Designing Systems at Scale
This work reflects leadership in complex, high-scale environments—where products are part of larger systems, and experience decisions intersect with operations, policy, engineering, and business strategy.
Rather than optimizing isolated features, these initiatives focus on alignment, governance, and decision-making at scale—ensuring design holds up under growth, ambiguity, and real-world constraints.
Context
Online car buying spanned multiple products and teams, each optimizing their own surfaces while experience gaps and inconsistencies emerged across the end-to-end journey.
Leadership Challenge
The challenge was not redesigning a single flow, but creating a way to see and address experience seams across products before they shipped—in an environment where teams were moving quickly and ownership was distributed.
What Jessa Led
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Established a system-level approach to identifying experience gaps across products and teams
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Introduced shared mechanisms for surfacing risks, misalignment, and friction earlier in the development cycle
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Enabled product and design teams to catch and resolve experience issues before launch, rather than reacting post-release
Outcome
Teams shipped more cohesive experiences with fewer downstream issues, demonstrating how system-level visibility can improve quality and speed without slowing delivery.
Scaling Design Decision-Making Across Agile Organizations
Context
As design teams scaled, traditional review and handoff practices created bottlenecks—slowing delivery, clustering work at the end of cycles, and making it harder to maintain quality.
Leadership Challenge
The challenge was to bring clarity and structure to design decision-making within agile systems—improving speed and quality while also developing designers’ judgment.
What Jessa Led
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Developed the 30 / 60 / 90 framework to align design work with agile delivery rhythms
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Enabled designers to hand work off earlier and more continuously, rather than all at once
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Used the framework as both a delivery mechanism and a training tool to improve decision quality over time
This system was created at Walmart, implemented at Capital One, and later adopted at Yum. Other design leaders have introduced this model to companies like Meta, Stripe and Spotify as well.
Outcome
Design quality improved measurably, delivery became more predictable, and teams moved faster without sacrificing rigor—demonstrating a repeatable system for scaling both speed and judgment.
Context
Over time, a multinational organization accumulated numerous technical systems intended to support employee IT needs. These systems evolved independently across domains—software, hardware, identity, asset management—resulting in fragmented experiences and unclear ownership.
Employees struggled to understand where to go for help, while support teams lacked visibility into how services connected end-to-end. The result was duplicated investment, delayed resolution, and productivity loss at scale.
The opportunity was not to redesign a single support tool, but to make the entire support ecosystem legible.
Leadership Challenge
The ambiguity was structural. No single team owned the full support experience, priorities varied across domains, and decisions were made locally without understanding downstream impact.
The challenge was to surface risk, dependencies, and decision points across a deeply interconnected system—while aligning stakeholders who each controlled only part of the whole.
What Jessa Led
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Led multi-channel research across technical support touchpoints to understand real-world service breakdowns
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Prioritized services based on organizational risk and employee impact
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Mapped end-to-end service flows across systems, touchpoints, actors, actions, and policies
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Facilitated stakeholder workshops to validate ownership, dependencies, and gaps
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Created a service ecosystem map that revealed hidden complexity and systemic inefficiencies
Outcome
The resulting service map provided a shared, system-level view of technical support, making visible the overlaps, gaps, and inefficiencies created by fragmented ownership.
This work enabled leadership to:
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Identify high-risk services and decision bottlenecks
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Reduce duplicated effort across domains
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Inform a clearer roadmap for technical support investment
Most importantly, it shifted conversations from individual tools to system-level decisions, enabling more intentional, coordinated action in an otherwise opaque environment.