A meaningful number of users were disengaging before successfully beginning care.

The breakdowns weren’t caused by a single feature or interaction. Instead, they emerged from a series of smaller coordination failures:

• unclear next steps

• fragmented communication

• inconsistent scheduling workflows

• poorly timed outreach

• operational gaps between systems

• limited visibility into where users were losing momentum

These moments of friction directly impacted progression through the care journey.

At the same time, providers and internal teams were operating across workflows that were difficult to coordinate and scale effectively.

This wasn’t purely a user experience problem.

The care journey involved overlapping needs and constraints across:

• patients

• providers

• operations teams

• scheduling systems

• communication infrastructure

• internal operational workflows

Small changes in one part of the system could create downstream operational or provider impacts elsewhere.

Additionally, the emotional context of mental health care made reliability especially important. Delays, confusion, or missed communication carried a much higher cost than in many traditional consumer experiences.

Many of the challenges involved balancing competing needs across patients, providers, and operational systems. Reducing friction for patients could also increase operational burden for providers or care teams, making systems-level tradeoffs and prioritization especially important.

To better understand where users were disengaging, I focused on identifying measurable breakdown points across the broader care journey.

This included:

• analyzing progression patterns across key stages of the care journey to identify high-friction drop-off points

• evaluating engagement behavior across communication touchpoints

• identifying timing-related friction in scheduling workflows

• assessing how communication patterns affected progression through care

Rather than optimizing individual touchpoints in isolation, I focused on understanding how behavior changed across the system as a whole.

These insights informed:

• communication timing strategies

• scheduling workflow improvements

• prioritization decisions across operational constraints

• experimentation designed to improve progression toward successful scheduling and ongoing engagement

The work reinforced how small operational inefficiencies could create disproportionate downstream impact on care access and continuity.

Reframing the Problem

One of the most important shifts was recognizing that the issue wasn’t simply scheduling.

It was coordination across a fragmented system.

Instead of approaching the work as a series of isolated feature improvements, I focused on understanding:

• where users lost momentum

• how operational workflows contributed to friction

• where communication timing broke down

• how provider and patient systems interacted

• which constraints created the highest downstream impact

I led work to redesign portions of the communication experience to create more behavior-aware messaging flows.

This included:

• reducing unnecessary communication

• improving timing and relevance of outreach

• creating clearer guidance through key moments in the journey

• improving coordination between scheduling and communication systems

The goal was not simply increasing engagement, but improving reliability throughout the care journey.

I also worked on initiatives designed to reduce friction between intake and first appointment, including improvements to scheduling workflows and operational coordination across systems.

This required close collaboration across:

• product

• engineering

• operations

• clinical stakeholders

A major part of the work involved aligning teams around a shared understanding of:

• where breakdowns were occurring

• which operational constraints mattered most

• how to balance patient, provider, and system needs simultaneously

A major part of the challenge involved coordinating behavior across interconnected operational systems, including scheduling, communication workflows, provider operations, and internal tooling.

This required thinking carefully about:

• workflow dependencies

• operational reliability

• system scalability

• communication timing

• provider availability states

• how information moved across systems and teams

The work reinforced how deeply operational infrastructure shapes user experience outcomes.

The work contributed to measurable improvements across engagement and scheduling outcomes, including:

• double-digit improvements in successful appointment progression

• reduced scheduling-related friction across key stages of the care journey

• measurable reductions in unnecessary communication and operational inefficiencies

• improved coordination reliability across scheduling and communication workflows

• clearer operational visibility into user progression and workflow breakdown points

More importantly, the work reinforced how deeply system design impacts access to care.

In mental health care especially, improving provider systems, communication reliability, and operational coordination can directly shape whether someone receives support at all.

This work fundamentally changed how I think about product strategy in healthcare systems.

I became increasingly interested in how operational infrastructure, provider experience, scheduling reliability, behavioral systems, and communication workflows all contribute to care outcomes.

What looked like a scheduling problem on the surface was ultimately a systems coordination problem involving:

• people

• workflows

• incentives

• operational constraints

• timing

• trust

That intersection of operational complexity, behavioral systems, and human impact remains the kind of problem I’m most drawn to solving.