How Comma scaled an existing system instead of starting over

4 weeks from kickoff to a fully documented handover, against a hard COO deadline

4 team dashboards built around how each line of business already worked, not one shared template

Offerpad is a real estate solutions company running four distinct lines of business — cash offer, renovation, a direct investor marketplace, and premium listing. Daniele Merriweather's role, Director of Operational Excellence, was brand new to the company: a department of one, tasked with bringing process and visibility to all four. There was no formal project management system on the business side — engineering ran its own execution work through Azure DevOps, but nothing bridged that to the rest of the company — and no knowledge base beyond documents scattered across OneDrive and SharePoint.

Hers to keep, not ours to replace

By the time Comma showed up, Daniele had already done the hard part herself: a five-tier hierarchy (Strategy, Outcomes, Programs, Projects, Action Items), a Direct Request Log, an Issue Log, a Decision Log — all her own design. What it lacked wasn't thinking, it was reach. It worked for her, not for the business: no shared workflow the rest of the company could plug into, a crude executive dashboard that wasn't ready for the room it needed to be presented in, and a COO, Chris, expecting a full system demo with a hard date attached. The brief was never to start over. Comma's job was to take the architecture Daniele had already built and make it work for everyone who'd need to use it — not hand her a template and ask her to fit it.

Built around how each team already worked

Rather than one shared view forced on every department, Comma built four separate collaborative dashboards — one per line of business — each filtered to show that team only what was relevant to them, all drawing from the same central data underneath. A home-hub teamspace tied it together for the Operational Excellence team and doubled as the onboarding entry point for anyone new.

This is the whole point of centralising data in the first place: once everything lives in one place, you can view it from any angle — a single project, a whole program, or the strategic goal it rolls up to — without re-entering anything. That got tested almost immediately. Daniele's original structure could show a project's status, but not roll it all the way up to the strategic pillar it belonged to in one view. Comma restructured the relationships underneath it — nesting Outcomes inside Strategy — so leadership could now see an entire line of business, from top-level goal down to this week's project, on a single page. Exactly the kind of cross-functional visibility centralising the data was supposed to deliver, proven out under real pressure rather than in theory.

That pressure showed up directly, too: partway through the build, a high-priority company project landed on Daniele's desk with only a two-to-three-week runway — a genuine test of the system before it was even finished. She fed an 87-page planning document into the new Context database and used Notion AI to draft a first-pass project structure against it, mapping the document to programs, projects, and decisions in one pass instead of doing it by hand.

The result: everything talking to everything

Four collaborative dashboards give every line of business a place to work cross-functionally instead of in isolation. The executive teamspace gives leadership the full picture of what's happening in ten minutes, from one page, without chasing anyone down. And a product teamspace — never part of the original brief — grew straight out of the same templates built for everything else, so it arrived scaffolded rather than starting from a blank page.

Nobody asked for the AI skills either. Now anyone on the team can invoke Direct Request, Log an Issue, or Project Creation from any of those spaces, and collaborate through them the same way. The system isn't four separate builds that happen to share a database — it's one system, working the same way everywhere someone touches it.

We engaged Matt to complete our entire Notion Operational Excellence build out. This included creating the operating infrastructure, setting up databases, creating new properties, designing page layouts, and more. Working with Matt was such a great experience. I really appreciate how clear and thorough he was. I loved being able to learn from him as he built out our instance. Seeing his own best practices and how he sets things up for his own business was so valuable. I also appreciated his focus on incorporating AI into the workflow. This was such a great addition and made me feel that we were futureproofing our setup. The handoff and transition was smooth and detailed. The structure of our databases and the ability to use AI to query them has been a complete game changer. Notion has become that much more of a useful tool with the more logical build out and AI enablement.

Daniele Merriweather - Director of Operational Excellence

Already running on a system that works for you, but not yet for your whole team? Talk to Comma about scaling it without starting over.