THE JED FOUNDATION / AI & INTELLIGENCE
Upgrading daily scribbles into enterprise pipelines
Freeing field teams from admin purgatory
ROLE
Sole product designer responsible for leading end-to-end service discovery, synthesizing seven sources into a comprehensive program journey map, and redefining a note-taking feature into an AI-assisted reporting system. Owned product experience strategy, information architecture, and interaction design in collaboration with product management, engineering, and program stakeholders.
SCOPE
0→1 AI-Powered Reporting System
STATUS
In Development
FOCUS
Product Discovery, E2E Journey Mapping, Service Design, UX Architecture, Data Strategy
ORGANIZATION
The Jed Foundation
02 / DISCOVERY
Four days. Seven sources. One systemic problem.
“Can we just get a simple note-taking feature?”
If only.
Leadership assumed a routine ticket for a simple text box would magically cure documentation fatigue, treating data capture like a harmless little administrative chore. But slapping a basic text box onto the roadmap would have just given users yet another isolated field to ignore while the program stayed trapped in an operational Bermuda Triangle.
Siloed teams were already stashing notes in lawless hideouts across Salesforce, Asana, and random Google Docs from Zoom technical assistance (TA) calls—the literal lifeblood of program data collection—went completely off the grid. A standard text box would have just added another unorganized graveyard for data and perpetuated the problem even further.
The organization was flying blind across a grueling four-year journey. Schools were quietly ghosting the program, and Research & Evaluation (R&E) was stuck playing an endless, soul-crushing game of telephone just to piece together portfolio health. Solving that required transforming how information flowed across the entire ecosystem, and not just in one isolated instance.
Working under tight resource constraints, I took a step back to look at the bigger picture and mapped the entire four-year user journey across six distinct program phases in less than a week using insights synthesized from seven different data sources.
Note: TA Notes were slated as the initial release, but not all of these strategic opportunities were implemented.
03 / THE OPPORTUNITY
Finding common ground between oil and water.
The journey map diagnosed the illness, but stakeholder discovery revealed why past fixes kept failing. We had four groups pulling in completely opposite directions.
Consultants
Needed fast, low-friction methods for capturing messy human conversations in real time, entirely hidden from school partners.
Research & Evaluation (R&E)
Had a bottomless appetite for rigid, structured metrics to measure comparable multi-year progress.
Program Leadership
Wanted a snapshot to spot who was thriving and who was about to quietly ghost the program.
School Partners
Needed summaries to lock in next step accountability and streamline mid-program onboarding during staff turnover.
On paper, this looked like a Mexican standoff. Throwing up strict forms pleased analysts by infuriating consultants, driving them right back underground. Loose text boxes created data black holes, and sharing off-the-record notes threatened to instantly obliterate decades of hard-earned trust with schools.
Pushed to accept an inherited all-or-nothing compromise. I stepped in to champion a secret third option—decoupling how information is captured from how it is structured, which ultimately broke the stalemate and saved the product from repeating the past mistakes.
04 / THE SOLUTION
Messy notes in. Clean data out.
Instead of forcing consultants to wrestle with soul-crushing forms or watching valuable insights get buried alive in random text blocks, my task was to build a system that finally gave every single stakeholder what they wanted without compromise.
Stepping up to the challenge, I designed an intuitive experience combining gentle conversation prompts, optional Zoom transcripts, and AI-powered synthesis so consultants could just document naturally while the system quietly did the heavy lifting of turning raw dialogue into pristine, structured data for R&E, and shattering the false choice of the past by turning a single conversation into multi-layered value across the entire program.
Manual clearance check for off-the-record items
Suggests relevant project spaces for quick linking
Replaces manual check-ins with clear visibility into where attention is needed
(see first screen)
05 / THE IMPACT
From a simple notepad to program-wide visibility.
With engineering handoff just around the corner, my task was to secure executive buy-in and organizational alignment for a product that finally gave consultants, R&E, leadership, and schools a lightweight, real-time window into school progress between the start and end of the program. Stepping up to the challenge, I demoed the comprehensive solution to stakeholders—winning over warring departments, earning praise from our external AI partner Neural Web, and sparking a stakeholder proclamation about our MDP:
"Really putting the D in Delightful!"
The stunning result was an immediate organizational shift from building a basic notepad to investing in continuous program intelligence, perfectly setting us up for engineering handoff and real-world rollout.