from Engineering to Experience Led
Breaking Siloes with Connective Tissue Initiative
“At times, direction is more important than speed”
Company: AlayaCare, Healthtech Saas Company, size 600+ employees
Role: Director of Product & Design
Mandate: Fix the highest-friction moments across the most-visited pages — and make the platform feel like one product.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Conceived, pitched, and ran a cross-platform team from scratch
Shipped continuously for 18 months, evolving from small friction fixes to full workflows
Shifted the culture — from engineering-led to experience-led
PROBLEM SPACE
Each team at AlayaCare owned a slice of the platform — scheduling, clinical, billing, reporting — and stayed there. Nobody was looking at the whole. The most-visited pages accumulated friction quietly, while feature teams focused on what to add next. That gap became my starting point.
PAPER CUTS — THE HACKATHON
Each team at AlayaCare owned a slice of the platform — scheduling, clinical, billing, reporting — and stayed there. Nobody was looking at the whole. The most-visited pages accumulated friction quietly, while feature teams focused on what to add next. That gap became my starting point.
That shift was the point.
PITCHING A SMALL BET
“Create a small team to standardize and simplify user interface across AlayaCare Platform. Run the experiment for 3 months and evaluate value vs. impact.”
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.
CSAT Score improvement from 2.7 to 3.7
The Shift
Over eighteen months, what started as a small experiment became a proof of concept for something larger. I had set out to fix the platform's most painful friction points — but the deeper outcome was cultural: a quiet, sustained demonstration that investing in the experience of what already exists can be as strategic as building what's next.
It helped move the organization's center of gravity — from engineering-led to experience-led. Not through mandate. Through eighteen months of a small team earning trust, one improvement at a time.
Note & Credits: The work featured was done by a team: designs for New Header, New Home page Remi Milleret; designer for Client Profile Steve Ladanyi; Front End Engineer Phillip Gruneich. All images above are of launched products