Unifying the Fragmented Therapist Toolkit into a Practice Suite
Strategic Objective / The Fragmented Toolkit Problem
Most therapists don't have a software problem — they have a context-switching problem. Zoom for video calls. Google Docs for session notes. Stripe for billing. Three separate tools, three separate logins, and a constant mental overhead that has nothing to do with caring for patients.
Therasee existed to solve this. My goal was to lead the product evolution of a unified workspace that centralised these functions into a single, high-security ecosystem — moving the platform beyond a basic tool into a comprehensive practice management suite built specifically for mental health professionals.
Product Discovery / Prioritising the Right Next Move
The base product existed, but therapists were still reaching for external tools for their primary clinical workflows. The question wasn't what to build — it was what to build first. That required working directly with the founders and a cohort of early-adopter therapists to separate Must-Haves from Nice-to-Haves before a single pixel moved.
A competitive audit of the two main incumbents — SimplePractice and Therasoft — revealed a consistent gap: neither offered note-taking during an active video call. Therapists were forced to pause the session, switch applications, type their notes, and re-engage. It was the single most disruptive point in the clinical workflow, and neither competitor had solved it.
Telehealth Suite / Working While You Talk
Transitioning from external video links to an integrated system wasn't a design challenge — it was a product logic challenge. The system needed host controls that worked the way therapists expected, privacy standards that met HIPAA and GDPR requirements, and a workspace that let clinicians do real clinical work without breaking eye contact with their patient.
The host controls layer covered the expected table-stakes: waiting rooms, screen sharing, integrated session chat. But the defining feature was the Side-by-Side workspace — allowing therapists to view patient history and take encrypted session notes in the same view as the video call, without minimising or switching windows.
The technical collaboration piece was non-trivial. Partnering with engineers to maintain low latency while enforcing end-to-end encryption meant making trade-offs between video quality and compliance headroom. Those decisions required understanding both the clinical context (why a dropped frame during a sensitive disclosure is a real problem) and the engineering constraints (where the compliance floor sits).
Operational Scalability / Design-as-a-Service
Rapid product expansion creates a hidden tax: every new feature that gets designed in isolation means engineers rebuilding UI components from scratch, and designers re-solving problems that were already solved. At the pace Therasee was growing, that accumulation of one-off work would have become the product's primary bottleneck.
The answer was a system decision, not a design decision. I selected and adapted the Untitled UI component framework — not for aesthetics, but as a product strategy to ensure engineering could build new modules using a pre-validated library. When Invoicing or Scheduling needed to be added, the components existed. The work became configuration, not construction.
Outcomes & Impact / From Vision to Production
The most consistent work in this engagement was translation: turning founder vision into engineering-ready specs, and turning engineering constraints into product trade-offs the business could actually reason about. That interface — between non-technical founders and a delivery team — is where most early-stage products lose coherence. Maintaining it required detailed User Stories, functional prototypes, and a release cadence that matched the sequencing of a therapist's actual day.
Release management wasn't just about shipping features — it was about shipping them in the right order. Notes before Scheduling. Scheduling before Billing. The sequence had to match the therapist's daily workflow, or adoption would stall at each transition point.