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Cori Jones

Design & Product Strategy

I fix what breaks between strategy and execution.

Twenty-five years in design and design leadership, diagnosing why talented teams underperform and designing the structural conditions that let them thrive.

Writing The Coherence Gap: Why Organizations Break Between Strategy and Execution

SYSTEMS

01 — Work

What I've built

Enterprise Fintech · 2023–2025

Closing the Gap After Four Acquisitions

A mid-size fintech acquired four companies in two years, inheriting five design systems, fragmented research practices, and a product experience that no longer felt like one product. Leadership assumed it was a design problem. It wasn't. It was a coherence problem. I led the structural redesign (team, system, and strategy) that turned a patchwork into a platform.

B2B2C SaaS · 2021–2023

Building Coherence from Zero

Joined SimpleNexus at about 100 employees during COVID. The product had strong market traction but the design function hadn't scaled with it: no design system, no product vision, no research practice, and a team of five. I built the structural coherence (product trio model, shared context, explicit outcomes, ownership architecture) that helped the company reach 350 employees and a $1.2 billion acquisition where UX was cited as a top factor.

Consumer Tech · 2012–2016

When the Product Doesn't Know Its User

Bluehost had built a massive customer base on price and reliability, but the experience was designed for sys-admins, not the small business owners who actually used it. The gap between customer reality and product design was the Coherence Gap made visible. Strategy said 'help small businesses.' The product said 'here's cPanel.' That's Unclear Outcomes paired with Misaligned Constraints. I led the structural redesign that closed it.

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COHERENCE

02 — Thinking

Writing

Adapted from The Coherence Gap — a book about the structural patterns that silently erode product organizations.

The Five Failure Modes

Framework

Why Design Reveals Dysfunction First

Diagnosis

The Velocity Trap: When Metrics Lie

Strategy
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SIGNAL

06 — Connect

Let's talk about what's broken.

I'm always interested in conversations about product organizations, design leadership, and the systems underneath both.

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THE COHERENCE GAP