UWM brokers elite lending experiences with Dynatrace

United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) is the number one mortgage lender in the nation. UWM is a wholesale lender that works exclusively with independent brokers across the country to provide a faster, easier, cheaper mortgage experience that is far superior to any bank or retailer. To support this mission, UWM has an unwavering focus on putting the client experience first and providing elite client service to its broker partners. Through this strategy, UWM’s ultimate goal is to increase client lifetime value by driving client satisfaction and repeat business.

UWM has focused heavily on accelerating its digital innovation drive to bring new applications and features to market faster, building its services on a complex and dynamic hybrid cloud and containerized architecture. This advanced infrastructure went beyond the capabilities of the older monitoring tools, and while they did provide an understanding of service availability, the company wanted to gain better insights and visibility into the quality of the user experience.

Essentially, UWM wanted a more unified and intelligent approach to monitoring that would enable its product and application teams to shift from being focused on maintaining service availability, to managing the quality of the client experience. Its primary goal was to reduce the mean time to resolution for incidents, going from situations where it took several hours to resolve a problem, to being able to rectify it in under 30 minutes. After evaluating the market, UWM identified that Dynatrace was best suited to its needs, offering full stack observability across its containerized application stack.

“We want to make sure that no matter what happens, our applications are responsive, our clients are made whole, and that the overall experience reflects that elite client service we talk about every day,” said Tim Dolan, AVP, Observability Center of Excellence, United Wholesale Mortgage. “Once we brought Dynatrace into the organization, we saw the value it provided. It was an easy decision to make sure everything was in one unified platform. With over 1,100 team members in our IT department, the first thing we did on bringing Dynatrace in was ensure that everyone had access. Dynatrace has made it so teams from different backgrounds can speak the same language. In planning, it allows you to ensure that products are going to be observed properly and in crisis situations, everyone can start with the same basic understanding of what they're seeing.”

• Informed decisions: Dynatrace has enabled UWM’s APM team to transition from a network operations center to a function that provides observability as a service. This ensures that teams across the business have access to the insights they need to have more informed conversations about the value created by digital innovation. As a result, UWM can ensure that decisions about new application features are driven by data, making it easier to guarantee that they will bring benefits to the client experience.
• Increased ownership: With the full stack observability and analytics from Dynatrace, UWM has a unified source of insights that its teams can use to make strategic business decisions without requiring detailed technical knowledge or skill sets. As a result, teams have been able to adopt a shift left approach, taking ownership of the products and services that they are responsible for, embracing a mindset of ‘you build it, you run it’.
  
• Improved collaboration: The data-driven analysis from Dynatrace makes it easier for UWM’s teams to adopt a proactive approach to incident management. By identifying the precise root cause of incidents, Dynatrace enables UWM to reduce the number of people required in crisis rooms and makes it easier to break down silos and bring teams together to find a solution when problems occur.
  
• Getting on the front foot: Dynatrace’s automatic and continuous discovery capabilities have eliminated surprises in UWM’s software delivery lifecycle. Now, UWM can maintain full stack observability during deployments and visualize new applications before its teams know they exist. Teams no longer need to manually instrument or configure monitoring capabilities, which ensures they are always on the front foot whenever change occurs in UWM’s technology stack.

“Dynatrace is critical to meeting our company goals. It exists to help measure success and failure and look for ways to turn those failures into continued success,” continued Dolan. “We can now ensure that every team is prioritized, and they're heard and understood. Dynatrace gives us the insights we need to prioritize our clients and find things like tech debt to ensure that no matter what we do, we're not leaving anything behind, and we're always ensuring the stability and scale of our applications.”