Leading from
the middle.
The part that usually goes uncredited — and the part that decides whether the design survives being built.
I was co-lead on the design and sole lead on production — the design-to-development pipeline that turns comps into shipped software across three surfaces and parallel sprint tracks. This is the machinery: the scope engineering built from, the redlines that answered edge cases before they became guesswork, and the day-to-day of directing the build.
Co-lead on design. Sole lead on production.
I sat where the work actually converged. That middle position is unglamorous and decisive — it’s where a beautiful design either survives contact with engineering or quietly degrades. I call it leading from the middle: owning the machinery that turns designs into a shipped product.
Shaping the role-aware experience across all three surfaces. See the design work →
Specs, annotated wireframes, redlines, interaction docs, acceptance criteria — across parallel sprint tracks. The subject of this page.
The design-to-development pipeline.
What kept fidelity intact across three surfaces and a lot of hands wasn’t more pixels — it was the production layer. The approved scope, the redlines, the edge-case docs, and the cadences between design and engineering. Here it is, made concrete.
What I owned end to end — specs & acceptance criteria, redlines, edge-case docs — run across two parallel tracks (the live system and net-new features) alongside the PMs.
The approved, prioritized user-story scope — role by role, priced MUST / HIGHLY DESIRED / NICE TO HAVE. Scope arguments happened on paper, before code. (A real story: FCG29, two-level dashboard permissions, with its appliance-vs-web edge case written down.)
Designer redlines on the Create-Patient flow — the “DP comments” that turned a wireframe into something engineering could build without guessing: inline validation, required fields, and the duplicate-patient edge case.
The producer half, made concrete: align before code hardens, spec it, embed through the build to unblock, and hold the line in review — the loop that kept what shipped faithful to what was designed.
Design fidelity doesn’t scale without process.
Three surfaces, parallel sprint tracks, and a lot of hands is exactly the condition under which a polished design turns to mush by the time it ships. What stopped the drift wasn’t a document — it was a process, and staffing it was my job: co-located on site so questions were answered in minutes not sprints, and artifacts genuinely kept current. Fidelity scales on someone owning the connective tissue.
A beautiful comp is a promise. Production is how you keep it.
Connect 2.X launched on schedule and under budget, replacing fragmented systems with a unified, role-aware experience — and left behind durable inter-team cadences between design and engineering. The lesson I carried forward: at scale, owning the seam between design and build is as much of the job as the design itself.
Outcomes here are qualitative — on schedule, under budget, systems unified. No adoption or task-completion figures were captured, so I don’t quote any.
The design this pipeline shipped — wireframe to hi-fi, screen by screen:
The design work