Cerner
Here the design was the team — and the team, when I arrived, was in trouble.
Most of my case studies are about a screen or a flow. This one is about a team. I came in as Lead Experience Designer for the charting and documentation tools clinicians live inside all day, and inherited seven designers who’d been working without leadership or structure long enough that it showed.
Two hard problems, stacked on each other.
The team was fragmented — no central leadership, no shared cadence, no agreed way of working. Just seven talented individual contributors pointed at an enormous product surface and left to fend for themselves. The symptoms were predictable: inconsistent output, missed deadlines, and the quiet morale erosion that happens when smart people aren’t sure where they fit.
A leadership void — no rhythm, no direction, work that didn’t add up to a coherent whole.
Clinical documentation, where every change touches compliance, safety, and downstream systems. You can’t just “make it simpler.”
Not to redesign a feature — to build a team that could.
I set out to give the group structure, direction, and enough psychological safety that good work could actually happen — while keeping the design solutions both user-centered for clinicians and workable within enterprise and regulatory constraints. The measure I cared about wasn’t a single deliverable.
I took charge within a week — before I had every answer.
The team didn’t need a month of observation; it needed a point of contact and a cadence, fast. So I moved early and adjusted as I learned.
A leadership cadence
Daily stand-ups, regular critiques, standing one-on-ones. Not exotic — that’s the point. The team wasn’t failing for lack of clever process, but for lack of anydependable rhythm.
Work as a shared load
Assigned to strengths, tracked progress, balanced priorities — and deliberately watched for burnout, which in a domain this heavy produces exactly the inconsistent work the team was known for.
Mentoring, and I meant it
One-on-ones weren’t status meetings — they were where I understood what each person was stuck on, gave guidance, and helped grow their talent in partnership with management.
The connective tissue
I became the central point across UX, UI, strategy, Foundations (design systems), Human Factors, product, and development — negotiating the vision when user, business, and product reality pulled apart.
Standards as the throughline
With seven hands on a sprawling product, the design system was what could hold the work together — so I drove consistent use, contributed patterns back, and logged non-compliant output for mitigation.
I had one quarter, and a choice: control, or autonomy.
A short runway, a team needing both immediate stabilization and durable change, in a domain where you can’t cut corners on rigor. Over-index on process and I’d be the bureaucrat nobody asked for; under-index and nothing would outlast me.
The structure
The cadences, the standards, the priorities — a frame the team could work inside.
The ownership
Inside that frame, the designers owned their work — the cadence framed it, the mentoring gave them the confidence to act without waiting for me.
That’s the difference between a team that performs while the lead is watching and a team that keeps performing after the lead leaves.
The team changed shape — and the practices outran it.
What had been a disjointed, low-morale group became a functioning, collaborative unit — meeting deadlines, producing more consistent work, with noticeably better morale. With that structure in place, the charting and documentation design got sharper and more usable for the clinicians who depend on it.
These outcomes are qualitative — turnaround in consistency, deadlines, and morale, by my account. I don’t have measured figures (velocity, satisfaction scores) to quote, so I don’t.
What it looked like from alongside.
“As a Lead in the UX field, Catherine brings structure and strong communication skills to the plate. Working with Catherine was a very enjoyable experience; she made us all better at what we do. Just within a couple of weeks into our cooperative engagement, she taught me specifically where I could strengthen my approach in being a mentor. I learned so much from directly observing her methods of support and stabilization when it came to running a healthy and diverse team of interdisciplinary UX designers. She shares her multifaceted expertise and experience with a flavor of passion & integrity that is truly inspiring.”
Leadership is largely the deliberate act of giving power away.
Direction keeps a team from drifting — but mentoring people and trusting them with ownership is what makes the work outlast the leader. In one of the least forgiving software domains there is, the most valuable thing I built wasn’t a feature. It was a team that no longer needed me.