Finding the forest among the trees.
I have always been fascinated by patterns - connections, relationships, the bigger picture. my role as a CD and a design mentor is built around a practice of simultaneously looking inward and outward - attention to detail, and a broader perspective on strategy.
when i joined deloitte in 2018, part of my remit was to represent design and product development across our entire SLED sector. a considerable amount of that work was in IE, and as i began to introduce myself to the account teams responsible for those client relationships and engagements, i began to sense some common needs and circumstances. faster time to market, higher UX standards, and simpler long term operation / scalability.
on the administrative side, i was tasked with developing a growth plan for the nascent austin studio - one that would guide hiring strategy and provide some initial revenue forecast. selfishly, i wanted to build a project pipeline consistent enough to sustain an apprenticeship program to both train early career staff and provide mentorship opportunities for rising seniors.
IE presented a unique opportunity: i could build and maintain the kind of high quality white label IE product account teams were looking for, and have a level of certainty in projects to plan career development around. Perhaps just as important, i could create an internal knowledge base and research center for IE work that would improve research efficiency and / or reduce cost by coordinating all the discovery and strategy work across the firm.
Understanding integrated eligibility.
Driven by federally funded low income healthcare, all states have integrated eligibility (IE) software systems to allocate, manage, and in some cases distribute low income benefits.
The core of these systems is the benefits application, which captures the user data necessary to render a benefits determination — whether or not the applicant will receive benefits, what kinds of benefits they have access to, and to what degrees or amounts. Typically, states will offer their own additional programs, or adjust some of the requirements. All of these programs’ applications live within the IE product, hence integrated eligibility.
If federal funds have been contributed to the creation or upgrade of IE software systems, those assets must then be made available to other states. That stipulation, and the trend toward rebuilding these systems on platforms like Salesforce and Service Now, sparked the idea of an Austin IE product ‘headquarters’.
The recipe for a product organization.
My strategy broke down into three parts:
- establish a research foundation that could grow and evolve over time, but reduce effort and redundant work on future projects;
- grow a team and career development path to build institutional knowledge while allowing for scheduled transitions to other project types;
- create a core design system, stress-tested through unique projects, scalable and supported by a formal governance process, and built with engineering leadership to accommodate the client requested platforms (Salesforce, Servicenow, etc.).
While straightforward in theory, this plan had to account for some significant practical state to state differences: different levels of client technological sophistication and project experience; varied or ambiguous qualitative and quantitative success metrics; a high degree of variation in the numbers and types of programs offered. Lastly, the strategy itself would need to evolve to accommodate different account team work styles, since product design was only ever one member of a larger set of disciplines.
Three in a series.
The individual IE case studies presented illustrate a progression through this product organization strategy, in roughly the same order displayed above: establish the shared context, deliver against it, and create the administrative structure around it.
The first, Texas’ aptly named Your Texas Benefits, sets the stage for an emerging research synthesis approach intended to form the foundation of the IE knowledge base — both to generate strategic concepts, and to evaluate the effectiveness of design and delivery.
The second, Kentucky’s Benefind (since rebranded as Kynect Benefits), was the first chance to put our knowledge base to the test, and offered an opportunity to explore design solutions to a complex user experience.
The third and final project was the redesign of Wisconsin’s ACCESS: a broader and more complex set of programs than Kentucky’s, and an opportunity to pilot a design system and governance process built to maintain quality and consistency well beyond final release launch.