Building UX at Advarra

Overview

Over time, my role at Advarra evolved beyond product design and front-end development into helping establish UX as a more structured and strategic function within the organization.

As the company grew through acquisition and expanded its product portfolio, teams faced challenges related to consistency, collaboration, accessibility, customer feedback, and design quality. While continuing to contribute to product initiatives, I helped introduce practices, processes, and governance structures that improved how teams approached user experience across products.

The work ultimately extended beyond individual projects and became focused on creating the conditions for better product decisions, stronger collaboration, and more sustainable delivery.

Why This Matters

Many organizations invest in UX by hiring designers. Fewer invest in the processes, relationships, and operating models required for UX to consistently influence product outcomes.

This work demonstrates my ability to identify organizational gaps, create practical solutions, and help establish UX as a trusted partner across product, engineering, and leadership teams. It represents one of the clearest examples of a recurring theme throughout my career:

Creating structure where structure does not yet exist.

Problem

As Advarra expanded through acquisitions and continued to evolve its product portfolio, UX practices varied significantly between teams and products.

Challenges included limited consistency across products, inconsistent customer feedback processes, accessibility requirements becoming increasingly important, varying levels of UX maturity across teams, and a lack of shared standards and reusable assets — all while teams were actively delivering software, making large-scale organizational change difficult.

Constraints

Delivery could not stop. Any improvements had to be introduced while products continued shipping.

Limited dedicated resources. Many initiatives, including the design system, were built through influence and collaboration rather than dedicated headcount.

Diverse product portfolio. Products served different users, workflows, and business needs, making standardization challenging.

Regulatory and accessibility requirements. Healthcare and clinical research software required a high level of attention to compliance, accessibility, and usability.

Organizational change. Success depended on earning trust and demonstrating value rather than relying on authority.

Approach

Rather than attempting a large-scale transformation initiative, I focused on introducing practical improvements that could demonstrate value and gain adoption over time:

• Design reviews — recurring sessions to encourage collaboration, improve quality, and increase visibility across teams.
• Customer reviews — opportunities to gather direct feedback and validate assumptions earlier in the process.
• UX planning and intake — more structured approaches for managing UX work, prioritization, and collaboration.
• Design system governance — governance structures, including a Design System Council, to support adoption and sustainability.
• Accessibility program — accessibility as a shared responsibility, with processes, standards, and documentation that improved consistency.
• Cross-functional partnerships — close work with product managers, engineers, leadership, and customers to build alignment.

Measuring what matters

One lesson that shaped my approach to UX leadership was learning to focus less on design output and more on measurable outcomes. I was never particularly interested in tracking the number of screens designed or stories completed — those metrics describe activity, not value.

Instead, depending on the product, success might mean improving customer satisfaction (CSAT), reducing study startup time, reducing protocol deviations and screen failures, increasing workflow efficiency, reducing financial reconciliation errors, improving payment processing accuracy, or increasing adoption and task completion rates. UX is most effective when it can demonstrate a meaningful impact on the outcomes that matter to customers, users, and the business.

Outcome

The organization developed a stronger foundation for UX across products and teams: more consistent design practices, increased collaboration between design and engineering, stronger customer feedback loops, improved accessibility readiness, established governance and review processes, and greater visibility of UX within the organization — foundations that enabled broader initiatives such as the design system.

While not every initiative reached full maturity, many became embedded in how teams worked and created momentum for future improvements.

Reflection

One of the most important lessons from this experience was that successful UX organizations are not built solely through deliverables. Design systems, accessibility programs, customer reviews, and design processes all matter, but their success ultimately depends on relationships, trust, and shared ownership.

Looking back, I am most proud of helping create environments where better conversations could happen, where teams had more structure to work within, and where UX became a stronger part of how product decisions were made.

Give me a complicated system with real users, real constraints, and real consequences, and let me help make it better.