Thomas Drenning Principal Product Designer & Product Design Leader

Principal product design · Design leadership · Enterprise UX

I make complex enterprise products easier to understand, trust, and use.

I lead product design for data-heavy platforms, operational workflows, and regulated experiences—turning complexity into clear decisions and scalable product systems.

View selected work View résumé

Open to Principal and Lead Product Design roles

Thomas Drenning
15+ years Enterprise product design
40% faster task completion Florida Blue dashboard
37 UX professionals led organization scale
75+ cross-functional partners across six product teams
33M+ estimated product reach across career portfolio

What I solve

Clarity at the point where complexity becomes operational risk.

My work sits where dense information, business rules, and human judgment collide: retirement plan administration, healthcare operations, provider policy, automotive service, and enterprise portals.

I help teams decide what matters, make the product’s logic visible, and create patterns that scale beyond a single feature or release.

Selected work

Three projects. Three difficult product decisions.

All featured work shipped with me as the sole lead designer. Each case leads with the decision, constraint, and outcome.

01 · Financial services · Enterprise AI

Shipped enterprise platform experience

Empower Plan Service Center

Designing explainable AI for retirement plan decisions.

Plan sponsors had extensive retirement-plan data but no reliable way to determine what required attention next. I aligned dashboard intelligence, navigation, Plan Performance Insights, and Digital Coach around one product principle: surface the signal, explain why it matters, and leave the final decision with the administrator.

Ownership
Sole lead product designer
Delivery
Shipped
Engagement
Multi-initiative platform evolution
Team
Product, engineering, research, and business leadership
Core constraint
AI trust, regulated decisions, legacy navigation
Plan Service Center case-study cover preserving the shipped dashboard structure while replacing confidential interface text, branding, and data with neutral placeholders View sanitized cover ↗

Sanitized for NDA Interface copy, branding, and data have been obscured. The image preserves the shipped design structure without exposing production content.

Business KPI focusShipped product · directional impact
↓Time to plan insight
↑Next-action completion
↑Recommendation engagement
Product decisionShow the signal and rationale, then let the plan administrator decide.
Read the decision story
The problem

Users managed tasks, reporting, payroll, compliance, participant behavior, and plan performance across an experience that surfaced data without consistently clarifying priority or next action.

The strategic shift

Treat PSC as an intelligent plan-management platform—not an administrative dashboard. Connect plan signals to implications, rationale, and actionable next steps.

What I drove
  • Plan Performance Insight structures for plan health and participant behavior
  • Navigation concepts moving from left navigation toward a mega menu
  • Digital Coach interaction patterns for explainable recommendations
  • Reusable cards, statuses, trends, AI callouts, and dashboard modules
Outcome

The shipped work unified three connected platform initiatives and established six reusable pattern families for cards, insights, statuses, trends, AI callouts, and dashboard modules. It also shifted Digital Coach from an authoritative recommendation model to an explainable signal–rationale–action pattern that better addressed user trust and regulated decision-making.

02 · Healthcare operations · Dashboard UX

Shipped and validated enterprise redesign

Florida Blue Dashboard

Removing noise to make service work faster.

Service representatives were losing time scanning dense screens and switching context. As Lead UX/UI Designer, I reorganized the dashboard around task priority—and used usability findings to win support for removing low-value information entirely.

Ownership
Sole lead UX/UI designer
Delivery
Shipped
Engagement
End-to-end dashboard redesign
Team
Product, engineering, operations, and research
Core constraint
Dense data and stakeholder resistance to content removal
Florida Blue dashboard case-study presentation showing personalized welcome, action-oriented design, and connected member tools View full dashboard ↗
Business KPI impact1 measured outcome · 2 operational indicators
40%Faster task completion
↓Context switching
↑First-contact resolution
Product decisionRemove low-value widgets instead of simply rearranging them.
Read the decision story
The problem

Critical member, claims, plan, and workflow information competed for attention. Representatives spent time managing visual noise before they could identify the next action.

The strategic shift

Treat the dashboard as an operational decision-support system. Structure information around what a representative needs to know first and act on next.

What I drove
  • Representative workflow and task-priority mapping
  • New information hierarchy and dashboard architecture
  • Interactive prototypes and iterative usability testing
  • Stakeholder alignment around intentional content removal
Outcome

The redesigned dashboard produced approximately 40% faster task completion for core representative workflows while improving scanability, prioritization, and confidence.

03 · Provider operations · Information architecture

Shipped provider self-service experience

Highmark Provider Resource Center

Solving a trust problem disguised as a search problem.

Providers were finding policy content but still calling support because they could not tell whether the answer was current or applicable. I reframed the work from search optimization to workflow trust—combining clearer IA with decision-critical metadata.

Ownership
Sole lead product designer and UX strategy lead
Delivery
Shipped
Engagement
Research through launched provider experience
Team
Product, engineering, content, and provider operations
Core constraint
Complex policy content and low confidence in results
Highmark Provider Resource Center case-study cover comparing the redesigned provider experience with the previous interface View full experience ↗
Business KPI focusShipped product · directional impact
↓Time to trusted answer
↑Self-service completion
↑Support-call deflection
Product decisionTreat content metadata as part of the product experience.
Read the decision story
The problem

Providers needed prior authorization, policy, reimbursement, manual, bulletin, and BlueCard guidance. Even technically correct results created doubt when applicability and freshness were unclear.

The strategic shift

Reposition the resource center as a provider workflow ecosystem. Help users move from question to trusted answer to next step with less ambiguity.

What I drove
  • Provider journey and pain-point mapping
  • Stakeholder workshops and future-state IA
  • Improved grouping, labels, search paths, and discoverability
  • Effective date, last updated, plan applicability, related policy, and next-step patterns
Outcome

Shipped a provider self-service experience that unified six critical information domains and introduced five trust signals—effective date, last updated, plan applicability, related policy, and next step—to shorten the path from question to confident action.

Additional experience

Breadth without nine competing case studies.

A compact view of adjacent enterprise work across platforms, industries, and constraints.

Automotive · SaaS · Shipped

Autosoft Service

As sole lead designer, I created a modern service-management system spanning repair orders, inspections, pricing, approvals, and reusable workflow patterns for automotive teams.

Healthcare · SaaS

EVIO VBA Platform

Translated value-based pharmacy administration into five workflow modes organized around user intent and operational state.

Healthcare · Portal

Contigo Health

Reframed navigation around patient questions instead of internal organizational structure.

Mobile · Field operations · Shipped

Draiver Remote Inspection

As sole lead designer, I sequenced high-effort inspection steps early and created guided vehicle-capture patterns to reduce missed documentation and field abandonment risk.

Enterprise portals

Salesforce Experience Cloud

Balanced user needs with platform constraints across workflow-first, branded portal implementations.

Enterprise SaaS

Oracle Enterprise UX

Built alignment and reusable patterns that helped complex design decisions survive into production.

How I operate

Design leadership that moves from ambiguity to implementation.

I work across product strategy, interaction design, organizational alignment, and design systems—making the rationale clear enough that teams can carry it forward without me in every room.

Review leadership experience
01

Enterprise product strategy

Turn operating models and dense requirements into product direction teams can act on.

02

Workflow and information architecture

Organize complex tasks around user intent, state, priority, and decision points.

03

AI-assisted experiences

Design explainable recommendations, guided actions, and trust-building interaction models.

04

Design organizations and systems

Build reusable patterns, capable teams, and cross-functional alignment that scale.

Let’s work together

Need a design leader who can make a complex product feel clear?

I’m exploring Principal and Lead Product Design opportunities across enterprise software, healthcare, financial services, and AI-assisted products.

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