Reduced onboarding time by 75% while strengthening compliance and aligning four audiences through one connected statewide service.
The funding program served students, families, schools, and specialists through fragmented workflows, manual communication, and an aging portal that struggled to keep pace with yearly legislative changes.
Established a shared vision, mapped the end-to-end ecosystem, prioritized the highest-impact opportunities, and redesigned the service experience to create a scalable roadmap for modernization.
As Service Design Lead, I aligned executives, delivery teams, and vendors around a shared strategy while leading research, service design, continuous discovery, and client UX maturity across the program.
Families missed critical funding windows, communication broke down across four audiences, and annual legislative changes required costly manual work that slowed delivery and increased compliance risk.
Missed funding windows
Fragmented communication
Manual tracking
Four disconnected audiences
Vendor coordination
Inconsistent workflows
Annual policy changes
Limited compliance agility
Manual implementation
Low UX maturity
Growing Agile teams
No shared service vision
"Specialists aren't notified when schools or households add comments to tasks, and it could be a month later before we know, causing the student to miss the window for critical funding." Specialist
"Yearly legislation changes in November bring large, last-minute, disruptive changes, and then we have to wait a month or more because we can't make changes ourselves." Program Lead
Aligned executives, delivery teams, and vendors around a common vision, shared success metrics, and a two-year modernization roadmap.
Mapped the complete service ecosystem across four audiences, exposing dependencies, communication breakdowns, and the highest-value opportunities.
Introduced continuous discovery, usability testing, and co-creation to prioritize improvements based on evidence instead of assumptions.
Expanded CX from one team to three, coached cross-functional delivery teams, and embedded human-centered design practices into Agile delivery.
These strategic decisions created the research foundation, delivery cadence, and organizational alignment needed to modernize a statewide public service.
Fixing isolated experiences
Transforming the entire funding ecosystem
The work expanded beyond redesigning a portal. It aligned strategy, research, service design, and organizational change to modernize how four audiences experienced and delivered the program.
Aligned executive vision, legislative goals, success metrics, and delivery priorities before research began.
Mapped the complete funding ecosystem across four audiences to uncover root causes, dependencies, and high-value opportunities.
Combined stakeholder and user interviews, quantitative metrics, behavioral design, and usability testing to validate solutions with confidence.
Designed a scalable service model and onboarding experience that connected people, policy, and technology.
Translated priorities into scenario workflows, designed the solution, and validated it through usability testing.
By directly tackling organizational complexity and introducing a human-first approach, the program moved from fragmented processes to a unified, compliant system.
Supported by a redesigned experience across four audiences, improving compliance, communication, and delivery.
This public version has been simplified to protect client confidentiality. I'd be happy to walk you through the research, strategic decisions, representative artifacts, and transformation roadmap with hiring teams and prospective clients.
Request a Private Case Study WalkthroughCurrently open to full-time, contract, or consulting. Principal/Staff level.
Service & Product Design, AI Activation, UX Research