Loyal Health’s Product Design Organization
Building a product design organization from the ground up: a 4 year journey
When I joined Loyal Health in March 2020, the world was entering an unprecedented global pandemic. The company was an emerging startup with fewer than thirty employees and three product designers. In my time there I built and scaled our design team entirely remotely to support a company of more than 200.
Challenge
Build and nurture a successful, healthy product design team, that evolved to meet each stage of our rapidly growing organization.
Outcome
I hired and led a world-class product team, responsible for a clean, consistent, and accessible experience across web and mobile.
We built an enterprise SaaS platform comprised of 12 products used by 450+ hospitals representing up to $20 million in annual revenue. Creating 36% in YoY revenue growth.
Role
Director of Product Design and UX Research
Timeline
March 2020 - September 2024
Team
11 designers, 1 UX researcher, 1 design system designer, 2 managers
The Solution
Our platform, which began from 3 single point solutions, was comprised of 12 products after my tenure at Loyal. These products support the needs of both patients and hospital staff and are being used across the US by more than 450 hospitals.
A healthcare enterprise platform suite
Establishing an efficient hiring process
As a new organization, we lacked a hiring process. I developed an efficient process tailored to our needs. Without a recruiting team, I balanced designers’ time between product work and interviewing.
Drawing on my extensive interview experience at Thoughtworks, I streamlined hiring to find the right people with minimal time investment. Traditional hiring prioritizes technical skills but I took a different approach: hiring people, not just skills. Here is the process I created:
Manager Interview: This interview centers around behavioral questions and getting to know more about the candidate, their past work, and what they are looking for in their future team.
At-home exercise: Although controversial, I believe this is the quickest and comprehensive way to discern a candidate’s individual abilities. To make this task as focused as possible for candidates, I provided a brief that clearly stated what they were being evaluated on and provided “UX research materials” to support their decision-making.
Group panel homework presentation: Candidates walk through their at-home exercise and answer questions about their decision-making and process from a panel of designers. This reduces the number of interviews needed as well as the potential overlap of questions.
Cross-Collab Peer Interview: Representatives from across the product function (PM and Engineering) participate in the interview. Designers are asked about their approach and experience in the product design and development process.
These interviews built on themselves, allowing us to dive deeper into the candidate’s abilities, collaborative nature, and outlook toward design. They focused on problem-solving, core design skills, and strategic thinking.
Setting up onboarding processes
Creating a systematic process for continuous knowledge transfer
To prevent siloing and knowledge fragmentation as we scaled, I developed a structured onboarding process that seamlessly integrated new designers.
Each designer received a centralized board outlining key activities—interactive presentations, educational videos, cross-functional introductions, and shadowing—aligned with 30-, 60-, and 90-day targets. Recognizing different career stages required tailored approaches, I adjusted onboarding accordingly; for example, associate designers started with smaller, focused features.
After each onboarding, I gathered feedback to refine the process, leading to innovations like Bhakti’s living onboarding document and Val’s team-playing cards. This upfront investment accelerated team integration, shortened learning curves, and fostered a culture of continuous learning.
People do their best work when they understand expectations and evaluation criteria. With 89% of design teams lacking a documented progression path (Nielsen Norman), I saw the impact of a clear career ladder firsthand and made creating a career lattice my first major initiative.
This framework outlined clear expectations for each role and seniority level across craft, leadership, and professional skills, with concrete examples. It guided hiring, annual reviews, and individual goal-setting. As we scaled, the lattice evolved through four major iterations and was so effective that Engineering and AI directors adopted it.
Creating a clear career growth path
Defining Design Team processes and culture
Rituals drive both product work and team bonding, but they must evolve with the organization. As a design leader, I’ve learned that what works in one phase may not in another.
During team shifts, I ran retrospective-style sessions to assess which rituals still added value, what needed adjustment, and what to change. This kept our practices meaningful rather than routine.
