Three meetings in,
something felt off.

The brief was clean enough: design the patient journey for a pharma patient management platform being built on Salesforce, involving two external vendor teams.

Everyone kept talking in features. Dashboards. Alerts. Case lists. Forms. But nobody had agreed on what a Patient actually was in this system. What information lived on it. Whether a Case was part of a Patient or separate. Whether a Fill was a child of a Case or its own object. Whether a BV and a PA were siblings or parent-child.

The vocabulary wasn't shared. And if the vocabulary isn't shared, there's no product — there's just a collection of screens that don't add up to anything.

For the client, I didn't sell OOUX as a UX methodology. I sold it as a project risk tool. I showed them the structural ambiguity — what a Patient was, what a Case was, who could update what — and made the cost of that ambiguity visible. They understood that language.

For my team, I simplified the framework into action. OOUX is often treated like a recipe to be followed step by step. I treated it like a thinking tool — adapting it as I learned more about the domain, changing my approach when something wasn't landing, and teaching it to my junior as I went.

What would have
gone wrong without this.

• Development standstill

  The Salesforce team would have started building without a shared model. When the objects turned out to be wrong — and they would have — sprint velocity would have collapsed.

• Client confusion on priorities

  Without knowing which objects matter most and how long each takes to design and develop, the client would have continued asking for the wrong things in the wrong order.

• Multi-vendor misalignment

  Two vendor teams, no shared vocabulary. The object model became the contract between teams — design, development, and the client's SME all working from the same document.

• Potential project loss

  A multi-vendor engagement with timeline pressure and no structural clarity is a recipe for client attrition. Defining the system first made progress visible and defensible.