Challenge: SonarMD's care engagement platform had a retention problem — but the data alone couldn't explain it. Patients were dropping off, survey completion was low, and NPS wasn't moving. The real issue wasn't the product. It was the experience: too many touchpoints, unclear messaging, and an onboarding flow that felt like work rather than care. With approximately 1,900 daily active users, even small friction had outsized impact on engagement and retention across the entire patient population.

My Role: Hired by the COO as SonarMD's first Director of Care Experience, I owned the patient-facing care product and experience strategy end-to-end — responsible for engagement, retention, utilization, and care delivery across the full patient population. I led cross-functional work spanning Product, Engineering, Marketing, Clinical SMEs, and Care Coordinators, and served as a strategic partner to Product and Engineering leadership on roadmap priorities.

Approach & Solution: I started by mapping the full patient journey — auditing 30+ touchpoints to identify where friction was highest and why. Rather than making changes based on assumption, I defined success metrics and hypotheses upfront, then designed experiments to test them.

The core redesign focused on three areas: simplifying onboarding flows to reduce cognitive load at the point of enrollment, redesigning monthly engagement journeys to deliver clearer calls-to-action with fewer interruptions, and optimizing channel mix and message timing based on behavioral data in Iterable.

Specific changes included compressing onboarding reminders from 30 touchpoints to 12, reducing monthly survey reminders from 12 to 4, and clarifying messaging and CTAs throughout. Every change was validated through A/B testing before full rollout.

I also partnered with Product and Engineering to translate patient-reported friction points into actionable roadmap requirements — closing the loop between qualitative experience data and product decisions. And I integrated three external lifestyle care programs within three months, expanding the care portfolio without adding member friction.

A significant part of my work was also diagnostic. I identified systemic gaps in how engagement was defined and measured — including survey completion being tracked by send date rather than completion date, CTR data living in Iterable but absent from Tableau dashboards, no visibility into partial survey completion, and no flags for patients at risk of disengagement. I built the business case for rebuilding the measurement framework and was in the process of driving that change when the role ended. The outcomes above were delivered within an incomplete measurement system — which means they're likely conservative.

How I Navigated Complexity: The core tension in this work was counterintuitive: reducing the number of messages patients received while increasing their engagement with the program. That's not an obvious hypothesis, and it required proving it through data before the organization would commit to it. Running rigorous A/B tests and presenting behavioral evidence — rather than arguing from design principles alone — was what made the changes possible at the pace they needed to happen.

Key Outcomes & Impact: · 22% increase in resource utilization (CTR) · 60% increase in survey engagement · 43% lift in NPS · 21% reduction in participant churn · 60% reduction in monthly reminders with no loss of engagement · Integrated 3 external lifestyle care programs within 3 months · Redesigned enrollment flows, care journeys, and ongoing engagement touchpoints across a population of ~1,900 daily active users

Closing Insight: The outcomes above were delivered within a measurement framework I knew was incomplete — tracking four engagement signals when the full picture required at least a dozen. The most consistent finding across my work in health and education is that the biggest barriers to engagement are rarely about content quality or product features. They're about the felt experience of being asked to do something hard. When you design from that starting point — reducing friction, increasing clarity, making the next step feel achievable — the metrics follow. That's the lens I bring to every care and program experience engagement.

Challenge: Patients with Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD) needed a structured, accessible way to complete supervised exercise therapy — a clinically recommended intervention that dramatically improves mobility and health outcomes but is notoriously difficult to sustain. Clinics were already stretched thin, patients were geographically dispersed, and getting people to commit to and maintain an exercise program remotely introduced barriers that in-person programs don't face.

The Society for Vascular Surgery needed a partner who could design the implementation infrastructure, manage the clinic relationships, and keep patients engaged long enough for the program to work.

My Role: As Customer Success Lead at Cell-Ed, I managed Cell-Ed's partnership with the Society for Vascular Surgery — coordinating program implementation across 20+ clinics nationwide, overseeing patient engagement across 150+ participants from diverse backgrounds, and co-designing the coaching protocols that supported patients through the program alongside the clinical content SVS had already developed.

I also directed the design and implementation of a Randomized Control Trial across 10 of the clinical sites to evaluate program effectiveness.

Approach & Solution: The clinical content was established by SVS. Our work was building the implementation layer that would make it actually work in the real world — which meant solving two distinct problems simultaneously.

