Building Shared Understanding: Mapping the Optavia Experience

How we "drew the bigger picture" together as a team and prevented future assumption-based product work

Information architecture diagram showing the Optavia mobile app navigation structure, starting from loading and login screens, branching into four main sections (Insights home, Contacts, Learn, My profile) with their respective sub-pages including notifications, global search, contact management, business incentives tracking, personal settings, and external links to Coach Buzz, Optavia Events, and other resources

The Problem

When I joined the team, the coach experience at Optavia was more complex and nuanced than anyone fully understood. Product decisions were being made based on incomplete mental models rather than true understanding of user behavior. People tip-toed around and avoided the parts of the product that were messy and imperfect, so I stepped in to take a look and get to work. Teams were responding to surface-level requests to “make things look nice” or do what leadership intuitively “thought would work” instead of addressing the real problems coaches were experiencing.

Hand-drawn sketch showing a speech bubble with text 'New request from Product Management: I'd like a widget, and make it pop!' pointing to an iceberg diagram where 'documented & understood' appears above the waterline and 'the rest of the actual user experience' appears as the larger mass below the waterline

Approach

I took ownership of mapping the entire coach experience as part of a larger company-wide user journey initiative. Working with the coach portfolio product managers, I facilitated weekly collaborative sessions to build shared and deep understanding of the coach journey map.

Hand-drawn wireframe showing a two-step user journey mapping process: Step 1 shows drawing a rectangle as a starting point, Step 2 shows mapping the rest of the experience as a dumbass (messy collection of boxes and arrows representing the full complexity)

The Process

This wasn’t traditional user research — it was facilitative leadership of a complex organizational challenge. It’s what you might call ”organizing the messy middle.”

Together with the design team and product managers, we designed a collaborative process where stakeholders could work through complexity together and see the bigger picture, building shared understanding rather than just documentation. The sessions involved making a mess, getting everything out, and reorganizing it together until patterns emerged.

Whiteboard photograph from a collaborative mapping session showing handwritten notes in multiple colors covering client profiles, task management, motion tracking features, follow-up cadences, business summaries, areas of concern, navigation structure (Connect as a CRM), and strategic questions about coach adoption and feature priorities

Persistence Factor

This is the kind of work that feels like walking through a dark forest, wondering if you’ll ever come out the other side until you finally start to see the sunlight. I kept bringing the team back to the same discussion week after week, even when progress felt slow or unclear, until we finally reached a coherent structure that fit the entire coach experience.

Hand-drawn illustration showing a stick figure labeled 'Technical Design/Debt Product' carrying the weight of accumulated complexity, alongside a simple cartoon of the product team facing a monster representing scary unknown problems

The Impact

Our teams created a comprehensive artifact that outlined the entire Optavia user experience. I made a coach experience sitemap that became the foundational document referenced for all subsequent product decisions in the coach portfolio. This systematic understanding shifted focus from reactive design requests to strategic problem-solving based on real needs. The work was significant enough that it earned my personal promotion to Senior Designer.

Coach experience sitemap:

Information architecture diagram showing the Optavia mobile app navigation structure, starting from loading and login screens, branching into four main sections (Insights home, Contacts, Learn, My profile) with their respective sub-pages including notifications, global search, contact management, business incentives tracking, personal settings, and external links to Coach Buzz, Optavia Events, and other resources

Why This Worked

Sometimes the most valuable design work happens before any interfaces are created. By persisting through the ambiguity to build genuine organizational understanding, we created a reliable and sturdy foundation for all future strategic decisions.

Next Project: From 2 to 4.7 Stars