“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 launched a new cross-platform team model from scratch
Designed and ran a company-wide Paper Cuts hackathon to surface and prioritize user friction
Built an executive sponsorship model across Product, Engineering, and Customer Service
Shipped three rounds of improvements in the first 90 days
Secured team renewal every quarter for 18 months and counting
Expanded scope from paper cuts to full workflow redesigns and platform-level pattern work
Led one of the first teams at AlayaCare to integrate AI into front-end production
CORE EXPERIENCE QUIETLY DETERIORATING
AlayaCare is a complex platform serving home care organizations — scheduling, clinical documentation, billing, reporting, all under one roof. Each of those areas had its own team, its own roadmap, and its own design direction.
The result: a platform that felt like five different products sharing a login screen. The most-visited pages — the ones customers used every single day — were accumulating friction, because no team had been asked to own them.
Early on, I identified that nobody was looking at the platform as a whole experience. Feature teams were focused on their own backlogs — adding capabilities, shipping roadmap items — while the core experience quietly deteriorated.
That gap became my starting point.
PAPER CUTS — THE HACKATHON
Rather than pitching the problem top-down as a new director, I made a deliberate choice: surface the need from inside the organization before naming a solution.
I designed and ran a company-wide event called Paper Cuts — an open invitation for anyone at AlayaCare to flag what bothered them most. Customers, support reps, engineers, designers. What slows you down? What have you stopped noticing because it's always been that way?
The output was a shared, prioritized backlog of friction points — grounded in NPS and CSAT data, focused on the highest-traffic pages and most common workflows. But the more important outcome was cultural: it shifted the conversation across the organization from feature gaps to experience gaps.
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:
one designer, one front-end engineer,
a focused mandate, and
a three-month runway.
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.
The impact
The First Three Months
Improved page density, standardized header profile information, prioritized vital info.
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.
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.
Facilitation, convergence and illustration by Audrey Drolet.
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 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.
“... because culture works faster than processes”
