# Joanne Mendel > Cross channel product and service design strategist | Research-driven innovator | Experience design practice leader Location: Oakland, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/joannemendel Over 25 years of experience in service design and research and digital product design at start-ups, consultancies, and multinational corporations spanning multiple market sectors; healthcare, banking, IoT, education, retail, and consumer goods. Building cross-functional teams and shaping practices has provided me with a way of evolving methodologies to improve outcomes, including establishing a Discovery Research Practice for GE Digital’s Platform Team, leading Cheskin/Added Value/Kantar’s practice in Data Synthesis, Visual Modeling and Semiotic research, building a Experience Design Team for OnTrak which re-envisioned their digital behavioral health intervention and delivery toolset, and modeling Sapient's Global Information Architecture practice framework providing an approach and tools that influenced the growth of an emerging field. I engage business stakeholders and orchestrate cross-functional teams in research, and opportunity framing, and translate them into product & service strategies, value propositions, roadmaps, and experiences. I take a systems view across touch points and channels and leverage the power of business and customer data and technology to impact desirability and viability. I incorporate visual modeling methods in creating maps, models and decision frameworks that communicate opportunities, facilitate cross-functional team alignment and trust. Most recently I've begun to adapt this research driven approach to innovation for enterprises to the design of equitable ecosystem models based on reciprocity that can sustain locally grown businesses for small enterprises and global philanthropies. I hold a Master’s in Human Centered Design Research and Strategy from the Institute of Design, IIT and a BFA in Visual Design and Communications from CCA. ___________________________________ To learn more or get in touch:  1) Email: joanne@joannemendel.com 2) Portfolio: https://www.jxmendel.com/ SKILLS Leadership • Practice Leadership, Hiring, Strategic direction, Write proposals, Lead cross-functional teams, Coach best practices Strategy • Product & service vision, Objectives and key results, Value propositions, Roadmaps Research • Ethnography, Diary studies, 1:1 interviews, Secondary research, Semiotics, Participatory design, Longitudinal studies, Surveys, Competitive analysis Experience Design • Journey mapping, Service blueprints, Data visualization & insights, Personas, Use cases, Scenarios, Concept ideation, Concept testing ## Work Experience ### Principal - Service Design Research + Strategy @ MendelWorks Jan 2010 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Research-driven innovation, design of equitable models for locally grown businesses and global philanthropic initiatives. Clients include Oliveseed Foundation, Kaiser Permanente Garfield Innovation Center, Capital One (Adaptive Path), Microsoft, and Gap. ### Service Design Principal @ Ascension Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area Ascension Healthcare is the third largest healthcare organization in the US. Ascension Studio Innovation and Strategy team, includes a cross-functional group of business strategists, service designers, technologists, researchers and UX. Proposed/Lead an initiative for identifying the root causes of systematic use of emergency rooms by vulnerable populations for non-emergency purposes - generating losses of $150M annually in Ascension hospitals across the U.S. Engaged clinicians, business and technology stakeholders in identifying solutions based on identified critical failure points, conducted impact evaluations for identified solutions and provided inputs to shape pilots. ### Senior Director User Experience @ Ontrak, Inc Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 OnTrak coaching platform enables people with behavioral health conditions and chronic disease to co-create personalized pathways to improved health and reduce medical expenses with the support of nurse coaches and a national provider network. • Established a User Experience practice which reenvisioned the company's core product offering -- a behavioral coaching platform for delivering personalized, adaptable health interventions with outcomes tracking and reporting to payors. • Led initiatives to develop the strategic vision for OnTrak's end-to-end Provider Network solution and Call Center worker experience through alignment of Executive Leadership and Product Management on business goals, value propositions and a roadmaps. • Led the effort for establishing OnTrak's end-to-end product development lifecycle, a co-created, cross-functional process framework representing the contributions of all disciplines to drive consensus across Product Management, UX and Technology teams on best practices. • Proposed, scoped and defined cross-functional team approaches in major initiatives in collaboration with Product Management. Established a UX Case Study Hub to educate the company on what integrated team work looked like through project plans, research insights, personas, journey maps, use cases and prototypes that had been created and utilized for company initiatives. ### Principal Design Researcher, Co-Innovation Group @ GE