High Stakes Product thinking
Clarity in the noise of organ transplantation saved lives.
United Network of Organ Sharing
Problem: Critical matches weren’t happening fast enough—too much noise, not enough signal. In GTM terms: teams miss intent windows because alerts are noisy and fragmented.
What we shipped: A cleaner signal layer, a real-time medical record snapshot, and role-based dashboards that surface the next action.
Impact: Cut response time ~50% in a high-stakes domain; rebuilt trust in the data; enabled faster, coordinated action. (GTM analog: fewer false positives, faster time-to-first-touch, higher conversion to MQA/meeting.)
Context
I was the UX Researcher embedded with clinicians who made time-sensitive match decisions. The stakes were real: if the right match wasn’t found in time, a life-saving opportunity was lost.
Constraints were intense—privacy/compliance, fragmented tools, and data that users didn’t fully trust.
Users & their Jobs-to-Be-Done
Transplant coordinator: I need clean, prioritized alerts so I can act quickly on qualified opportunities, increasing first-touch speed and meeting rate.
Surgeon: I need a concise “snapshot” to decide if this is worth my scarce time, improving the probability of success.
OPO/Program admin: I need configurable criteria and role-based views so I can reduce noise, align teams, and lift organ conversions across the funnel.
What we shipped
Research → Product → Business Outcomes
Methodologies → Interviews, Focus groups, Field Studies, Design workshops, Usability testing, Product Analytics
Signal-driven criteria (ICP/fit analog):
Feature: tunable filters that gated alerts.
User value: fewer irrelevant offers/alerts.
Business effect: faster responses; higher quality touches.
Real-time snapshot:
Feature: a concise, data-backed summary at decision time.
User value: confidence to act now.
Business effect: fewer stalls; better call quality.
Role-based dashboards:
Feature: saved views by role/task with next-best-action.
User value: clarity; fewer clicks to action.
Business effect: throughput up; adoption up.
Outcomes
Noise down, focus up: By gating alerts with high-signal criteria, we reduced irrelevant volume and cut response time ~50%.
Confidence restored: A single snapshot with source-of-truth fields increased trust and raised adoption of the new flow.
Coordination unlocked: In-flow messaging reduced back-and-forth and sped decisions in time-sensitive moments.
Less noise → faster time-to-first-touch, higher conversion
How I Drove Alignment
Decision-ready readouts: Short, story-first summaries that tied insight → decision → shipped change.
Lightning talks & demos: 10-minute “see it, ship it” updates to keep momentum.
Shared prioritization matrix: Made trade-offs explicit (signal quality vs. volume) so stakeholders stayed aligned.
User Problem-