When the organization is the design problem

We put a room full of stakeholders together and asked them to describe one of their core products. No one gave the same answer.

They had sixty products. Five hundred pages talking about those products. And a navigation system that, everyone agreed, was the problem.

It wasn't.

The real problem was that the organization didn't have a shared model of what it sold, how its products related to each other, or how to talk about any of it consistently. That's bad enough on its own. Add a transition from products to platform, and a simultaneous shift to self-serve acquisition, and the business didn't stand a chance.

My team was brought in to redesign the site. What the work became was something different — three sequential reframes, each one creating the conditions for the next.

Reframe 1: Organizational complexity as a design problem

Research surfaced the pattern quickly: users couldn't make sense of the product ecosystem because internal stakeholders couldn't either. Teams were representing their products independently, using inconsistent language, with no shared logic for how offerings related to each other. This was a direct consequence of the platform transition — when products were sold standalone, each team only needed to tell their own story. Platform selling required a coherent system story, and that didn't exist yet.

Solving the website meant solving the model first.

I defined a standardized product taxonomy — core platform, bundles, add-ons, standalone — and established a naming and categorization framework that could hold across business units. But defining it was only half the work. The other half was socialization — making sense of it first within my project team, then pressure-testing it with the account lead and brand strategist, then bringing it to the primary client contact, and finally presenting it to the broader client organization. Every presentation of the IA started with the taxonomy, not the sitemap — the model had to land before the structure could mean anything.

One thing the process made clear early: the framework couldn't be too rigid. Business units had legitimate differences in how their products were structured and positioned, and a system that didn't accommodate that would get routed around. The decision was to centralize the model — the taxonomy, the hierarchy, the naming logic — while leaving defined flexibility for how individual products and teams expressed themselves within it.

The signal that it worked: stakeholders began using the taxonomy in internal conversations without being prompted. That organizational alignment became the foundation everything else was built on.

Reframe 2: Market segmentation to persona-informed flow

The existing structure organized content by vertical — skilled nursing, senior living, home health. That logic made internal sense but didn't reflect how users actually moved through a buying decision.

Research identified four distinct personas with different entry points, different content needs, and fundamentally different relationships to the purchase:

• Decision makers (executives, budget owners) entering at the industry level to orient, then returning to cross-evaluate adjacent solutions after engaging with a specific product

• End user advocates (frontline, ops champions) entering at the challenge level, where workflow pain points were most recognizable, and moving forward or self-correcting from there

• IT evaluators (technical gatekeepers) bypassing the top two levels almost entirely, arriving directly at solution pages to assess integration and compliance

• Onboarding managers (implementation leads) entering at solution after a decision was near, focused entirely on scoping executability rather than evaluating fit

The vertical navigation stayed — it remains the most reliable self-identification mechanism. What changed was what each level is for and what content lives there.

Persona journey map

What this implied for each level:

Industry pages serve two awareness states simultaneously. New visitors orient to the landscape. Returning decision makers cross-evaluate adjacent solutions. The page has to work for both without fragmenting.

Challenge pages carry a self-correction responsibility. When a user reaches the wrong solution and backtracks, Challenge is where they reorient. That required specificity in how challenges were named and scoped — enough signal for users to recognize a mismatch and find the right path, not just enough to move them forward.

Solution pages are the highest-stakes surface. All four personas converge here, each with a different content job: building an internal case, evaluating usability, assessing technical fit, scoping implementation. Module sequencing in the solution page template was designed around that convergence — a single page serving four distinct reader needs without requiring them to self-identify.

Reframe 3: Marketing surface to decision system

With an organizational model in place and a clear picture of how different users moved through the experience, the deeper problem became visible: the website was designed to broadcast product offerings. The buying process it needed to support was something else entirely — a multi-stakeholder, multi-session evaluation that the vendor never fully sees.

Stakeholders wanted product information and demo requests surfaced aggressively across the site. Research showed users weren't ready to convert that early and disengaged when asked to.

The shift was to intent-based conversion: surfacing product depth and conversion asks when user behavior signaled readiness, not when the business was impatient. Uniform demo requests were replaced with staged CTAs tied to journey position. Lead quality — not conversion volume — became the measure.

The more meaningful signal came post-launch: the sales team became willing to reduce form friction — simplifying fields, introducing scheduling — not as a concession, but because they trusted the content system to qualify leads before they arrived.

System Design

The framework was operationalized through four components, each designed to balance the centralized model with the controlled flexibility identified in Reframe 1:

Information architecture — Industry → Challenge → Solution hierarchy with defined content relationships and product taxonomy applied consistently across the ecosystem, with structured flexibility for products and content that sat outside the core framework.

Navigation system — global, local, and on-page pathways supporting both broad exploration and deep evaluation, connecting to supporting content (case studies, customer stories, resources) at appropriate moments in the journey.

Modular page template system — scalable templates encoding the persona flow logic established in Reframe 2: defined content structures (overview, features, proof, technical detail) with CTA sequencing tied to user intent and module prioritization reflecting the convergence of multiple personas at the solution level.

Resource center redesign — restructured from a content repository into a hub-and-spoke model organized around four resource types, aligned with the broader IA as an evaluation and trust-building system.

Outcomes

Organizational adoption and scalability
Stakeholders adopted the taxonomy and framework in internal communication without prompting — but the more durable signal was what that made possible. The IA, taxonomy, and templates became the standing brief for ongoing site development. New pages were being built against the system without the agency in the room. The design outlived the engagement.

Improved lead quality
Sales trusted the content system to qualify leads upstream — and that trust changed the nature of early sales conversations. Leads arrived already oriented to the right solution, reducing the clarification work that had previously defined first calls and shortening the path to meaningful evaluation.

Content production efficiency
The template system eliminated per-page structural decisions and the stakeholder alignment cycles that came with them. Across approximately 120 pages built on the new templates, that removed an estimated 360–600 hours of design and review time — time that shifted to content and strategy work rather than relitigating page architecture.

What I'd Push Further

The demo request experience is where this work should extend next — into the handoff between website and sales as a service design problem. With the organizational alignment now in place, there's room to redesign the end-to-end experience from discovery through conversion in a way that actually reflects how users buy.