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Global connected-health company · 2025 Service designer & research lead

When the deliverable had to do the job the organization wasn't ready to do yet

A journey map that had to function as decision-making infrastructure for an org that didn't yet have any.

10
providers across 2 archetypes
3
synthesis iterations before landing
5
opportunity themes for the roadmap

Twelve stakeholders described five different engagements in the first two weeks. The work inside a global connected-health company was nominally about provider research — mapping the experience of the physicians and respiratory therapists who refer and manage CPAP therapy. It was actually about something harder: producing research that could serve a strategy brief and a culture-change brief simultaneously, inside an organization still sorting out what those two functions owed each other. The structural gap the research exposed — the patient sitting in the space between two providers, neither of whom owns the full relationship — became the through-line of the work that followed. So did the synthesis that failed twice before it landed.

Chapter 01

Twelve stakeholders, five different versions of the engagement

The engagement opened with eight kickoff sessions across twelve stakeholders. The range was real: a product leader less than eight months into his role who wanted a scalable framework with shared language across six geographies. A CX leader, recently shifted from a product-aligned structure to a horizontal one, who wanted research that would give CX a credible voice in strategic prioritization. A research leader who wanted methodology. Two adjacent function leads who wanted the work to land in their roadmaps. IC design teams who wanted it useful to work already in flight.

By the time we'd sat with the twelfth stakeholder, no two had described the same engagement. The call I made was that the research had to do double duty: deliver findings and quietly build the shared understanding the engagement should have started with. That choice shaped everything I designed over the next twelve weeks.

image: off-stage roles template — session role matrix (facilitator / Miro note-taker / note-taker) with task detail in each cell. Source: medical-offstage-roles.png
One of the templates I built so every session started from the same baseline. The roles rotated; the system stayed consistent.

Chapter 02

Protocols built to produce moments, not just patterns

Ten 90-minute remote interviews in June and July: three home medical equipment respiratory therapists and seven board-certified sleep-specialist physicians. I moderated the majority. The dual-brief problem shaped the discussion guides from the first draft. The product leader's question needed the interviews to surface comparable cross-interview patterns. The CX leader's culture-change question needed them to produce moments that could shift a room.

I built protocols with two layers: a structural arc ("walk me through a typical patient from referral to ongoing care") that produced consistent data, and embedded scene-prompts ("tell me about the last patient who surprised you") that produced the specific scenes I'd need later. The "social meter" line and the "artist forced to paint by numbers" framing both came from the scene-prompts, not from the structural arc. The study was originally designed in-person; a recruiting collapse forced a pivot to remote. The final sample was smaller than designed, and the delivered work carries an explicit recommendation that further research deepen the HME archetype.

After a long week of convincing people that it will be okay, your social meter is just a little gone.

— Home medical equipment respiratory therapist, interview session

Chapter 03

The third synthesis was the one that worked

My first version of the insights deck organized findings around the structure of the interviews. It was comprehensive. It was unusable. It gave the team everything we had heard without a way to act on any of it. The second version added a synthesis layer — better, still descriptive rather than directional. It told the team what was true; it did not tell them where to look.

The third version reorganized everything around design implications. For respiratory therapists: human touch (operations were optimizing for cost, but referrals depended on human-quality experiences) and patient misconceptions. For physicians: boxed in (clinical autonomy under siege from four simultaneous pressures), information up front, and trust in equipment providers. Each implication paired evidence from the interviews with a directional question the client could act on. The third version was shorter than the first and did less. It was the one that worked.

The lesson I took: the version that captures everything you heard is rarely the version that gives the team something to do. Planning for a revision cycle isn't a setback — it's the work functioning correctly.

Diagram showing a physician at the center surrounded by four constraint quadrants: Time, Technology, Insurance, and Management — the four pressures boxing in clinical autonomy.
Four pressures boxing in physician autonomy — each one a design implication for a connected-health platform positioned between them.

Chapter 04

What the maps showed: the patient sits in the structural gap

The two experience maps used the same structural vocabulary — same emotional curve, same channel rows, same detail tables underneath. That parallelism is the design move that exposed the case's most important finding. One sleep specialist named it: "They look at the equipment provider as my extension. I'm the one who sent them there."

The prescribing physician owns the relationship and bears the reputational risk. The equipment provider runs the day-to-day experience. The patient sees one continuous service. No actor in the system has authority over the whole thing. This is the structural gap a connected-health platform is positioned to occupy — and it became the through-line of the opportunity workshop two months later. Both leaders walked out of the second workshop day having argued over the same maps, with the same vocabulary, in the same room.

Wide journey map titled 'I Enable - I Care' showing the home medical equipment respiratory therapist's experience across phases, with emotional curve, touchpoints, channel map, and supporting detail tables.
HME respiratory therapist experience map — the first of two parallel maps using identical structural vocabulary so the gap between them becomes visible.
Wide journey map titled 'I Enable - I Care' showing the sleep specialist physician's experience across phases, with emotional curve, embedded participant quotes, channel map, and detail tables including pains, gains, and opportunities.
Sleep specialist experience map — same structure, different archetype. The gap between these two maps is where the patient sits.

The reframe

We were hired to map the provider experience

We were hired to map the provider experience. Twelve kickoff sessions had suggested the deliverable was a framework — something scalable, governable, consistent across geographies. The research showed the platform's most important strategic opportunity was a structural gap that the framework question had obscured: the space between the prescribing physician and the equipment provider, in which the patient sits and absorbs the cost of their coordination failure. A framework would have organized what already exists. The maps surfaced what was missing from the system entirely. The shift from "map the experience" to "expose the gap" is what gave the workshop something to argue about — and what gave the CX leader the strategic claim she'd been trying to make before she had evidence for it.

What stays behind

Maps designed to keep working after we left

The maps were designed to keep working after the engagement ended. Both use the same structural vocabulary, so a product team in any of the six geographies can read either archetype against their own roadmap and locate the relevant moments. The five prioritized opportunity themes from the workshop — patient communication, mask fit and selection, coordination and data consolidation, compliance and monitoring, insurance and policy management — were scoped as discrete discovery streams rather than a single mega-program, which is what the product leader had asked for in week one.

The workshop's final segment addressed governance explicitly: how could the maps continue to live and evolve after we left? We sketched rituals and ownership structures — deliberately, not as an afterthought. That outcome was not accidental. It was the function we'd been designing toward since the first kickoff session surfaced five incompatible versions of the brief.