These aren't case studies designed to impress. They're accounts of what actually happened — the problem as it was handed to me, what I found, and what changed as a result. The through-line in every one: the surface problem wasn't the real problem.
Modernizing Government Benefits with Direct Express
A partnership between Mastercard and the U.S. Treasury to redesign the experience of receiving Social Security benefits for 3.4 million Americans — many of them unbanked, elderly, or living with disabilities.
The existing process for receiving Social Security benefits relied on mailed paper checks and call-in systems for basic tasks like balance inquiries. For unbanked and underbanked recipients — often older adults, people with disabilities, and lower-income individuals — this meant friction, anxiety, and exclusion from the tools most people take for granted.
The goal was to move recipients from paper checks to reloadable prepaid Mastercard cards, backed by a mobile app that made fund access simple, trustworthy, and accessible. The estimated cost of the status quo: $1B in waste over 10 years.
Before a single session began, I worked with the product team to define who we actually needed in the room. This wasn't a generic user sample — the study required older adults, people with physical and cognitive disabilities, individuals with low digital literacy, and caretakers acting on behalf of recipients.
I developed the research plan and discussion guide to explore what trust signals mattered, how participants currently managed money, what pain points existed in the legacy system, and how they'd respond to the prototype app.
During sessions, I re-screened participants at the door, ran the usability study, and observed behaviors that the task completion data alone would have missed. After the study, I synthesized findings and presented them directly to the client and internal stakeholders.
- Trust beats innovation. Participants cared far less about new features than they did about knowing their money was safe and reachable. This reframed every design priority.
- A smartphone isn't digital literacy. Many participants owned phones but didn't trust apps. Onboarding assumptions built for a general audience were wrong for this one.
- Checking balances was an anxiety ritual. For many, calling the 800 number to hear their balance every morning was a coping behavior, not inefficiency. The app had to honor that habit — not eliminate it.
- The product had to work for caretakers too. Many recipients were managing their benefits through a trusted third party. Single-user assumptions missed half the use cases.
The research directly shaped onboarding flows, UI language, and the decision to make balance visibility front-and-center rather than buried. Anxiety-reducing language replaced efficiency-focused defaults.
The U.S. Treasury adopted the updated platform. Direct Express became the national benchmark for digital federal benefit distribution.
Creating a Digital Front Door for Medical Tourism
A first-of-its-kind platform for patients traveling internationally for medical care — unifying discovery, booking, payments, provider vetting, and follow-up in one trusted experience, backed by Mastercard.
Medical procedures in the U.S. are increasingly unaffordable. For many patients, traveling abroad for care is a legitimate and cost-effective option — but the process of finding reputable providers, booking travel, arranging accommodations, and managing payments across borders was entirely fragmented.
The worst part was payments. If a wire transfer failed or a provider turned out to be disreputable, patients had no recourse. There was no infrastructure protecting them. The client — a medical tourism company — wanted to build the platform that fixed this, secured by Mastercard's payment infrastructure.
As Lead Innovation Strategist, I owned the engagement end-to-end — from initial scope definition through executive readout and into a 24-week development phase. This meant leading a cross-functional team of product strategists, UX designers, developers, video producers, subject matter experts, and client liaisons.
The core of the engagement was a structured design thinking sprint: four weeks of problem framing (stakeholder interviews, desk research, journey mapping, workshop planning), one intensive week of aligned design and prototype development, and six weeks of concept validation testing before moving into technology alignment and build.
Within the sprint week, my team produced a functional iOS prototype, an advertisement video, and an executive pitch deck — while I simultaneously drove client alignment to a singular CX strategy and kept the engagement on scope.
- A first-of-its-kind end-to-end platform for international medical travel — booking, provider research, communication, and secure payments in one place
- A new accreditation process created as a direct output of the extended engagement
- New partnerships formed between the client, Mastercard, and third-party payment facilitators
- $100M+ product revenue potential modeled against a $47B+ global industry
- Set the stage for first-follower competition in a space with no incumbent solution
Reimagining the Technical Help Journey at Scale
A 30,000-person organization where IT support ran on tribal knowledge, personal relationships, and first-in-first-out ticket queues regardless of severity. The fix required surfacing what employees already knew — and no one had formally asked.
Getting IT help at this organization meant knowing the right person. It meant calling your manager to jump the queue. It meant five separate help desks, none of which could reliably direct you to the right one. It meant that on your first day, a security protocol required you to be on the line while your new boss answered their own security questions — handing you that information before you'd even gotten your badge.
