Case study 2026 Product engineering
BrokerLogs.
A multi-tenant workspace where an employee-benefits brokerage runs its book: team spaces for conversation and delegation, clients and policies in one place, compliance deadlines tracked, and the annual renewal pipeline moving so nothing falls through the cracks. Built and dogfooded at a real agency, then sold to others.
- Role
- Product design, architecture, build
- Stack
- Next.js / Clerk / Drizzle + Neon
- Surface
- Multi-tenant SaaS
- Status
- Live at brokerlogs.com
Context
A brokerage runs on email, Excel, and a dozen carrier portals.
A small benefits agency carries hundreds of groups, each with policies, carriers, and a renewal date that cannot slip. The book lives in spreadsheets, the conversation lives in email, and the deadlines live in someone’s head. When a renewal is missed, a client feels it.
BrokerLogs pulls that work into one place: the team talks in spaces, delegates with tasks, keeps the whole book of business in a shared system, and watches every group move through the renewal pipeline. It is the software an agency actually runs on, not another tab to check.
I built it multi-tenant from the first commit, dogfooded it at a working agency, and shipped it to others. It handles group and policy metadata only, never protected health information, so the trust boundary is clear from the data model up.
What I built
Four pillars, one workspace.
Spaces
Slack-style spaces for team conversation and delegation, so the work and the talk about the work live in the same place instead of scattered across email.
Book of business
Clients, policies, and carriers in one shared system: the agency's whole book, legible to everyone on the team rather than trapped in one person's spreadsheet.
Compliance and deadlines
The dates that cannot slip, tracked and surfaced before they become a problem. Overdue is a state the system shows you, not one you discover after the fact.
Renewal pipeline
Every group moves through renewal stages you can see at a glance, so nothing stalls silently. The pipeline is the heartbeat of the agency's year.
Under the hood
The architecture is the product.
A workspace that holds an agency's whole book has to be right about two things above all: whose data is whose, and what it will never store. Both are settled in the data model, before a single screen is drawn.
Multi-tenant from commit one
Each agency is a Clerk organization; every query is scoped to the tenant. Isolation is a property of the data layer, not a check bolted on per request.
Type-safe data layer
Drizzle over Neon Postgres, with Zod at the boundaries and TypeScript strict throughout. The shape of the book of business is enforced end to end, not hoped for.
No PHI, by design
The system stores group and policy metadata only, never protected health information. The trust boundary lives in the schema, so it cannot be crossed by accident.
Tested, not just typed
Vitest covers the logic and Playwright drives the real flows end to end, so a renewal moving through the pipeline is verified by a test, not by memory.
Observability and email
Sentry watches production and Resend handles transactional mail with typed React Email templates, so the app tells me when something breaks and reaches users when it should.
Built to feel calm
Base UI primitives, a small component vocabulary, and status color reserved for meaning. These people manage other companies' money; the interface earns their trust by staying quiet.
The bar
Simple enough for a 55-year-old broker; masterable by a 21-year-old.
Many brokers are not software-fluent; they live in email, Excel, and carrier portals. So the design bar was explicit: an experienced broker should never need training to use it, and a sharp new hire should be able to master it.
That shows up in the details. Labels sit beside icons, never mystery-meat buttons. Confirmations say what will actually happen. Empty states teach instead of sitting blank. Keyboard shortcuts are accelerators, never prerequisites. Personality lives in small touches, like sidebar themes, and never gets in the way of the task.
By design
The decisions, stated plainly.
These are design facts, not performance claims. Adoption and usage are worth measuring against real traffic; I am not going to put a number on the wall that I have not earned yet.
Tools it replaces
4 1Team chat, the book of business, compliance tracking, and the renewal pipeline, in one workspace instead of email plus spreadsheets plus carrier portals.
PHI stored
0Group and policy metadata only, never protected health information. The trust boundary is enforced by the schema, not by policy alone.
Tenancy model
1org eachEvery agency is its own Clerk organization, and every query is scoped to it. One tenant can never see another's book.
Software that ships
Need a real product built, not a prototype?
BrokerLogs is a multi-tenant SaaS I designed, built, and shipped end to end. If you have a business problem that wants software around it, that is the kind of work I do.