Digital Jan 2013 – Jan 2019 | San Ramon, CA • Defined a new productivity application for oil drilling ships, Sea Stream Insight, to digitally monitor the health of ship equipment and anticipate failure before it occurs. Aligned a global cross-functional team of stakeholders on a product roadmap, value proposition, product concepts and use cases. The resulting product has a current install-base in major oil drilling shipping lines in the Gulf of Mexico. • Led a discovery research practice identifying opportunities to put industrial data to work predicting and maintaining the health of industrial equipment by finding ways to work smarter and more efficiently. Led major initiatives for clients across GE's Predix Technology Platform, Oil and Gas, Energy-Power Plants, and Aviation to identify opportunity areas and frame solutions. • Coached and mentored product designers in conducting research to up-level product and service solutions across the Predix Platform and Co-Innovation Groups. Built a research repository of templates with examples for planning, conducting, analyzing and reporting on research and for conducting stakeholder alignment workshops. ### Principal Service Designer (consultant) @ Kaiser Permanente Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Pleasanton, CA • Identified opportunities for mobile payment tools at Kaiser's Garfield Center of Innovation to improve member satisfaction and decrease billing inefficiencies for prescription drugs in Kaiser hospitals, pharmacies, and mail in channels. • Led a team in creating service blueprints derived from on-site research and interviews that helped focus stakeholder priorities, influence the roadmap and leverage other internal initiatives to scale the results. ### Principal Service Designer (consultant) @ Adaptive Path Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 • Guided Capitol One stakeholders to evaluate how their current services and digital assets are used by financial advisers, investors and wholesalers and created a strategic roadmap for disseminating assets across channels where and when they were needed to better service clients. • Created an experience architecture for targeting digital assets to persona needs, developed design principles, experience scenarios and prototyped concepts for web and mobile experiences that were user tested with target audiences. ### Director, Design Research Methods @ Cheskin Added Value Jan 2004 – Jan 2010 Cheskin conducts strategic marketing research to guide product and service innovation and identify market opportunities for a wide range of companies. • Led the Design Research Practice and defined two new revenue-generating product offerings, in visual modeling and semiotic research, for getting deeper insights out of diverse, complex data sets and framing opportunities that differentiate products and services. • Consulted to a wide range of clients on major initiatives identifying opportunities for product and service innovation including Humana, Levi's, Ford, NesQuik, Microsoft, HP, LG, Nokia, American Express, Fidelity, Samsung. ### Director Information Architecture @ Sapient Jan 1999 – Jan 2002 Sapient is a global system integrator partnering with clients to digitally transform how they work and serve customers by fusing company strategy, use experience & agile methods. • Defined the critical path and process that established Sapient's IA global practice, as part of a leadership initiative. Published as a best practice in 'Information Architecture, An Emerging 21st Century Profession'. Co-developed curricula and taught a week-long, IA intensive course to new hires. • Proposed and led complex cross-functional team initiatives for Chevron, Hallmark, Xerox, Spring Street and others. Worked with clients to establish business objectives and customer requirements and defined underlying organizational structures for content and interactions for digital applications and services. • Conducted design research, designed information architectures, conceptual models, design concepts, prototypes, wireframes and specifications ### Product Design Manager @ Personal Health Connections (start-up) Jan 1997 – Jan 1998 PHC is a start-up delivering next generation digital health intervention services to HMO member populations at-risk. • Defined the DoHealth on Call experience, an application for health facilitators who create, adapt, and track a tailored plan for HMO members by phone, and deliver outcome reports to HMO payors. • Integrated the business strategy, clinical content, and an information architecture into a holistic service experience. • Coordinated a cross-functional team effort that included medical content experts, user researchers, UI designers and engineers ## Education ### MDES - Master of Design in Design research and strategy Illinois Institute of Technology ### Artificial Intelligence (AI) and User Experience Design (UED) Stanford Continuing Studies ### Design intensive study in Brissago, Switzerland Yale University ### Bachelor of Fine Arts - BFA in Visual design and brand systems California College of the Arts ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joanne-mendel-11167 - Portfolio: http://jxmendel.wordpress.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/joannemendel JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/joannemendel/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13