Andrew Pennell

I design and build products that get used — most of them in healthcare, increasingly some that are in other domains. The visible work is the screens. The work that matters is the architecture underneath: the model that decides whether the next decade of features compounds or fights itself.

If I had to name the lens, it's cybernetics. I design for the feedback loops, incentives, and models that govern how a system behaves over time — what it rewards, what it renders visible, what it quietly optimizes for. It's why my civic-systems project, Integral Commons, starts from constitutional constraints and refuses engagement metrics, and why the EHR work is really an argument about the data model, not the screens. The interface is downstream of the system. I'd rather get the system right.

A decade has gone into developing that judgment, most of it in healthcare, where the constraints are unforgiving and the consequences are real. Four years at Tebra on clinical workflows and the architecture of the medical record; before that, design and design leadership across Kaiser Permanente, Optum, and AbleTo. The work has moved steadily up-altitude — from a landing-page redesign that generated $5M in revenue, to reframing what a chronic-condition platform is, to arguing for the data model an entire EHR should be built on.

The non-healthcare work — Taskr, a civic systems project called Integral Commons, occasional consulting — comes from the same instinct. Find a problem people actually have, design the system around it, build the parts I can, ship something that works. I do my own engineering alongside the design, because the gap between “designed” and “shipped” is where most products quietly lose their edge.

What I bring at this level isn't faster screens. It's the framing — naming the architectural choice clearly enough that a team can debate it, making the trade-off legible enough that leadership can decide, and drawing the path concretely enough that engineering can build against it. I'm most useful on the problems that aren't yet well-defined, where the first job is figuring out what we should build and why. Pretty surfaces are easy. The right system is hard. I'd rather ship something restrained and correct than something impressive and wrong.

I work as an individual contributor at staff and principal scope — the lead designer on a hard problem, setting direction across teams whether or not the title says so. Outside of work I write about design, read widely, and spend time outdoors.