These weren't edge cases. They were the daily experience of tens of thousands of employees. And they'd persisted for over a decade — not because no one noticed, but because no one had formally studied them.
As the department UX Subject Matter Expert, I led a corporate-wide initiative to align and redesign the technical help experience. I started with contextual inquiry interviews on both sides of the support equation — employees seeking help and the staff providing it. Both perspectives were essential; the system wasn't broken for one side and working for the other. It was broken for everyone.
I planned and facilitated a design thinking workshop with cross-functional corporate SMEs, synthesized the findings into executive-level insights, and used those insights to secure buy-in for the next phase. That phase involved standing up a formal Task Force — a multi-department working group that I formed and led — to actually execute the improvements.
I created service maps for three primary personas' technical help journeys, giving every stakeholder a shared source of truth for what current state actually looked like. Then I drove the multi-year EX strategy that followed.
- Seven separately managed help desks unified into a single intranet support hub — became the #1 visited intranet site within 3 months of launch
- Severity-based ticket prioritization replaced first-in-first-out queuing — the change a senior Task Force member said "we never thought about doing any other way"
- Permanent walk-up support areas established in-office, with locker pickup and vending machine self-service for peripherals
- Self-service tools reduced primary help desk ticket volume by approximately 1,000 password reset requests per day
- Appointment-based scheduling introduced — ending fully ad-hoc ticket handling
- Adjacent initiative spurred: five separate internal software portals consolidated into a single point of entry
Optimizing Loan Decisions at a Regional Bank
A small regional bank falling behind more digitally mature peers on commercial lending. Paper-heavy processes, disconnected systems, and in-person dependencies for tasks that didn't require them. Four weeks to find the friction and build the alternative.
Small business commercial lending is relationship-driven by nature — but this bank's process had friction that had nothing to do with the relationship. Physical paperwork, systems that didn't talk to each other, required in-person visits for tasks that could have been digital, and a decisioning process that was slow and opaque for both the banker and the borrower.
The client wanted to modernize — faster decisions, less manual intervention, better data visibility for everyone involved. The challenge was figuring out exactly where the process broke down and what a better version looked like.
I led the full engagement from scoping through delivery — defining the problem space, planning the design thinking workshop, and leading the cross-functional team through a structured sprint week. The client brought VP-level participants from small business banking, product, loan operations, credit risk, and enterprise architecture into the room. Having that breadth of perspective in one place accelerated alignment significantly.
Within the sprint week, the team produced a functional iOS prototype, an advertisement video demonstrating the concept, and an executive pitch deck — all delivered within four weeks of first contact.
- Functional iOS prototype simulating the redesigned loan decisioning experience end-to-end
- Executive pitch deck with a clear business case for modernization investment
- KPI framework and MVP roadmap for phased implementation
- Consensus among a large, cross-functional client group — the engagement structure made alignment happen inside the sprint rather than after it
A Developer Portal That Works for Everyone
A white-label payments provider needed a self-service portal serving two audiences with almost nothing in common — novice ISV users unfamiliar with payment infrastructure, and expert users who needed deep configurability. One product. Seven weeks. Build started on day two of the sprint.
Independent Software Vendors in payments occupy an uncomfortable middle position: they need to understand their own product space and the space of their customers — simultaneously, at both ends of the technical maturity spectrum. A novice ISV customer and an expert ISV customer need fundamentally different things from the same portal, and neither should feel like the product was built for the other person.
Add to this the inherent complexity of payments infrastructure — highly regulated, with significant configuration surface area — and you have a product design challenge that most teams would try to solve by building two separate products. The client needed one that worked for both.
Six weeks of problem framing before a single sprint activity: stakeholder interviews, client research analysis, persona development across five distinct user types, and a detailed workshop walkthrough with the client team. The goal was to walk into sprint week with alignment already established, not to find it during the workshop.
The sprint week itself produced a functional iOS prototype, an advertisement video, and an executive pitch deck. The client's development team — who participated fully in the workshop — had enough clarity to begin building in production on December 3rd, the day after the sprint started delivering outputs.
That's the outcome I'm most proud of here: not that we finished fast, but that what we built in a week was clear enough that a production team could act on it immediately.
- A portal concept that serves novice and expert users from a single interface — with progressive disclosure that matches the user's sophistication level
- Functional iOS prototype, advertisement video, and executive pitch deck delivered within the sprint week
- Production development began during the sprint — not after it
- New revenue pathways identified for the provider within the portal architecture itself