2025
Good Design is Design Strategy
Design strategy isn’t always visible—but its impact is real.
In the world of health insurance, design doesn’t just shape interfaces—it shapes how people access care, understand their benefits, and navigate some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. And yet, the most impactful work designers do in this space is often the least visible.
Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work at the intersection of design, regulation, and human need. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned this past year “Some of the most important design work doesn’t show up in the UI, it often lives behind the scenes”
It’s the conversations before the sprint.
The questions no one thought to ask.
The patterns spotted across siloed teams.
The decisions not to build something yet.
This behind-the-scenes thinking often goes unnoticed—because when things go smoothly, it looks easy. But what people don’t always see is the quiet, strategic effort to hold the bigger picture together.
Design strategy is not always the screens we ship—it’s the thinking that happens upstream. It’s the hours spent mapping fragmented member journeys, whiteboarding with compliance teams, and translating policy-heavy requirements into something people can actually use. When design goes unnoticed, it usually means it’s working.
But getting to that point isn’t easy.
Many teams are so focused on delivery that systems thinking falls by the wayside. Features are scoped in isolation, and user pain points are addressed only in silos. That’s where design strategy plays a crucial role—as connective tissue.
Using human-centered design (HCD), service blueprinting, and cross-functional facilitation, we worked to uncover the bigger picture:
- Where were we unintentionally creating friction for members?
- How could we reduce the cognitive load of navigating care and coverage?
- Which design decisions today might create complexity tomorrow?
Whiteboarding tools like Mural and Miro helped bring clarity to that thinking, but the real strategy happened in the spaces between those diagrams—in how we aligned teams, prioritized problems, and chose not just what to build, but why and when.
And that’s where articulation plays a critical role. Strategy isn’t just about seeing the bigger picture—it’s about helping others see it too. Clarity of communication becomes just as important as clarity of design. When you can distill a complex service flow into a simple explanation, you give the work power. You make it accessible, actionable, and hard to ignore.
As Adam Grant puts it:
"Clarity is not just a nice-to-have—it’s a force multiplier for impact."
In health insurance, where the stakes are high and the systems are complex, this is especially true. I’ve seen firsthand how the ability to frame a problem well—using clear language, visuals, and storytelling—can shift the direction of a product roadmap or unlock alignment across silos.
And the value of this kind of design thinking isn’t just anecdotal. According to McKinsey’s Business Value of Design report, companies that invest in design and embed it deeply into their culture outperform industry benchmarks by as much as two to one in revenue growth. Design strategy isn’t just a craft—it’s a business advantage.
One of the most rewarding shifts I’ve experienced is helping teams see design not as a final layer, but as a driver of better questions and better outcomes. Whether we were facilitating working sessions with product and engineering, or quietly aligning on a roadmap that balanced usability with accessibility and compliance—those “invisible” moments are where the real design work lived.
And while the outputs matter, the quiet wins matter too:
- When a partnering team says, “That blueprint helped me rethink the feature flow.”
- When a clinical SME finally sees how the journey feels to a member.
- When a team decides not to ship something because it doesn’t serve the user.
Design strategy in health insurance isn’t always glamorous—but it’s deeply meaningful. It asks us to think big, sweat the details, communicate with precision, and build with empathy at scale.
And most of all, it reminds us that good design often speaks the loudest when it doesn’t need to say much at all. It’s hard, often invisible work. But it’s essential if we want to build experiences that are coherent, scalable, and human-centered.
If you’ve ever felt like your most meaningful contributions happened in a meeting, a figjam, or a quietly persuasive Slack/Teams thread—you’re not alone. 🙌