The first was clinic adoption. Clinics were already overloaded and skeptical of adding another program to their workflow. I worked closely with clinic leadership to minimize their operational burden — Cell-Ed took on patient onboarding and initial setup entirely, so clinics didn't have to hand-hold participants through getting started.

The second was patient engagement. Changing health behavior is hard under any conditions; doing it remotely with patients managing a serious vascular condition added significant complexity. We designed a coaching protocol built around consistent, low-friction check-ins — weekly encouraging messages that reminded patients of their progress and proximity to their goals rather than their deficits. The approach was grounded in behavior change principles: reduce friction, increase perceived progress, and make the next step feel achievable.

How I Navigated Complexity: Running a national pilot across 20+ clinics with no in-person presence means you're entirely dependent on the relationships you've built with clinic coordinators and the systems you've put in place. When something broke — a clinic went quiet, a patient disengaged, a coordinator changed — the response had to be fast and relationship-first. I learned early that the clinics most likely to succeed were the ones where I'd invested time understanding their specific constraints before the program launched, not after.

Key Outcomes & Impact: · 92% of participants reported meeting their initial goals · 94% would recommend the program to others · 71% reported lasting habit changes at 12-month follow-up post-participation · Successfully coordinated implementation across 20+ clinics nationwide · Engaged 150+ patients from diverse backgrounds across a fully remote delivery model · Directed a Randomized Control Trial across 10 clinical sites

Outcomes from Cell-Ed internal pilot evaluation.

Closing Insight: The SVS pilot reinforced something that shapes how I approach every implementation engagement: the gap between a well-designed program and one that actually reaches people is almost always an implementation problem, not a content problem. Clinics didn't fail because the exercise therapy wasn't good. Patients didn't disengage because they didn't want to get better. The friction was in the system around the program — and that's exactly where the design work needed to happen.

Challenge: Cell-Ed — a mobile learning startup serving vulnerable and underserved populations — was growing faster than its organizational structure could support. Content, design, and coaching teams were operating independently: duplicating work, missing handoffs, and lacking shared processes. As the company scaled into new markets and languages, the need wasn't just better coordination — it was a unified department with clear ownership, shared systems, and the leadership capacity to deliver at scale.
My Role: I joined Cell-Ed as a Customer Success Lead, was promoted to Director of Program Design within a year, and then to Vice President of Programs — ultimately building and leading a 23-person department plus 19+ contractors, with a $1M budget and direct partnership with C-level leadership on growth strategy.
Approach & Solution: At the Director level, I started by identifying where the real friction was — not just the visible symptoms. The problem wasn't people; it was structural gaps at the handoff points between content, design, and delivery. I built a new Program Design team focused on population health, established cross-functional processes and documentation systems in ClickUp, Confluence, and Jira, and served as the internal subject matter expert on behavior change theories across both domestic and international projects.

During this period, I led the cross-functional work that secured three major contracts totaling $40M in projected revenue — a direct result of having built operational systems rigorous enough to support rapid scaling.

Promoted to VP, I unified three independently operating teams into a single 23-person department, directing hiring, onboarding, goal-setting, and individual development across all roles. The result was a team that went from siloed to integrated — producing over 100 content units in four new languages and consistently raising KPI attainment by 1–3% each quarter.

You're right — we did finish it. I have the full rewrite. Let me format it the same way for direct copy-paste.

Building a High-Performing Programs Department from the Ground Up — Cell-Ed (2020–2024)

Challenge Cell-Ed — a mobile learning startup serving vulnerable and underserved populations — was growing faster than its organizational structure could support. Content, design, and coaching teams were operating in silos: duplicating work, missing handoffs, and lacking shared processes. As the company scaled into new markets and languages, the need wasn't just better coordination — it was a unified department with clear ownership, shared systems, and the leadership capacity to deliver at scale.

This became particularly urgent as Cell-Ed took on work serving Afghan and Ukrainian immigrant and refugee communities — populations whose needs were immediate, whose contexts were complex, and for whom the margin for error in program quality was essentially zero.

My Role I joined Cell-Ed as a Customer Success Lead, was promoted to Director of Program Design within a year, and then to Vice President of Programs — ultimately building and leading a 23-person department plus 19+ contractors, with a $1M budget and direct partnership with C-level leadership on growth strategy.