Our design rituals
Design Standup
Design Critiques
Weekly Design meeting ( sharing/ continuous learning)
Once a month bonding sessions
Weekly 1:1’s and monthly skip levels
Senior and Peer Mentorship meetings
Feedback channel
Friday Kudos (the brainchild of Hannah Koenig)
Our Design Principles
Developing our guiding principles
Design principles often face skepticism for being too generic or ineffective in decision-making. However, I see them as essential for aligning a team’s work with the company vision.
In a multi-day workshop, we crafted principles through collaborative exercises and key insights from Senior Designer Erin McGlothlin. The result: principles that were practical, actionable, rooted in real examples, and applicable at both macro and micro levels—ensuring a unified design approach.
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In order to foster health equity, we try to meet people where they are and design for their context keeping in mind inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility.
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At Loyal we strive to provide a helping hand whenever needed. As hospital organizations across the country began tackling Covid-19 testing we created and shared a solution for triaging patients for free. We sweat the small stuff and create thoughtful experiences to empower health systems with the information and tools they need to better engage with their patients.
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We listen to patients and our partners in healthcare, so that we can build the right thing. By sharing our insights across our teams and with our customers we work to ensure that real data drives our decisions.
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We work to earn trust and confidence in our patients and our customers by providing clear and transparent communication in our interfaces and by making product choices that reflect our stance that privacy is non negotiable.
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At Loyal we look forward and seek out areas in the healthcare industry that lack definition. We do this by listening to experts and patients, examining emergent technology, and the shifts in our domain. Our goal is to proactively work towards closing the gaps we find and creating a more seamless, supportive healthcare experience.
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Our teams hone in on the goals and tasks of our users in every aspect of our work, whether we are making strategic decisions, troubleshooting with customers, or designing features. We respect people's time and effort and work to ensure that users are able to focus on their task and not our tool.
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We believe that it is important to be comfortable with defining ambiguity and managing the unknown. We pride ourselves on being able to navigate our wide array of users, their needs, and contexts across an ever evolving, complex healthcare journey.
Establishing our design system
Our design system started as a grassroots effort between designers and front-end engineers. Recognizing its potential, I expanded it into a company-wide strategic function, hiring a dedicated designer and forming a design system team.
Tory, our design system designer, collaborated with engineers to audit patterns, introduce new ones, and maintain documentation. Our main challenge was ensuring a cohesive platform experience across both mature and new products. I worked with Tory and PMs to establish a structured update process.
We leveraged Figma to create shared design libraries and Storybook for frontend components, enabling seamless collaboration between engineering, product, and design. To demonstrate impact, Tory regularly presented data on efficiency, quality, and platform consistency to our company.
Building our research function
Making UX Research a core company practice
Cultivating a Research Driven Culture
When I joined Loyal, the organization prioritized patient and customer needs but relied on intuition rather than structured user research. I made it a priority to build a strong, data-driven UX research function.
Change required more than tools or processes—it was about shifting mindsets. I led company-wide education through talks, involved stakeholders in research, and secured executive buy-in. This effort enabled me to obtain a research budget and the ability to hire a dedicated UX researcher, AJ. Together, we:
Developed a repeatable UX research framework
Democratized research across teams and roles
Coached designers with varying research experience
Regularly shared insights through showcases and Slack
Scaling Research Through Technology
As our product portfolio grew, our manual research approach became inefficient. I analyzed inefficiencies, built an ROI case, and secured VP support to adopt HIPAA-compliant Dscout. This led to:
Doubled research initiatives per team
Creating a nationwide participant pool
Reducing recruiting, scheduling, and compensation time by 60%
Establishing a continuous research roadmap
User research is now integral to every project at Loyal, guiding product validation, usability testing, and post-launch evaluation. What began as an a design initiative is now a core pillar of our process.
Outcomes and impact
Looking back, I'm profoundly grateful for the opportunity to shape Loyal Health's design culture. We didn't just build a design team—we created a collaborative, growth-oriented ecosystem that will continue to evolve and innovate.
