Strategic Systems Thinking
Example Project:
AI Patient Triage
Project Overview
Starting Point
As Principal Product Designer, I led a strategic design sprint to refresh our patient-facing brand ahead of a platform migration. The design system updates I delivered created more trustworthy, premium experiences for our growing direct-to-consumer audience. This work laid the foundation for our next innovation: integrating AI into the patient experience. I identified how AI could strategically address multiple business objectives: streamlining triage processes, improving service discoverability, and showcasing innovation to our clients and investors.
The Complexity
AI offers significant potential in healthcare, but trust is paramount. Our research revealed patients' skepticism about chatbots diagnosing conditions, frustration with generic responses, and anxiety about being directed to dead ends during vulnerable moments. Meanwhile, our development team had already begun building a basic chatbot interface based on technical requirements. This created tension between rapidly implementing new technology and maintaining the trust essential to our healthcare brand.
The Reframe
Rather than viewing this as a single feature implementation, I approached it as a strategic systems challenge. I developed a hybrid interaction model balancing structured responses with free text input, and created a phased rollout strategy that aligned with technical capabilities while establishing a clear evolution toward our ideal experience.
By thinking systematically, I identified connections between this AI initiative and an ongoing pain point in our legacy service selection: the lack of symptom-based search. This insight allowed me to influence the product roadmap to include reusing the AI's training data across multiple systems, transforming a single feature into a platform-wide improvement opportunity.
Outcomes
The phased rollout plan provided our cross-functional team with clear strategic direction that respected engineering constraints while protecting core user experience principles. User testing validated that our approach built trust rather than eroding it, with patients responding positively to both the interaction model and refreshed UI styles.
My strategic thinking created lasting value beyond the immediate project:
Secured executive buy-in for additional investment by demonstrating how one initiative could solve multiple business problems
Established design principles and interaction patterns that became foundational elements for our broader AI strategy
Extended the value of our technology investment across multiple systems through thoughtful reuse of AI training data
This project exemplifies how I approach strategic systems thinking: by connecting user needs, business objectives, and technical realities into cohesive solutions that create value beyond their original scope.
