Driving Culture and Delivery Change Across a Global Assessment Product Line
Organization: Multi-Health Systems (MHS)
Role: Project Manager → Program Manager
Tenure: ~5 years
Scope: End-to-end product modernization across psychometric assessment and digital platform initiatives
There were six of us in the PMO. At some point, we realized we were all writing down the same things — different projects, different products, but the same friction, in the same phases, every time. Nobody was failing. The system was.
THE PROBLEM
Nobody Was Failing. The System Was.
MHS builds psychometric assessments — clinical, educational, talent, and public safety tools — some of which take years to develop before a technology team even sees them. Product and R&D teams worked in a thorough, sequential way; technology teams were moving toward an agile approach.
Both approaches made sense on their own. The problem was the seam between them. Technology teams would open a requirements document representing months of upstream work and immediately raise concerns — not just about feasibility, but about how the product would appear on the platform and whether existing platform specifications could support something new. The right questions, arriving far too late to answer cheaply.
There was a trust dimension too: the investment teams had made in their products ran deep, and that investment sometimes made it hard to step back and let other functions do their part.
THE APPROACH
Drawing the System Nobody Could See
Nobody gave me a mandate to fix this — my job was to manage projects. But sitting across every phase and handoff meant I could see the whole picture. So I built a journey map of the entire product launch lifecycle on a shared whiteboard — not a process document, but a picture of where decisions happened, where handoffs occurred, and where things consistently got stuck.
I brought the heads of product, design, development, testing, and customer experience together to walk through it. They recognized the patterns immediately. What didn’t happen at that first meeting was a decision. Agreeing on the diagnosis and agreeing on what to change turned out to be two different conversations, and I had to keep pushing for the second one.
What finally moved things wasn’t me — it was revenue. Delayed launches meant demand we couldn’t meet, and that made the cost of the old way impossible to ignore. One idea guided how I worked throughout: invest heavily in getting the first piece right, and the rest becomes repeatable. What feels like slowing down at the start is how we speed up at the end.
THE TURNING POINT
Two Columns on a Whiteboard
The clearest shift came from a quarterly workshop I ran with product and technology together: one column for what we committed to that quarter, and one for what we delivered. It sounds simple, but it created something that hadn’t existed before — a shared, visual record we could use to calculate the rate at which commitments were being met, and trace exactly why things slipped when they did.
THE OUTCOME
What Changed
Launch timelines dropped from over 24 months to under 18. Teams stopped trying to ship everything at once, using MoSCoW prioritization to separate what customers needed on day one from what could follow. Technology teams started getting consulted during product development, not after — a habit, not a mandate.
WHAT I’D DO AGAIN
Choosing to See It
What made this possible was ecosystem-level thinking — holding the whole system in view instead of just the part in front of me. I’m not sure I changed the culture at MHS. What I did was make the friction visible. Once people could see it, they could act on it.
5+ products | ~9 functional groups | Launch cycle reduced from 24 to less than 18 months