Change how a team works, then do the work the new process calls for

The company builds enterprise content management software used by healthcare systems, banks, universities, and government agencies to manage documents, automate workflows, and run business-critical processes. When I came in as part of a consulting team, the product organization was building and shipping, but UX wasn't yet embedded in how they worked. There was no shared design system, no established research practice, and no process framework for how design and research connected to product delivery.

The engagement started with a question that had to come before any product work: what would it take to change how this team works?

Before touching a single product, I embedded. Over a several-month observation period, I sat inside the delivery process — in sprint ceremonies, backlog refinement sessions, product strategy planning meetings — watching how work moved from idea to shipped feature. I mapped the gaps: where UX was getting bolted on instead of built in, where research findings weren't making it into backlogs, where design decisions were getting made without user grounding.

From that observation, I built a new process framework — a SAFe-based delivery model that integrated UX research, design, and validation into the existing Agile structure. I presented it to leadership, walked through how it worked, and began the work of getting the organization to operate differently. That framework became the operational backbone for everything that followed.

One product was a clinical document viewer, built to work as an extension to primary EMR systems. Its users were physicians across disciplines who needed to navigate patient records and view clinical documents in context: MRIs, physician's notes, prescriptions, lab results, imaging studies. Any document type that might be part of a patient record, the product needed to handle, including formats that required specialized viewing capabilities.

The challenge was the breadth of that surface area and the stakes of the environment. Doctors working in clinical settings don't have tolerance for friction — getting to the right document, in the right format, at the right moment is part of care. I approached the product as a viewing and navigation experience problem, grounding design decisions in how physicians actually move through a patient's record and what they need to see when.

The second product handled document scanning and intake — used by imaging teams at hospitals, banks, universities, and retail organizations to physically scan, index, and process documents. When I engaged, the product had significant technical capability but the user experience hadn't kept pace with how customers were actually using it.

I ran a comprehensive generative research program across seven customer organizations — hospital systems, a university, an energy company, a bank, a grocery chain, a logistics company, and a health system abroad. That covered five on-site visits and five remote in-depth interviews, plus two sessions with the internal Imaging Services team. Across those sessions I engaged 32 participants: administrators, team supervisors, scanning clerks, indexing clerks, verifiers, and solution engineers.

From 700+ individual findings, I built 150+ categorized insights across 26 insight categories and 68 identified opportunity areas. I developed six personas covering every role in the imaging workflow — including an assistive technology persona — and built full journey maps for the document lifecycle and each persona's daily experience.

The research output was a comprehensive user experience vision: a framework organizing what users need across five goals, translated into four distinct experience surfaces — Clerk, Supervisor, Admin, and Specialized — and a strategic roadmap for the product's evolution. That vision fed directly into the redesign, which went into active development.

Running alongside the product work, I built a design system — shared components, patterns, and standards serving across both products and future ones. Building the system was one piece. The other was standing up a governance team: the internal structure for maintaining it, making decisions about it, and keeping it current as the product portfolio grew. When I left, the system was in use and the team was operating it.

3,140 hours across 19 months. My role on this engagement was design, research, and process — not managing products through to production launch. Both products shipped after I had moved on to other work. What I can account for is what I delivered: full UX design for the clinical document viewer, ready for development; comprehensive generative research, a user experience vision, and product design across the full scanning and intake workflow; a design system built and in active use across the product portfolio; a governance team stood up and operating; and a SAFe-integrated UX delivery process framework adopted by the organization.