Each case study shows the problem, the strategic decision, and the outcome. Client details have been removed. Every study opens as a PDF.
Brand & Communications Strategy
Raising the Profile of an Internal Design Organization
Challenge
A global technology company’s internal UX team shaped the tools hundreds of thousands of employees used every day. Yet, not enough people understood what the UX team contributed. Its communications described activity, not outcomes, and the team had no unifying theme or consistent voice. The question was whether it should promote its work or position itself around the results the work produced.
Approach
I recommended outcomes and built a strategy around three themes: collaboration, the user, and results. A facilitated brand-personality workshop gave the team four shared dimensions of voice, which I based on an American tone in place of global variants. The strategy then ran through four workstreams: brand and voice, a new team website, a creativity training program, and a case study series, along with communications tools for the team’s design system, which was used worldwide.
Result
The design system reached well over a hundred product teams, which built nearly 40% faster and spent about 20% less on maintenance. On one flagship app, roughly 40% of the accessibility issues handled would not have arisen had the team started from the system. The case-study series gave the team a body of outcome-led stories.
A global law firm’s in-house technology lab had built a platform that gave corporate legal departments a single source of truth to see and manage their legal work from multiple firms. The firm planned to spin it out as an independent company. Its target market, general counsel and law firms, was inaccessible and skeptical. The product did many things but didn’t articulate a single overwhelming benefit, which was needed to cut through market noise with signal.
Approach
I interviewed users, including an in-house general counsel and a paralegal manager, and reviewed how comparable legal software companies positioned themselves. General counsel were comfortable with a single source of truth hosted by a law firm they trusted, so the firm’s credibility could carry the pitch. I moved the messaging from “the firm’s client portal” toward “the client in control across every firm they use,” and wrote the launch material, working with the founders and the firm’s marketing team: announcement, interim website and company page copy, conference postcard, blog post, Q&A, and the script for a conference product video and presentation.
Result
My work ended as the company prepared to spin out. It launched as an independent company in 2021, positioned around putting corporate legal in control, and was acquired by a legal operations company later that year. The “client in control” framing I developed carried through to that launch.
A map publisher in India ran a heavily trafficked site with millions of monthly visitors, but ad revenue kept falling as traffic grew and its online store sold little. With a small US operation and no senior hires planned, every tactic had to be simple, inexpensive and manageable from the other side of the world. I advised the founder and CEO for several years on operations, strategy and US products, and he brought me into decisions like the one below.
Approach
The founder was weighing the purchase of a long-established US retail store. I recommended against it and showed the arithmetic: at about $2 per thousand ad impressions and a $20 sale at 50% margin, one sale was worth roughly 5,000 impressions. I advised running fulfillment in-house with one part-time person, fixing the store, selling into the company’s own audience, testing new products cheaply before building them, and building higher-margin lines, partnerships and a B2B mapping-services program.
Result
The founder did not buy the retail store. The company ran fulfillment in-house, overhauled its online store, and the overhauled store was very successful. The company was later sold.
