Summary
Government's digital products and services often impact millions of people. In this session, two team members from Coforma, a digital services firm supporting both commercial and federal government modernization efforts, will discuss how they navigate challenges and foster success in supporting one agency's effort to relieve over-burdened clinicians and improve patient care. At the center of their work is a suite of tools that enable the agency to advance equitable delivery of innovations in cancer treatment. Julie and Laureen will share their strategies for prioritization within a complex ecosystem of business owners, centering patients and clinicians through a strong UX/Product partnership, and leveraging roadmapping and user story mapping to define, focus, and clarify achievable MVP solutions.
Key Insights
-
•
Federal healthcare product teams often face unpredictable legislative shifts that require maintaining multiple roadmap iterations.
-
•
User story mapping helps align diverse clinical stakeholders and clarify priorities in complex healthcare projects.
-
•
Clinicians use outdated documentation methods like pen and paper alongside legacy digital systems.
-
•
Close, continuous collaboration between product managers, UX designers, and researchers is key to success in regulated environments.
-
•
Agile frameworks inherently support adaptability needed in government healthcare product development.
-
•
Direct access to patients is often restricted, so teams rely heavily on clinicians' perspectives to infer patient needs.
-
•
User story maps focus on visible user journeys and usually do not represent backend technical work like database schemas.
-
•
Contractors struggle when not fully informed on decisions due to restricted access to federal-only meetings and data.
-
•
Visual, shared artifacts like user story maps foster internal alignment even if too detailed for external stakeholder presentations.
-
•
Product teams must accept limited control over roadmaps and proactively prepare for inevitable pivots in priorities.
Notable Quotes
"Healthcare IT is a highly regulated industry with a lack of standardization and many legacy systems."
"Prioritizing across a complex ecosystem of business owners requires deep alignment between product and UX or the product never moves forward."
"We often have to rely on Google Newsfeeds to stay informed about legislative changes that impact our roadmap."
"Our users still rely on email, Excel spreadsheets, pen and paper, and even post-it notes for documentation."
"User story mapping helped us put the needs of clinicians front and center in a complicated federal healthcare space."
"We decided not to build a new app but instead integrate within the legacy electronic health record system."
"Working in agile keeps our teams nimble and able to adapt to frequent reevaluations and shifting priorities."
"We don’t get direct access to patients, so we rely on clinicians to represent patient needs to us."
"Sometimes information we need as contractors isn’t shared due to federal restrictions, which makes decision-making challenging."
"We created a change log to document roadmap and user story map updates due to evolving requirements and regulations."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Behavior begets behavior – by modeling sharing and documentation, others start adopting those habits."
Boon Yew ChewMaking Sense of Systems—and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise
June 6, 2023
"It’s how you think about the relationships between people and these artifacts that makes a design system."
Dan DonaldDesign Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change
June 1, 2023
"Research ops should elevate beyond processes and support to become a strategic partner reflecting critically on our work."
Fatimah RichmondThe Future of ReOps as a Strategic Function: A Roadmap for Getting There
March 25, 2024
"Critiques help teams stop being the lone ranger and instead iterate faster together with purpose and clarity."
Joseph MeersmanSweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
June 10, 2021
"Kate Middleton has been doing this for a hot minute, invested in maintaining the status quo because if it ain't broke, why fix it?"
Melinda BelcherBridging the Gap: Making the Most of the Differences Between Agency and Enterprise
January 8, 2024
"Affordances seem to have fallen to the wayside in favor of flat design and revenue optimization."
Uday Gajendar Adam RichardsonFrom AI to Zeitgeist: Theory as the design antidote to AI hype
March 27, 2025
"Planning officers became product owners, gaining confidence in agile and design processes through ongoing involvement."
Laura Smith Tom GaylerEmbedding Service Design and Agile Practice within UK Planning Teams to Create Services that Last
December 3, 2024
"You don’t have to become a manager or director to advance; becoming a principal IC role is equally influential."
Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica HarlleeWhat's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
February 22, 2024
"The promise of an LLM assistant requires users to build new mental models while using it."
Katie JohnsonDisrupting generative AI products with just-in-time consumer insights
June 4, 2024
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How does Mary Lynn view the impact of data-driven design practices on end users and designers?
What are some emerging adjacent roles in UX research that professionals can take initiative in?
How can service design approaches support innovation decision-making in large public sector institutions like the OECD?