Cigna
Year
2018
Roles
- Design Consultant
- Product Design Director
- Creative Director
- Project Strategist
- Design Opperations
Deliverables
- Design Engagement Model
- Hiring Process
- Career Ladder
- Org Design
- Design System
- UXR Research Repo
Building the Team
Cigna’s AI/ML department operated as an agile innovation lab, delivering healthcare insights to providers, clients, patients, brokers, and internal teams. Roughly 1,500 engineers and data scientists worked to create new products and experiences—fast.
I was initially brought on as a Design Consultant. After the first year, I was promoted to Director of Product Design, tasked directly by the Managing Director of Data & Analytics to stand up a Product Design organization from scratch as a founding member of Cigna’s Artificial Intelligence & Innovation Lab.
My mission: embed a user-centric approach into a fast-moving, experimental environment and build an enduring design capability where none had existed.
Metrics
23
Designers Hired
60
Projects Staffed
27
Faster Design & Development
The Problems
There wasn’t a single issue—there was a network of interconnected challenges:
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Lack of understanding: Few people knew what design was or why it mattered.
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Cultural barriers: Human-centered design wasn’t part of the department’s DNA.
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Team size: At the start, the “team” was just me.
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Zero funding: There was no initial budget for building a team.
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Talent attraction: Cigna wasn’t seen as a design-forward employer, complicating hiring.
As a result, products were being shipped without clarity or usability. Users didn’t understand the insights delivered or how to act on them—undermining the core value proposition.
Phase 1: Research
The first two months were pure immersion:
- Attended all agile ceremonies and leadership meetings.
- Embedded into active projects for firsthand insight.
- Benchmarked external best practices for building design teams in engineering-led environments.
- Began mapping out the org, funding process, and most importantly, the metrics of success for both the organization and individual projects.
I contacted other Design Leaders and read everything I could find on Design Operations and Org Design.
Phase 2: Synthasis & Planning
From my observations, it was clear that isolated fixes wouldn’t work. To succeed, I structured the strategy around three pillars:
- Partnership: Build trust and credibility across Engineering, Data Science, and Business leadership.
- Process: Introduce lightweight, adaptable design practices into existing Agile workflows.
- People: Recruit, train, and empower a world-class design team from scratch.
I began a roadshow for engineering leaders, project teams, and executives, explaining how design could help make their initiatives better, faster, and more attractive for funding.
At the same time, I drafted a Design Engagement Model, outlining costs, support types, our org design, and how we would operate within an Agile project for maximum impact with minimal disruption.
Finally, I created not only our hiring and evaluation process, but also extensive documentation for recruiters so we could target the premium talent we needed to deliver. I crafted a careful story and negotiated with HR to arrive on attractive compensation for the career ladder I drafted.
Phase 3: Action
Partnership
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Delivered early UX wins to build credibility inside agile teams.
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Secured buy-in from the Global Head of Data & Analytics by pitching business cases for new Design Systems and UX Research investments.
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Partnered globally across data and service teams to define and deliver a new enterprise data platform MVP within six months.
Process
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Introduced Lean UX and agile-friendly design rituals.
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Stood up operational frameworks, including SOPs, KPI dashboards, and learning programs.
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Created a “design advocate” network to ensure designers were embedded early in the product lifecycle.
People
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Raised a $7M budget to grow the team from 0 to 23 employees.
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Built a full-stack team: Product Designers, UX Researchers, Visual Designers, Content Managers, and Design Systems Engineers.
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Launched an internal agency model to service six different divisions across Cigna.
The Results
Design was no longer an afterthought. It was a strategic driver of innovation.
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Team Growth: From a solo designer to a fully staffed, multi-disciplinary Research & Design organization supporting the AI/ML Lab.
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Process Adoption: Lightweight, iterative design processes became part of the department’s SDLC and sprint rituals.
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Cultural Shift: Teams organically started requesting design engagement earlier in the product lifecycle.
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Organizational Impact: Partnered cross-functionally to identify critical patient behaviors and launch platform integrations that surfaced outcome opportunity moments across the patient lifecycle—directly improving healthcare outcomes.
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Product Delivery: Accelerated MVP releases with better usability and higher adoption rates across stakeholder groups.
Projects & Products
A few of the things our Design Team shipped during my tenure at Cigna:
Reflections
Standing up a Product Design organization inside a mature, engineering-led enterprise is a systems challenge—not a sprint.
You can’t just drop “best practices” into an environment and hope they take.
You must listen first, solve real problems, prove the value of design incrementally, and build trust at every level.
Success at Cigna didn’t come from flashy presentations or big reveals.
It came from consistent, visible delivery—and from building a team empowered to own the future of design inside the AI/ML Lab.
Metrics
23
Designers Hired
60
Projects Staffed
27
Faster Design & Development