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The Producer’s Mindset: Orchestrating Teams, Tools, and Trust Toward a Five-Star Goal
The Producer’s Mindset: Orchestrating Teams, Tools, and Trust Toward a Five-Star Goal
Business Need
Business Need
Peoples Health, a Medicare Advantage organization, aimed to achieve a coveted Five-Star plan rating—the federal government’s highest measure of quality, customer satisfaction, and care outcomes. This rating directly impacts the financial incentives Medicare organizations receive.
To meet this goal, multiple high-visibility strategic programs were in motion under strict regulatory timelines. Brenda joined to establish a consultative Project Management Office (PMO) that would guide executives, vice presidents, and functional leaders in effectively planning and delivering these initiatives.
Challenges
Challenges
Directors and managers were stretched thin, balancing project responsibilities with daily operations. This limited their ability to manage timelines, approvals, and cross-department coordination.
Although more than 80 employees had received training on the project management tool, user adoption was minimal, and standardized practices were rarely applied. The organization also lacked visibility into its 100+ active projects, including their scope, complexity, business value, and strategic alignment.
Adding to the challenge, the newly created PMO had no dedicated staff or infrastructure to fulfill its mission.
Approach
Approach
Brenda built the PMO from the ground up using a people-first, iterative approach:
People: Interviewed 30 directors, managers, and team members to understand real-world challenges and design PMO support around their needs.
Process: Delivered hands-on coaching and guidance from concept to delivery, building trust and demonstrating the tangible value of standardized project management practices.
Tools: Partnered with the Education & Training team to assess past tool usage and led usability testing with seven pilot users, shaping practical improvements for both standalone and enterprise versions.
Results
Results
Achieved the Five-Star plan rating, representing $10 million in additional revenue.
Delivered strategic programs on time, within scope and budget.
Validated a user-centered PMO model, grounded in real operational experience rather than top-down administration.
Developed three tool prototypes that identified workflow blockers, non-value-added tasks, and process gaps.
Improved enterprise-wide transparency and alignment across 100 projects through a centralized project inventory and performance analysis.
Expanded the PMO by hiring and mentoring new project coordinators equipped with user-focused project management skills.
Designing Flow: Enabling Creative Teams to Deliver at Peak Performance
Designing Flow: Enabling Creative Teams to Deliver at Peak Performance
Business Need
Business Need
At the onset of the pandemic, retail faced unprecedented shutdowns and uncertainty. Gap, Inc. needed to rapidly innovate its e-commerce capabilities across Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta. This required 6X more workload and 4X larger product engineering teams, including the team managing the Design System, which underpinned all UI development for seven other e-commerce and marketing teams.
Challenge
Challenge
The Design System team was key to enabling high-quality, reusable components for other engineerinng teams—but had a unique creative culture.
With 25+ members accustomed to minimal structure, Brenda had to:
Respect their self-determination and creative workflow
Introduce predictability without stifling autonomy
Balance unplanned support requests from multiple brands with iteration commitments
Without intervention, user stories repeatedly carried over, creating pressure from the business to deliver more, faster, and predictably.
Approach
Brenda applied a human-centered, incremental approach:
Observe: Spent time understanding team dynamics and workflows.
Small impactful changes: Introduced prioritization by moving the most valuable user stories to the top of the backlog, helping the team stay focused.
Share benefits: Gathered metrics and feedback every two weeks, demonstrating how new practices improved clarity and efficiency.
Scale improvements: Once adoption stabilized, used average iteration capacity to plan and prioritize work more predictably.
Results
Team fully embraced the new workflow without feeling constrained.
Improved focus allowed for faster development, clearer goals, and shorter meetings.
Performance metrics:
Committed vs resolved user stories improved from <50% to 100%
Average cycle time reduced by 3 days compared to the rest of the organization
Less back-and-forth communication freed time for creative work.
Gap, Inc. launched new e-commerce features in time for peak season, with Black Friday breaking all-time U.S. order records.
From Insight to Execution: Orchestrating Adoption and Experience in Banking
From Insight to Execution: Orchestrating Adoption and Experience in Banking
Business Need
Business Need
Banco Popular North America had launched new online banking solutions for small business owners, but a year later, most customers were still using personal banking accounts. Enrollment goals were not being met. Brenda joined to help the VP of Corporate Treasury Product Management improve the customer experience and drive adoption of the new product offerings.
Challenge
Challenge
Customers were unaware of the new B2B solutions or hesitant to switch from personal accounts.
Those interested faced obstacles with application, registration, and authentication—resulting in a lost opportunity of $8K per month.
Bank staff lacked tools to effectively support customers, and misalignment across departments caused high rates of rejected applications.
