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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.

The case in 6 moves

  1. Twelve stakeholders, five briefs
  2. Interview protocols
  3. Three synthesis iterations
  4. Two maps, one gap
  5. Framework vs. structural gap
  6. Maps that keep working
10
providers interviewed
3
synthesis iterations
5
opportunity themes

Twelve stakeholders described five different engagements. The work was nominally about provider research — how physicians and respiratory therapists refer and manage CPAP therapy. It was about something harder: producing research that could serve a strategy brief and a culture-change brief simultaneously. 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 briefs in two weeks

The engagement opened with eight kickoff sessions across twelve stakeholders. The range: a product leader eight months in who wanted a scalable framework across six geographies. A CX leader who wanted research that would give CX a credible voice in strategic prioritization. A research leader who wanted methodology. Adjacent function leads who wanted it to land in their roadmaps. IC design teams who wanted it useful to work already in flight.

By the twelfth stakeholder, no two had described the same engagement. The research had to do double duty: deliver findings and build the shared understanding the engagement should have started with.

Off-stage roles — session role matrix
One of the templates I built so every session started from the same baseline. The roles rotated; the system stayed consistent.

Chapter 03

Three synthesis iterations before the deck landed

My first version of the insights deck organized findings around the structure of the interviews. It was comprehensive and unusable. 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 version that captures everything you heard is rarely the one 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

Two journey maps, and the gap between them

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

The framework brief vs. the structural gap the research surfaced

We were hired to map the provider experience. Twelve kickoff sessions had suggested the deliverable was a framework — scalable, governable, consistent across geographies. The research surfaced a structural gap 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

How the maps 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 the single mega-program 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. That outcome was the function we'd been designing toward since the first kickoff surfaced five incompatible versions of the brief.

Maps still in use — discovery streams handoff
Five opportunity themes scoped as discrete discovery streams for product and CX.