Approach & Solution At the Director level, I started by identifying where the real friction was — not just the visible symptoms. The problem wasn't people; it was structural gaps at the handoff points between content, design, and delivery. I built a new Program Design team focused on population health, established cross-functional processes and documentation systems in ClickUp, Confluence, and Jira, and served as the internal subject matter expert on behavior change theories across both domestic and international projects.

During this period, I led the cross-functional work that secured three major contracts totaling $40M in projected revenue — a direct result of having built operational systems rigorous enough to support rapid scaling.

Promoted to VP, I unified three independently operating teams into a single 23-person department, directing hiring, onboarding, goal-setting, and individual development across all roles. The result was a team that went from siloed to integrated — producing over 100 content units in Dari, Pashto, Ukrainian, and Russian, enabling Cell-Ed to serve Afghan and Ukrainian refugee and immigrant populations during two of the most significant displacement crises of the decade.

How I Navigated Complexity: Building a department in a fully remote, fast-moving startup means your org design is already evolving before the ink is dry. The biggest challenge was creating systems rigorous enough to produce consistency — but flexible enough not to become bureaucratic overhead as priorities shifted. I approached our internal processes the same way we approached our programs: as living artifacts that needed regular review, user feedback, and iteration. That mindset kept the team invested in the infrastructure rather than working around it.

Key Outcomes & Impact:
• Progressed from Customer Success Lead to VP of Programs in four years based on demonstrated performance
• Built and led a unified 23-person department + 19 contractors from three fragmented, independently operating teams
• Secured three major contracts totaling $40M in projected revenue at the Director level through cross-functional orchestration
• Managed a $1M department budget across a fully remote team in a rapidly scaling startup environment
• Built the operational infrastructure to expand content delivery into Dari, Pashto, Ukrainian, and Russian — enabling Cell-Ed to serve Afghan and Ukrainian refugee and immigrant populations during two of the most significant displacement crises of the decade
• Raised individual KPI attainment by 1–3% each quarter consistently across the team
• Contributed to the Caring4Cal program in partnership with HCAI, supporting the distribution of a multimillion-dollar grant and an $18M incentives fund across 20 organizations to recruit, train, and retain home health workers
• Authored an average of 5 SOWs per quarter in collaboration with C-level leadership
Closing Insight The most important thing I learned leading this department is that organizational dysfunction is almost never about people. It's about the structures — or the absence of them — that shape how people work together. When you fix the structure, people who were previously frustrating each other often become each other's strongest collaborators. That insight shapes how I approach every organizational engagement I take on.

Challenge: First 5 California needed a mobile-first, accessible parenting curriculum that could reach diverse families statewide — including Spanish-speaking communities — with content designed not just to inform but to measurably change parenting behaviors. The program needed to work on caregivers' own time, across language and cultural contexts, and within a compressed development and launch timeline.

This is the design challenge I encounter most often across health and education: how do you build something that people actually use, that works equitably across populations, and that produces real change in the behaviors that matter most?
My Role: As VP of Programs at Cell-Ed, I held executive and operational accountability for the Stronger Starts curriculum — managing the team responsible for design and development, overseeing Cell-Ed's subcontractor relationship with Rescue Agency, and ensuring the program launched on time and met First 5 California's quality and equity standards.

The Director of Learning Design led content development. My role was building and sustaining the conditions for that work to succeed: strategic direction, stakeholder management, timeline oversight, and the cross-functional coordination required to move from design to a live statewide program between summer 2023 and February 2024.
Approach & Solution: The curriculum combined self-paced educational courses with live coaching, delivered through Cell-Ed's mobile platform in both English and Spanish. Content was structured around the behaviors caregivers most wanted to change — staying calm under pressure, responding rather than reacting, building routines that worked for their families.

One of the most significant design decisions was building for short engagement windows. The evaluation later confirmed this was the right call: 76% of participants intended to continue using the educational courses specifically because they could engage on their own time. That's not accidental — it reflects what behavior change design for busy caregivers requires.

Managing the stakeholder review process was a significant operational challenge. Multiple approvers across organizations created risk of sequential delays that could have compromised the launch timeline. I addressed this by coordinating simultaneous review across all key approvers and creating detailed demos so reviewers could evaluate content in context — compressing what could have been months of back-and-forth into a single consolidated pass.