Approach
Approach
Customer & Staff Insights: Conducted discussions with Customer Service, Branch Managers, Product Managers, Operations, IT, and Creative Services to map the customer journey and pain points.
Workflow & Documentation: Mapped internal processes with customer touch points and created a visual matrix detailing required documents by solution package for use by branch managers, relationship managers, and cash management officers.
Communications & Training: Partnered with Creative Services and Product Managers to develop educational materials for 800 representatives and customers. Reframed security communications to build trust and designed an online training walkthrough for platform navigation.
Quality Assurance: Reviewed and corrected 20 discrepancies in customer surveys between English and Spanish versions to improve feedback accuracy.
Results
Results
Business platform enrollments increased by 150% across five markets, generating $600K in annual revenue.
Customers experienced a smoother, seamless journey through the sales funnel.
Staff benefited from improved workflows, documentation clarity, and cross-department alignment.
Producing a Market Launch that Connected Brand, Community, and Results
Producing a Market Launch that Connected Brand, Community, and Results
Business Need
Business Need
Auxilio Platino was a new Medicare Advantage plan in Puerto Rico, affiliated with Auxilio Mutuo Hospital. The market was highly competitive, dominated by established insurers with strong resources and aggressive growth tactics. To launch the plan, the hospital partnered with Peoples Health, a New Orleans–based Third Party Administrator, leveraging its experience and infrastructure in the Medicare Advantage niche.
Challenge
Challenge
Launching in Puerto Rico came with its own production-scale challenges. The healthcare landscape operated very differently from the U.S. mainland, demanding a localized strategy to build credibility and connect with the community.
The organization had to move fast—assembling a new team, securing office space, and setting up operations from scratch—while racing against the short Medicare enrollment window of just a few months.
As part of the launch team, Brenda had to build the Community Relations and Marketing function from the ground up—designing outreach strategies and brand experiences that would drive both enrollment growth and provider network expansion.
Approach
Approach
Brenda led the market entry strategy by engaging 80 local organizations to assess community needs and establish key partnerships. She developed annual plans focused on brand recognition, lead generation, and provider network support while pioneering the use of metrics to track event ROI and regulatory compliance.
Each initiative included detailed logistics, budgets, measurable objectives, and post-event evaluations to capture leads, referrals, and enrollments. Collaborating closely with Sales, Provider Network teams, and creative contractors, she also produced marketing collateral—digital and print—and guided a newly hired project coordinator to ensure consistent execution.
Within the first year, Brenda and her team delivered more than 50 events and marketing projects, creating a strong local presence for Auxilio Platino.
Results
Results
Exceeded enrollment goals by 120% within a half-million-dollar budget, fully compliant with local and federal regulations.
Expanded the physician network by 500%.
Established a scalable, metrics-driven community engagement model for future growth.
Designing Customer-Centered Ideation Workshops
Designing Customer-Centered Ideation Workshops
Business Need
Business Need
For a global hi-tech leader in Silicon Valley, staying at the forefront of enterprise product offerings requires continuous innovation. A Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems wanted to create spaces for generating new product ideas from the ground up. Brenda, an embedded Agile consultant, was invited to design and execute the company’s first customer-centered ideation workshop.
Challenges
Challenges
Technical mindset: Engineers traditionally focused on technical solutions; the workshop needed to shift focus toward customer needs.
Time and cost constraints: Engineers would be pulled from daily responsibilities, so activities had to be highly strategic to generate tangible outcomes within a half-day.
Cross-functional collaboration: Balancing participants across Product Managers, Technical Marketing Engineers, and Software/Field Engineers from Wireless, Switching, Routing, and IoT required carefully sized groups for productive ideation.
Organizational culture: Cisco valued top-down directives, but Brenda needed to foster a bottom-up, inclusive approach to encourage engagement and creativity.
Approach
Approach
User-centered personas: Each group created fictional customer personas to guide ideation and ensure solutions addressed real customer needs.
Lean & Kanban methods: Workshop activities incorporated visualization, dot-voting, Work-in-Progress limits, and a retrospective to maximize value and minimize wasted effort.
Optimized group structure: Worked with VPs and directors to select 3–5 participants per group, ensuring a balanced mix of roles for effective collaboration.
Bottom-up facilitation: Introduced non-directive guidelines and fostered a safe, inclusive environment, empowering participants to self-organize and contribute ideas freely.
Results
Results
40 new customer-centered product ideas were generated in a single half-day workshop.
Top 3 ideas were identified by cross-functional consensus among 20 participants, aligning with organizational goals.
Ideas were documented in the Innovation Portal for Proof of Concepts, Hack-a-thons, and further R&D.
Introduced a new model for ideation that engineers found productive, engaging, and fun, paving the way for future workshops.
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