Converging two siloed programs into one design ecosystem
Two government programs — one state, one federal — were building two flavors of the same enrollment ecosystem from a shared codebase, yet their teams rarely talked. I led the convergence that turned parallel silos into a single, collaborative design workstream.
🔒 Some specifics are generalized to respect confidentiality. Happy to walk through the details in conversation.
Context
The product landscape was a full enrollment ecosystem delivered in two flavors — one for a state program, one for a federal program. Each program spanned four products: a public-facing website, an enrollment application built for desktop, tablet, and kiosk form factors, tools for the administering agency, and internal administrative tools for user management and operations. Critically, the two programs were built on shared codebases and were meant to deliver one common, end-to-end experience.
The challenge
On paper, the programs shared services and code. In practice, their teams were managed separately and rarely communicated or collaborated on the shared layer they were both responsible for. The result was predictable and costly:
- Duplicated features and entire applications
- Repeated rework and accumulating technical debt
- Goals that quietly drifted out of alignment
Two teams were solving the same problems twice — and sometimes solving them in conflicting ways.
How I led the convergence
I started where the duplication started: the conversation. Rather than reorganizing teams or mandating process from the top, I brought the right people into the same room — product owners, project managers, the PMO, and engineering leadership (VP and director) — and proposed centering the work around two recurring discussions on a standard Agile cadence:
- One for the public-facing products
- One for the shared internal products
By convening these conversations at the root — product design — I created a shared starting point that pulled product and engineering from both the state and federal teams together. With design as the common entry point, those teams could finally align on front-end design, architecture, and backend decisions in the same forum. The effect rippled outward: the teams went on to reorganize several of their other Agile cadence calls around the same principle.
Throughout, I positioned myself — and encouraged my design team — to serve as the connective fiber: the people who bridged the communication gaps and kept the shared ecosystem coherent across program lines.
Before — parallel silos
Duplication · rework · tech debt · drift
After — one converged workstream
shared Agile cadence
Shared repos · daily alignment · coherent ecosystem
The outcome
The state and federal teams are now genuinely aligned. They organize around shared repositories, hold regular alignment discussions, and communicate daily — rather than operating as parallel silos. What had been two teams accidentally duplicating each other's work is now a single, collaborative workstream with design at its center.
What it taught me
The lever wasn't authority — it was convening the right conversation at the right altitude. Design became the shared language that let separate teams start acting like one.