Healthcare providers use ROME to order cancer therapies with a strict five-day shelf life. Orders must be created quickly and accurately to ensure patients receive timely treatment.
What began as a six-month redesign became something much bigger. Over the next three years, I led product design through platform expansion, corporate rebranding, shifting business priorities, and four competing design systems while the product continued to ship and evolve into an enterprise platform.
Lead Product Designer
Novartis · 2023–2026
194 → 51would-be UI bugs reduced
4.8+Satisfaction Rating
-20%Returned Products
19% LeadOver leading competitors
From Frankenstein to One Source of Truth
ROME outgrew the systems that built it.
Challenge
Corporate rebranding, a platform split, and rapid expansion turned ROME into a Frankenstein of mismatched styles, interactions, and components.
Without a single source of truth, design and engineering implemented new features inconsistently, compounding the problem with every release as development expanded to a new sister platform.
Strategy
As the sister platform was being built on Salesforce Design System 2, an opportunity emerged. Rather than adding more duct tape and patchwork, I consolidated ROME and SLDS 2 into a single source of truth, creating a shared enterprise design system through a phased migration that minimized disruption while supporting ongoing product delivery.
Why a phased approach?
A full redesign wasn’t realistic. Product wanted a consistent experience, engineering couldn’t absorb the scope, and the business couldn’t pause feature delivery. Working closely with engineering, I prioritized global components and the most frequently used pages first, creating a phased migration that balanced all three.
Result
Established the NPS Design System as the single source of truth for design and engineering across enterprise platforms.
Replaced competing design systems with a shared component library that provided a consistent foundation for future development.
Everything Everywhere Needs to Be Fixed Right Now
1px misalignment and broken primary buttons in the same hot-fix.
Challenge
UAT uncovered an average of ~35 UI issues per sprint during redesign. Findings ranged from minor inconsistencies to broken interactions that prevented user progression. Every issue entered the engineering queue with the same priority.
Without a shared way to evaluate UI quality, discussions increasingly shifted from fixing problems to debating ownership and severity.
~35 bugs per sprint
Strategy
To address this, I created a UI Quality Framework that prioritized issues based on user impact, frequency, and visual severity. Clear definitions, examples, and weekly review sessions gave design, engineering, and UAT a shared standard for evaluating UI issues and determining what should be fixed immediately, deferred, or accepted.
Result
Reduced UI tickets sent to engineering by 74%, from 194 to 51 across six sprints.
Established a shared standard for evaluating UI quality, helping design and UAT align while engineering focused on higher-impact issues.
Reduced review sessions from weekly to biweekly as the backlog stabilized, returning time to product work.
ROME continues to evolve.
Every new challenge required a different solution, but my goal remained the same: reduce complexity and leave the platform better than I found it.
