Aligning Design Across a $400M Health Platform
When RVO Health was formed as a joint venture, it brought together eight businesses— Healthline, Healthgrades, OptumRx, and Hello Medicare—under a single roof to create a $400M health platform. The complexity was immense: over a thousand employees, hundreds of legacy processes, nine products, eight business units, seven executive leaders, and four separate design teams. As a design organization, we needed to get aligned quickly to mobilize our teams.
Role | Sr. Director of Product Design
Initiative Duration | 1 year
Challenges
8 businesses, 9 products, 7 leaders, and 4 design teams with different norms and structures
Fragmented design talent and inconsistent work quality across a rapidly evolving JV
Vastly different product methodologies across business
Slow internal AI tool approval process
Actions
Skill Development: Create a Shared Foundation for Craft and Growth
Co-developed a cross-org skills development program to assess and grow design capabilities.
Design Quality: Turn Process Into a Platform for Excellence
Redefined Product Requirements & Sources of Truth
Partnered with VP of Product to standardize “ingredients for success”
Set AI Utilization Standards
Wrote AI Tooling Playbook for org based on personal experimentation.
Made Design Hypothesis-Driven
Shifted culture from visual-first to evidence-led by requiring explicit framing of problem/solution hypotheses.
Results
Staff Impact
100% adoption of the skills + IDP program across the JV
Stronger talent mobility and bench strength across businesses due to shared craft taxonomy
Org Impact
2x research throughput per researcher (avg. 20 studies/year vs. 12 prior)
+25% user engagement in Healthgrades new design efforts via hypothesis-led iteration
Broad AI tool adoption
Systemic quality uplift across all teams: fewer review cycles, clearer briefs, more strategic partnerships
Create a Shared Foundation for Growth and Development
With the product design organization stretched across eight businesses, we needed a way to normalize how we assessed talent and nurtured growth. I partnered with my design leader and a peer to build a Skills Assessment Framework—a shared foundation for understanding individual capabilities and identifying opportunities for development. Our approach:
Mapped the landscape - We compiled and synthesized skills matrices from top design organizations to create a reference model tailored to our needs.
Defined craft with clarity - Used ChatGPT to iterate on model frameworks then we refined the definitions and levels.
Tested for resilience - We piloted the framework with a small cohort, asking designers to self-assess before being assessed by managers. The framework held strong and was scaled across the design organization.
To operationalize the framework, we developed an Individual Development Program (IDP) that:
Captures self- and manager-assessments
Identifies skill gaps relative to role expectations
Establishes annual goals tied to tactical learning activities
The process, now in its third year, is fully automated using the Google Suite—with assessments feeding directly into dynamic reports and IDPs. The result has been a clear, repeatable way to drive individual growth and improve team-wide capability planning.
Skills Guide document - Created using ChatGPT, referencing dozens of industry examples then edited heavily.
Skills Assessment form - After team members completed the form, it was analyzed on the back end then autogenerated a summary report per person.
Turn Process Into a Platform for Excellence
AI Utilization Playbook, 2025
For my business units, I initiated a series of design-led interventions focused on five key areas:
Redefined Product Requirements & Sources of Truth - Partnered with VP of Product to standardize “ingredients for success” for all initiatives:
Co-authored “Ingredients for Success” with VP of Product to unify requirements across pods.
Implemented shared rituals to improve design readiness and reduce churn.
Mandated kickoff boards combining research, business goals, and hypotheses to ground work.
Codified AI Tooling Standards - Wrote the org’s first AI tooling playbook, aligning with peer leaders, legal, and security teams to define
Approved tools
Responsible usage scenarios
Design/research task boundaries
Doubled Research Throughput with AI & Lean Ops - Cut time-to-insight from 4 weeks to 2 days by:
Supporting launch of Slack-based AI insights bot
Figma-based synthesis boards powered by FigJam AI, increasing researcher influence and output capability.
Made Design Hypothesis-Driven - Mandated that all design work be anchored in clear, testable hypotheses based on user insights. Shifted culture from execution to strategy—enabling designers to articulate:
What outcome they’re driving
What behavior they’re targeting
What evidence supports the solution
Built a Culture of Critique & Peer Growth - Established biweekly, two-hour design deep-dives across businesses. Initially uneven, these sessions matured into trusted critique forums—raising quality, collaboration, and team cohesion.
Artifacts
A small collection of artifacts I was directly responsible for:
Healthgrades Q3 FY25 Initiative Overview