In 2018, the client came to the consulting firm I worked for with an open brief: they wanted a digital way for customers to engage with their security program. No product spec, no defined scope — just a recognition that something needed to exist.
This is one of the largest security services firms in the world. Their customers — retail chains, corporate offices, convention centers, nonprofits — hire the firm to staff officers at their sites and run their security programs. Between those customers, the district managers who own the relationships, and the officers on the ground, the entire operation ran on phone calls, emails, and manual processes. There was no digital infrastructure connecting any of it.
The brief came from the CTO. I started with research.
Before designing anything, I went into the field with a research partner. I conducted 15–20 in-depth interviews with customer stakeholders and 5–10 interviews with district managers, then led contextual inquiry on-site: a leading tech company office, a major convention center, and a homeless shelter. Watching how security programs actually operate — the handoffs, the edge cases, the real friction points — gave us grounding that interviews alone can't provide.
From that fieldwork, I built out findings, insights, personas, journey maps, and a comprehensive set of recommendations. The immediate ask was addressed. But the research also surfaced a much larger opportunity: a multi-system future vision for how the client could modernize its entire digital ecosystem, across both the customer side and the operational side. 657 hours of research and design work later, two of those recommendations became products.
The first product was a customer-facing web application giving customers a real-time view of their security program: sites, assigned officers, schedules, incident reports, and system status, plus a direct communication channel with their district manager. I led the design from research through to production. It has been live since 2019 and is still in active use, with a continuous roadmap of improvements.
The second recommendation was a native mobile app for security officers — schedule management, clock in/out, and equipment requests. That shipped as well.
In July 2025, I was brought back in — this time to lead a delivery team, on a separate application serving a different part of the ecosystem. The stakes were immediate: one of the firm's largest customers was considering leaving. A competitor had started offering location verification — proof that officers were physically on-site for the full duration of their shifts — and the firm didn't have it. I was brought back to build it, and to build it better.
I started with a team of 12. The goal was to add geolocation capabilities and develop customer-facing reporting around it — not just matching the competition, but building something more accurate and more transparent.
In January 2026, the team shipped. The application went live to 80,000 users, with geolocation active for an initial rollout of roughly 1,000 and expanding. Response from users and operations teams has been strong. The contract was saved.
Following that delivery, I led a full end-to-end redesign and modernization of the application — untouched long enough that it wasn't set up to scale. That work runs January through September 2026.
While the redesign was underway, the engagement grew significantly. In October 2025, I ran a four-week AI proof of concept — a RAG-based chatbot giving field teams faster access to operational knowledge. Greenlit in December; a team stood up. I followed with a second four-week AI POC — an AI-assisted risk research tool. Also greenlit.
In December 2025, I scoped and received approval for a greenfield web application, with a native mobile companion planned, built specifically for field operations. By early 2026, I was leading 38 people across four concurrent workstreams — the platform redesign, the new field-operations app, the RAG chatbot, and the AI risk research tool. That second chapter alone has logged over 1,400 hours, and is still running.
A customer-facing web application in production since 2019, continuously improved. An officer mobile app shipped directly from the 2018 research. Geolocation live to 80,000 users as of January 2026, expanding. A full platform redesign underway through September 2026. A new field-operations app in active development. Two AI proofs of concept, both greenlit and in active development. A 38-person delivery team, built, staffed, and led across four concurrent workstreams.
The original research in 2018 produced a future vision for what this client's digital ecosystem could look like. Eight years later, that vision is still being built. That's the value of doing the research right the first time — the work it generates outlasts the engagement.
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