The Reporting Renaissance:
engagement metrics design
data product leadership
cycle time compression
I was brought into a high-stakes drug launch to architect a patient-data reporting system using a Salesforce Health Cloud foundation that the organization lacked the internal capacity to utilize.
My role was to build the organization’s first self-serve Tableau dashboard that tracked user actions in real-time with weekly updates, replacing month-old manual reports.
The Problem
The client needed to move their call center operations to a new vendor while undergoing a massive internal reorganization. This created a “Knowledge Vacuum”—the people who knew how the old system worked were gone, and the remaining team was paralyzed by anxiety and a 4-month deadline.
The Solution
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My Approach
By asking the questions the client didn't know to ask, I moved the project from reactive fire-fighting to proactive system-building. When it became clear that no one really knew how all the pieces would fit together, I built extensive end-to-end workflows to illustrate the envisioned process; this allowed everyone to get on the same page and start pointing out missing components, identify upstream and downstream effects that weren’t part of the conversation, and draw natural conclusions about what next steps they needed to take in their respective remits.
Core Skills Leveraged
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While my formal remit was project management, I realized early on that the client team’s main struggle was not in tracking timelines, but in identifying what needed to be done and what indirect impacts changes to the program would have on other parts of the organization (e.g. sales, analytics, finance, etc.). This strategic blind spot meant the team lacked a clear view of second-order effects the program changes would have.
By asking questions and probing one level deeper (e.g. “Then what happens? Who takes it from there? What do they do with it?”), I unsurfaced critical dependencies that had been overlooked. We brought in more internal stakeholders from within the client organization for advice, and were able to inform more functions of the upcoming changes, and even co-create new processes in anticipation of the transition.
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The client team was divided into ten workstreams focused on different areas of the transition. I was one of the few individuals that attended all meetings. Serving as the connective tissue allowed me to piece together all the moving pieces and relay information promptly, facilitating faster decision-making by reducing the stalling that occurs when teams lack cross-functional context. I also built this connectivity into the weekly workstream lead dashboards, flagging critical interdependencies that would become bottlenecks to the full transition process.
When I noticed that across workstreams, client team members were struggling to grasp the full extent of the changes and what the new end-to-end process would look like, I created workflows mapping out all the key actions, touchpoints and data transfers to aid discussions. This also served as a “single source of truth” for all technical discussions: the internal IT team working on reconfiguring the client’s CRM and the new vendor’s IT team could now be on the literal same page about when certain APIs would push or pull information, which status changes would trigger action, etc. Both technical and human operational planning relied heavily on these workflows, which visually connected the dots for everyone working on the transition.
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Operational excellence depends both on people and processes. This project took place in a high-anxiety environment due to both a recent reorganization and the tight timeline of four months. As a result of the corporate reorganization, certain departments holding the legacy "source of truth" had been let go, leaving the remaining team in a state of institutional amnesia. The project wasn't just a technical migration; it was a business continuity risk and required tactful change management. My challenge was to build a bridge between the old way of working and half-articulated vision for a revamped program that included both a new vendor ecosystem and new processes we were actively defining.
Drawing upon my learnings from various workstream meetings, I centralized fragmented knowledge to draft the new Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Business Rules Document (BRD). By creating this baseline, I enabled stakeholders to engage in focused problem-solving: they could opine and add their questions, edits and suggestions, which often led to richer discussions that uncovered and then solved for previously unknown complexities.
