AlayaCare
Set up a cross-platform team that shipped continuously for two years, landing small, friction-reducing fixes that modernized the product experience and increased NPS by two points.
Achievements
- Increased NPS by two points by fixing high-friction moments across the most-visited pages
- Conceived, pitched, and ran a cross-platform team from scratch
- Shipped continuously for two years, evolving from small friction fixes to full workflows
Organize a Hackathon to Shift the Culture
Conway's Law was visible to our users: nobody was looking at the whole product experience. To change that, I organized a company-wide hackathon where feature teams could pick up any “paper cut,” in any product section, regardless of ownership.
Starting a culture shift was the point.
Hackathon posters used to recruit teams across the org
Pitching a Small Bet
“Create a small team to standardize and simplify user interface across the AlayaCare Platform. Run the experiment for 3 months and evaluate value vs. impact.”
The pitch
With a concrete backlog and organizational buy-in, I designed the smallest possible team structure that could address it:
I built a sponsor model around three executives across Product, Engineering, and Customer Service, who would act as a committee at each checkpoint and decide: stop or continue. This gave the team accountability, visibility, and protection from being deprioritized by siloed roadmaps.
I named it Connective Tissue, deliberately, because the mandate was to stitch together what the siloed teams had left disconnected. The name made the purpose impossible to misread.
Low investment. High potential return. Built-in accountability.
Impact
The First Three Months
The team shipped three rounds of improvements in the first cycle, changes that were already more stable and durable than most feature releases. At the checkpoint, the sponsor committee voted to continue.
Improved page density, standardized header profile information, prioritized vital info.
Growing the Scope
At six months, I proposed making Connective Tissue permanent, same lean structure, same sponsor model. The committee agreed. As the quick-win backlog cleared, I expanded the team's scope: core workflows, key landing pages, cross-team pattern work.
A new landing experience, anchoring first impression experience
Accelerating with AI
As AI tools matured, I pushed the team to adopt them early, not as an experiment, but as a structural decision. The same headcount could now take on work that previously required a full feature team. Connective Tissue became one of the first teams at AlayaCare to integrate AI meaningfully into front-end production.
The patient profile, prioritizing latest progress information.
A Small Team, a Lasting Shift
Continuous, unglamorous fixes to what already existed proved as strategic as building what's next, and moved AlayaCare from engineering-led to experience-led, one improvement at a time.