The claims work happened inside a larger job. At a healthcare platform business I led product work across master data, enrollment, claims and policy capabilities. The scope expanded across teams and portfolios, with operating-budget responsibility and a funding case I had to make.
You do not lead multiple teams by attending every stand-up. We ran the Scaled Agile Framework: program-increment planning every quarter, features prioritised by weighted shortest job first, and an explicit balance between enabler work — the platform investment nobody sees — and business-value features the sponsors could point at. I have earned SAFe product-owner/manager credentials, and I still believe its central idea: that the plan is a negotiation between capacity and value, made visible.
The platform used Reltio for master data. When leadership proposed a source-by-source migration, I disagreed and brought dependency evidence: the business capabilities relying on that information, the consequences of interruption and the readiness of their consumers. The sequencing changed to protect dependent capabilities. I was asked to lead both platforms.
We modernized enrollment with Kafka. Before launch, a performance problem led to a focused investigation with engineering; the team found avoidable repeated processing and improved it. I also worked on a digital member migration and reverse-engineered Medicare deductible logic for an accumulator application. Those projects connected platform behavior with usable access and customer-service needs.
And the people. I hired early-career engineers from a development program and supported their growth. When a direct report was caught between competing outage-window requests, I took the escalation and helped secure a workable alternative. Leading a platform is mostly making sure the people who build it can.
Tools in this chapter Reltio MDM · Kafka · Teradata · SQL · Java / XML / XSD · Jira Align · SAFe PI planning · WSJF · Tableau · Salesforce integration