How I Navigated Complexity: Building and launching a statewide curriculum under a compressed timeline, with multiple organizational stakeholders and a fully remote team, requires holding a lot of moving parts simultaneously. The work that doesn't show up in the final product — the coordination, the stakeholder alignment, the decisions about what to cut and what to protect — is often what determines whether a program launches well or doesn't launch at all.
Key Outcomes & Impact: Satisfaction & reach: · 95% of participants likely or extremely likely to recommend the program to another caregiver · 80% satisfied or very satisfied overall · 100% of participants applied strategies from the curriculum · 96% of Spanish speakers found the content relatable · 100% of Spanish speakers reported using learned strategies and tools · 93% found the program length appropriate — and wanted more content

Behavior change — pre/post measures:

· Knowledge of co-regulation: 28% → 60%

· Understanding of power struggles: 48% → 85%

· Caregivers not yelling at or in front of children: 40% → 63%

· Caregivers giving regular praise to their children: 48% → 73%

· Confidence building community for family: 55% → 83%

· Belief that responsiveness won't spoil a child: 35% → 70%

Source: Formal program evaluation conducted by Rescue Agency as part of the First 5 California contract deliverables, July 2024.

What Participants Said

"I feel like we hug way more than before and we would hug a lot before." — Pilot participant

"I am trying to talk more with my kid instead of yelling. I am trying to ask for 1 request at a time so he can understand instead of asking for many things at the same time." — Pilot participant

"I love this course! It gives me tools and more skills to navigate things in a timely manner with the kids." — Pilot participant

Closing Insight: The Stronger Starts pilot reinforced something I bring to every program I lead: satisfaction metrics are a floor, not a ceiling. The question that matters is whether people do something differently because of the program. When 100% of participants report applying what they learned — and pre/post data shows meaningful shifts in how caregivers actually relate to their children — that's what program success looks like. That standard shapes how I define and measure impact across every engagement.

Challenge: Schools across the country needed evidence-based programs to address violence and drug prevention among students.

My Role: Managed 30+ school districts, 110 schools, and 450+ teachers during grant implementation across six states, ensuring the effective execution of the Botvin LifeSkills Training program.

Approach & Solution: Provided strategic oversight, conducted annual school visits to evaluate program fidelity, and met with key personnel to ensure compliance with grant requirements.

Challenges & Lessons Learned:
One of the biggest challenges was getting teachers—who are already overworked and continuously face new requirements without anything being removed—onboard to implement a new program. To address this, I worked closely with teachers and school leadership to show how the LST curriculum aligned with state standards, helping them integrate it seamlessly into their existing instruction. By demonstrating how LST could replace parts of their current curriculum rather than add to their workload, I was able to improve adoption and engagement.

Key Outcomes & Impact: Ensured school districts reported and maintained an average of 85% fidelity to program and grant requirements, strengthening program effectiveness and sustainability.

Challenge:
Many low-income individuals and immigrants face barriers in understanding health information and making informed decisions. The goal was to design an engaging, accessible digital learning experience to improve health literacy.

My Role:
I designed and developed a digital learning prototype applying the ADDIE model to ensure effectiveness.

Process & Approach

✅ Research & User Insights

• Conducted a needs assessment to identify key barriers to health literacy.

• Defined user personas (low-income individuals, immigrants, elderly, those with chronic illnesses).

• Researched best practices in microlearning and behavioral health education.

✅ Wireframes & Design Iterations

• Created low-fidelity wireframes to outline module structure.

• Developed interactive learning elements using Genially, ensuring accessibility.

• Iterated based on feedback from peers and mentors.

Challenges & Lessons Learned:
One of the biggest challenges was completing the entire instructional design process—from analysis to evaluation—without a team. While this was easier for me because I fully understood the vision, I had to ensure that every step was well-documented so that someone who was not part of the process (such as a developer receiving only the wireframes) could accurately interpret and build the prototype. To address this, I created detailed step-by-step instructions and rationale, making the prototype development seamless for future collaborators.

Key Outcomes & Next Steps

• Designed an interactive learning experience that aligns with adult learning principles.

• Received positive feedback on clarity, engagement, and accessibility.

• Next steps: Further testing with a broader audience and refining content based on user behavior insights.

👉 View the Prototype in Genially