My practice is built on a conviction: that the tension between what's good for the customer and what's good for the business is usually a symptom of something else, whether that’s a misaligned incentive, a broken hand-off, or a service model that was never designed as a whole. When you map the system clearly enough, you almost always find that the most human solution and the most sustainable one are the same solution. That's what I work toward, both for the organizations I partner with and the design teams I help build.
A real world example…
It's 2020, and we're heading into the Pandemic. A global medical diagnostics company is recognizing that serving patients has too many physical interactions to be safe and too many digital gaps to adapt quickly.
Just prior, I had been leading the effort to redesign the end-to-end patient experience for LabCorp, one of the world's largest diagnostic networks. When COVID-19 arrived, that work became a lifeline. Because LabCorp had invested in patient-centered digital infrastructure before it was urgent, they were able to serve millions of patients—including for COVID testing—at a moment of life-or-death consequence.
That project is a good example of how I work: connecting patient research and operational reality to design services that are not just desirable, but resilient. I've done similar work at the systems level for a large health insurer, a credit union, the world’s largest satellite company, and others. The through line is the same—to eliminate the false tradeoff between good design and good business.
Featured Case Studies:
LabCorp
I transformed LabCorp’s discrete patient touchpoints into one connected journey. The project concluded just before the pandemic, and the experience designed for the patient turned out to be exactly the experience the patient needed when conditions changed. More»
Blue Cross Blue Shield
I worked with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts to create an innovative new in-person experience to bridge the gap between consumers and the larger healthcare system——and in the process, transformed BCBSMA itself. More»
Shorelight
Shorelight helps universities recruit and support international students. I worked with Shorelight to improve the student experience, streamline employee systems and workflows, and identify innovative marketing initiatives to unblock their path to a $1B valuation. More»
Building a Service Design Practice
Three times in my career I've been asked (or decided) to build a service design capability where one didn't exist: first at a small Boston agency called Story+Structure, then at Cantina, and most recently at Portfolio T, a venture studio spun out of one of Silicon Valley's leading innovation firms. This is the story of how that work gets done—and what it looks like when service design is applied not just to client problems, but to the organizations doing the designing.