Solace Health
Designing the collaboration system, not just the interface. A multi-city expansion framework that makes misalignment visible before it compounds into delays, rework, and launches that miss the market.
Solace Health is a women’s healthcare startup expanding from Austin across five cities. Growth exposed a structural problem: every city has different regulations, demographics and clinical needs, and Austin’s core team was making product decisions in isolation.
Six months before a new-city launch, three critical breakdowns were already in motion. The PM drafts roadmaps without cross-city input. Engineering hits architectural conflicts mid-sprint. Design discovers city-specific requirements after designs are already approved.
The result: 6 to 8 month launch delays and $1.5M+ in wasted labor on rework alone. None of it was anyone’s fault, which is exactly what makes it a structural problem rather than a people problem.
We surveyed and interviewed 13 engineers, product managers and designers across companies including Meta, Netflix, TikTok, Indeed, Walmart and SAP. The synthesis surfaced a core tension that reframed the whole brief: everyone is drowning in communication but starving for context. The problem was never too few messages; it was that none of them carried the context a decision actually needed.
Decisions happen without the people closest to the problem. The tools aren’t broken; the gaps between them are. No tool bridged the space between disciplines, forcing teams to rely on meetings and tribal knowledge to stay aligned.
The solution isn’t a single artifact; it’s a system. Three interconnected layers, each one covering a gap the other two leave open. A ritual creates the moment alignment can happen, a framework gives that moment somewhere to live, and a tool keeps it alive between moments.
Teri is a designer on the Chicago expansion. Early in the sprint she catches an assumption that doesn’t hold in this market. Under the old way, that flag gets buried, the sprint ships, and the wrong assumption goes with it. Here, she flags it where she’s already working, it surfaces in the weekly async, and if it needs a decision it routes to the alignment call. The decision lands in the Decision Context Log, documented rather than lost. The log feeds the retro. The learnings shape the next cycle.
That’s the point. Not to eliminate the hard decisions, but to catch misalignment early, before it compounds.
Cut
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. The v1 tool screens are already in the media slot, so this is the section about what that version did and why you built it that way.
Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore. Your note about auto-scheduling being universally rejected in testing belongs here, in your words.
Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation. What the v2 panel does instead, and why that posture change was the real fix.
Three layers, each one reinforcing the others. The ritual makes alignment happen, the framework gives it a place to live, and the tool keeps it visible between the moments when everyone is in the same room.
A structured 60-minute call before every city launch. The local PM presents first: local context, clinical constraints, demographic insights. Austin listens before it leads, and that ordering is the whole design. A weekly async City Pulse Check keeps alignment alive between calls.
Every section of the Launch Readiness Canvas has a named owner. The Canvas captures decisions and local adaptations during weekly calls. The Decision Context Log persists across launches so the next city inherits it, and it’s required reading before any new PRD.
A lightweight plugin connecting Jira, Slack and Notion. In Jira, a side panel gives sprint visibility with active blockers and team health. In Slack, it generates a dedicated channel per ticket. The AI Health Summary suggests actions without deciding for you.
Two rounds of usability testing with EPD professionals. The most telling finding was about posture rather than features: people didn’t reject AI assistance, they rejected AI that didn’t give them a reason to trust it. Every change we made afterwards moved the system from acting to proposing.
This project changed how I think about what designers can, and should, design. Working at the systems level meant designing rituals, decision flows and knowledge structures instead of screens.
The core insight: psychological safety isn’t just a value to aspire to, it’s designable. The Pre-Kickoff Alignment Call puts the local PM first so Austin listens before it leads. The City Pulse Check makes flags visible without requiring someone to interrupt a meeting. The Decision Context Log means a designer can see what happened to her flag without asking. These are psychological safety mechanisms, not just principles.
Team culture isn’t a soft problem separate from the real design work. It is the design work.