Enterprise Experience Strategy & Optimization

The Practice

At Optum, I led the development of a shared service focused on experience strategy and optimization. Positioned as a go-to team for high-priority initiatives across the organization, we partnered with business, marketing, and operations leaders to transform existing experiences and shape new product strategies.

Two Modes of Work

Our work often began with optimization engagements: analyzing existing experiences through stakeholder interviews, qualitative research, touchpoint analysis, and operational data. We mapped current-state journeys, identified consumer pain points and operational inefficiencies, and facilitated collaborative workshops to define opportunity spaces. From there, we co-created future-state visions and partnered with teams to test and implement improvements — ranging from content and digital design updates to call center process changes.

In other cases, we were brought in during early-stage product development, where business leaders had identified an opportunity space but needed clarity on where to go next. We conducted consumer research, identified unmet needs, validated early concepts, and helped define a go-forward strategy aligned to both consumer demand and organizational capability.

Whether optimizing what existed or designing what was next, our work was grounded in human-centered design, operational insight, and practical implementation support. This repeatable, scalable practice elevated the role of experience strategy within the organization and helped unlock measurable value across the enterprise.

What We Did

• —Conducted stakeholder interviews to understand goals, pain points, and ecosystem dynamics
• —Analyzed call data, touchpoints, and operational metrics to identify friction and inefficiencies
• —Mapped current-state and future-state consumer journeys
• —Facilitated cross-functional workshops to identify and prioritize opportunities
• —Developed go-forward strategies grounded in consumer insights and business objectives
• —Validated concepts through qualitative research and early testing
• —Partnered with operational teams to implement and test experience improvements
• —Built strong relationships across a complex, matrixed organization — gaining visibility into back-end systems and processes to drive meaningful change

Sample Deliverables

The practice produced a wide range of artifacts depending on the engagement — from capability tiles showing the team’s service menu, to current-state experience maps surfacing friction, to future-state vision maps and journey-level analyses.