Overview
Cityblock Health is a health-tech company that nationally provides tech-enabled value-based healthcare for individuals with complex needs. In particular, the focus is on Medicaid beneficiaries, and those who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.
As the Product Design Lead on the Care Planning Team, I’ve been cross-collaborating with partners in product, healthcare providers, clinical innovation, and beyond to build and improve the internal Web Platform called Commons used by our 900 clinicians to manage the care of over 100,000 members.
ROLE | Product Design Lead
TEAM | Self, Product Manager, Tech Lead and Developers
SHIPPED | Internal Enterprise SAAS App; Design System
Context
I was brought on to lead design a newly formed team called Oversight and Delegation. My team’s mandates were to enhance patient care, boost operational efficiency, and make the product compliant with healthcare regulations. This materialized as a juggling act of tactical work, comprised of everything from enhancements to whole new features. Simultaneously, my focus was to zoom out onto redesigning experiences across the platform to help our employees do their jobs more easily and effectively. Ultimately my work boiled down to increasing task completion in order to reduce total cost of care and better patient outcomes.
Constraints
The urgent nature of the audit remediation work on the table required us to hit the ground running so defining a team process had to happen in parallel. Utilizing the Cityblock design system, called Common Place, I began to tackle the tasks at hand while also working on building our’s team’s culture and way of doing things. Although the organization already had teams in existed for far longer than mine, each operated fairly independently. The organization going through restructuring at the top also meant we had to find our footing without much guidance from leadership. With all of these factors at play, you can imagine how much uncertainty we were operating under. This is where I come in. Equipped with a knack for bringing order through structure to spaces where there is none, outside the box thinking, and yet my lighthearted demeanor, I helped the team deliver on our mandate and shape a whole new one from the inside out.
Below is a glimpse into the tools I had at my disposal and what my process looked like.
Shipments
All the uncertainty, nuances, and moving goal posts on the business front, meant that we were going to be building a lot and fast. Not everything was going to be solving the problem. Despite that, I shipped 15 feature enhancements and 3 redesigns within the app. My proudest achievement wasn’t just that we got the job done, but that we did so with the team morale high and a collective sense of accomplishment in the end.
Here are some snippets of what we shipped and the vision I led the shaping of for the product going forward.
Parting wisdom
I have walked away from this experience with an encyclopedia worth of do’s and don'ts. From tales of triumph to cautionary anecdotes, it’s safe to say that the startup journey is never short of learnings.
Here is how I would sum up some high level takeaways:
🧹Establish healthy testing hygiene habits
🔮Involve your engineers early and often
I hear you
I know what you must be thinking. There’s so much more to the story and you’re left wanting to know more. I’m all ears for your questions so feel free to reach out and I’d love to answer them for you!