
1. AI-Assisted Posting: Capture Without Friction
The biggest barrier to sharing was the blank page. Teams with rushed schedules couldn't justify 30 minutes of writing. So we built "Create with AI"—a feature that lets users upload construction photos, PDF meeting notes, voice recordings, or rough text, then generates a polished post in seconds. Users can then edit, add context, tag relevant project phases and topics, and publish.
2. Project-Aware Search: Find Answers, Not Just Documents
We observed that users didn't just want to search—they wanted answers to specific problems, with evidence and examples. The search system blends two approaches: keyword search for precision ("HVAC commissioning delays") and AI search for semantic understanding ("How do we prevent schedule slips?"). Every result surfaces the originating team, project phase, topics, and linked posts for context.
3. Suggestions Tracker: From Idea to Implementation
Ideas die in meetings. We designed a Suggestions Tracker that lets any team member propose a process improvement—with a category, topics, description, target group, and assigned owner. Suggestions flow through a Kanban board: To Do → In Progress → Under Review → Completed. Every suggestion is linked to relevant posts and pinged to the right stakeholders, making accountability visible and preventing ideas from falling through cracks.
To ensure consistent, scalable design across the platform, we built a comprehensive design system with foundational colors, typography, and custom component variants. All components were documented in Figma and implemented in React, enabling rapid iteration while maintaining visual coherence.
We iterated extensively on key layouts: the home feed with post cards, post detail pages with rich context and comments, and the suggestions tracker. Early user feedback revealed that users wanted a side panel for quick post viewing without losing context—a pattern we refined across multiple iterations.
“Before BuildWise, I wouldn't have found out that the Singapore team solved this exact problem. Now I can search, find the post, see their approach with attachments, and contact them directly. That's saved us weeks.”
A team at Austin faced repeated HVAC commissioning delays due to last-minute control logic changes. They posted their solution using BuildWise's "Create with AI" feature, uploading meeting notes and a pre-handoff checklist. Within days, a team at Seattle searching "HVAC commissioning delays" found the post, implemented the same pre-handoff checklist approach, and reduced their delays by 3 weeks. The knowledge captured during one project immediately prevented delays on another—exactly the cross-campus collaboration BuildWise was designed to enable.
Looking ahead, we're exploring team-based insights dashboards, native integrations with Confluence and Google Calendar to surface relevant posts in context, and expanded voice + image capture on mobile. The core thesis—that distributed teams thrive when knowledge flows freely—is proving sound, and each new feature is designed to lower friction even further.
Real estate teams are mobile-first. We designed responsive mobile views for all core flows: Feed discovery, AI-assisted posting from job sites, quick search, and suggestion browsing. Mobile usage accounts for ~40% of total engagement, with particularly high adoption during construction phases when teams are on-site.
BuildWise demonstrates how thoughtful UX can unlock organizational knowledge. By removing friction from posting (AI assistance), making search intelligent and context-rich (hybrid keyword + semantic), and tracking improvements from idea to action (suggestions tracker), we've transformed how a global real estate team learns from itself. The result is faster problem-solving, reduced duplicate work, and stronger cross-campus collaboration—all enabled by design that anticipates user intent and removes barriers to contribution.
BuildWise solved a fundamental challenge in distributed organizations: how to capture, share, and apply knowledge at scale. What started as scattered email threads and forgotten meeting notes became a living repository where one team's breakthrough becomes another's starting point.