Case studies in organizational coherence

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

04

Designing the System That Produces Innovation

Asurion was one of the world's largest private companies, and almost nobody had heard of it. With 20,000+ employees serving 300 million customers, the company didn't lack innovative people. It lacked structural conditions for innovation. No repeatable path from insight to prototype. No shared frameworks for experimentation. The fix was coherence infrastructure: shared decision rights, learning cycles, and a practice that could sustain itself without depending on any single team.