CVS Health

Career path

I started at CVS Health as a contractor through an agency. I worked my way to full-time employee, then design lead, then design manager — eventually helping lead a skunkworks effort that grew from 6 people to 30. Along the way I collaborated with others to break down silos, build cross-company collaboration, and advocated for a cohesive one company customer experience even though CVSHealth has over 7 subsidiary companies & brands.

I was hired to bring out-of-the-box thinking to some of CVS Health's hardest problems — competing with Amazon Pill Pack through a concept called Simple Dose, building CVSCare (a deeply integrated care navigation experience), leading a skunkworks adherence prototype with an Aetna pharmacist, and rethinking Medication reminders. The challenge underneath all of them was the same: know our customers deeply enough to actually serve them, inside some of the strictest regulatory guardrails in any industry — and still find room to innovate.

The approach

I utilized the design thinking methodology end to end — empathize, define, ideate, prototype/test, implement — but I leaned hardest on empathize. Skip that step, or treat it lightly, and you risk building something technically sound that no one actually needs. I like to pair design thinking with heavy cross-functional collaboration and deep business acumen. Design that ignores the business rarely survives and design that work with business, thrives.

The learnings & outcome

As an individual contributor, the work itself was the reward — solving hard, large-scale problems alongside smart people. As a design manager, the lesson changed: my job wasn't to have the vision, it was to get a team to see it, believe it, and build it with me. A mission statement doesn't move anything on its own. What moves things is a team that trusts each other enough to challenge the status quo and understands and sees the company vision. It’s hard for a team to all move in the same direction if they can’t see the direction they are going and that understanding is more then credos, policies, initiatives or strategies or town hall meeings.