Hi, I’m Cody Heart — a lead product designer
living in Chicago, IL, building tools at LifeStance Health.
My strength is strategy — five-plus years turning LifeStance’s internal tools into measurable, defensible outcomes. Before that, three years rebuilding claims and billing at Collective Health. The work I’m proudest of shows up as a number on a P&L, and every one of those numbers came from sitting with the people behind the workflow. More about me →
Tool Consolidation
Every region had built its own intake tools. I inventoried all of them, named the six jobs underneath, and turned an intractable landscape into the roadmap the company committed to.
Matching Tool
The platform existed but hadn’t shipped. As designer and acting product owner, I ran a two-state pilot, let coordinator distrust set the roadmap, and closed the trust gap fix by fix.
Care Matching
Nobody could say why patients dropped out of a black-box funnel. Four measurable gates — intent, eligibility, availability, acceptance — gave every dropoff a name and an owner. Rematches fell by a quarter.
Design ROI
I stopped arguing that design was valuable and modeled it — on the ledger, against fully-loaded cost, with every assumption inspectable. It became the CTO’s planning tool.
Essay · 6 min read
Design as a revenue lever.
A change in leadership, an estimate I got badly wrong, and one weekend of pure curiosity — the story of learning to put a number on the work, and why I think every designer should.
Read the essay →