Eric Mack Johnson
Scaling product development operations
Unite Us
Product Operations • Discovery • Design for Growth
Unite Us
Product Operations • Discovery • Design for Growth
I founded the UX team at Unite Us and scaled operations as we grew from 200 to 750 employees, raised $150M, and acquired 2 companies. I hired and trained 3 researchers, 4 designers, and a Director of UX. I expanded our design system to support 4 product lines while we concurrently refactored our back-end. Hyper-growth and complexity taught me to be hyper-efficient and create systems that any new employee could immediately access, understand, and use. Unite Us is now valued at $1.6B.
Kaiser Permanente • CommonSpirit Health • Blue Shield of California • Adventist Health Lodi Memorial • City of Long Beach • Santa Cruz Health Information Organization • Institute for Veterans and Military Families • North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services • Foundation for Health Leadership and Innovation • United Way of North Carolina • Expound Decision Systems • Adirondack Health Institute • Healthy Alliance, • Catholic Charities Family and Community Services • Alamo Area Council of Governments • Institute for Veterans and Military Families • The University of Houston College of Medicine • CareAllies • Apex Health • Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute
CEO drives sales, operations, and customer success. CTO defines product architecture, writes code, and collaborates on product roadmap. Designer covers branding, marketing, and product.
When the leadership team is at capacity, delivery teams are formed with increasingly specialized functions. Discovery and architecture is often still shared across delivery and portfolio teams.
Delivery teams operate like mini-startups with each function contributing to daily standups. Customer Success Reps, UX Researchers, and QA Engineers can often work across 2 delivery teams.
This stage of growth introduces a level of complexity that startups often struggle to achieve gracefully. However, with the right structure and process, this stage can unlock a huge amount of productivity and creativity.
The portfolio team sets the goals for the organization by creating initiatives. Initiatives are then broken down into epics by the discovery team, which is made up of the leaders of each function. They conduct discovery research, define the solution architecture, give high-level time and effort estimates, and determine the appropriate delivery team for the work. The delivery team writes stories for each epic and gives detailed time and effort estimates that are verified with design and engineering spikes. Product designers then create high-fidelity mockups and clickable prototypes.
When stories have been written, development spikes completed, and designs created, the portfolio team has enough information to make prioritization decisions and external timeline commitments. If the initiative is greenlit, then epics can be added to the delivery team's roadmap and worked with confidence.
Functional leaders also need to make sure their teams are aligned on process and technology. They might meet daily with the discovery team and weekly with their individual functional teams to ensure consistency.
This product development structure can scale infinitely as separate product lines emerge with additional discovery teams. Another architectural layer may be added to coordinate discovery teams and communicate up to the portfolio team.