No. 01
Structure creates observability
The insight lives in the structure, not in generating more data.
Preserve continuity, attribution, and timing, and the patterns show themselves instead of being pieced together after the fact.
About
Hi, I'm Caity.
I design systems that fit into how people already work, at the intersection of data, workflows, and customer experience. I'm based in Portland, Oregon.
I've worked in customer success, implementation, and technical consulting since 2019. Over time, the work shifted from operating inside other people's systems to designing the systems themselves.
How I work
MBTI
ENFP-T
The Campaigner
I lead with people and possibility. I draw energy from the humans inside a system and the patterns that connect them. The turbulent side pushes me to refine a design until it holds.
DiSC
Is
Influence · Steadiness
I work through warmth and collaboration first, and I back it with the patience and follow-through to carry a system through to deployment.
Enneagram
2w3
The Helper
I build in service of the people who use a system, with a drive to make that help effective and lasting.
How I think about systems
Why I build systems.
For most of my career, the same pattern surfaced again and again: a system could function as designed and still be unreliable. Teams rebuilt workflows in spreadsheets. Users stood up parallel trackers the official tool was meant to make unnecessary. Automation got bypassed because no one trusted its output.
It was easy to call the system broken, but usually it wasn't. The friction was in the workflow. That distinction reshaped how I approach design.
I design for operational trust, which means structure people can see, logic they can explain, and outputs they accept without re-checking by hand.
What makes a system worth trusting?
No. 02
Human behavior is the environment
People aren't noise to design around; they're the environment the system lives in.
A design that only holds up under ideal behavior is one that doesn't get adopted, so I build for the habits they already have.
No. 03
Friction must justify itself
Some friction is worth protecting, because it creates intention and investment.
Administrative friction earns nothing, so I design it out: the repeat coordination, the extra approvals, the steps that survive only because no one removed them.
No. 04
Meet people where they work
People arrive with tools and rhythms they already trust.
So I build on the surfaces they know, like forms, spreadsheets, and Discord, because familiarity makes a system easy to adopt and visible logic makes it easy to trust.
No. 05
Trust breaks before the system does
A system loses people the moment it stops making sense to them, long before anything technically breaks.
That's when the workarounds start and people rebuild it in a spreadsheet on the side, so I design it to stay legible from the start.
In practice
In Three Systems, One Contact Record, every system behaved exactly as designed, yet stale values drifted onto a shared record and surveys went out with the wrong name, so stakeholders stopped trusting the reports.
No. 06
AI as an augment
AI earns its place once the structure is stable.
I lean on it to enrich a working system and surface patterns, and I draw a hard line between what the system determines and what AI infers.
In practice
The Storyteller Engine generates synthetic CX data on a deterministic relational model, and gives AI one bounded job: filling comment templates inside a structure it doesn't define.
The problems I return to
I'm drawn to systems where ambiguity piles up, the workflow drifts away from the work, and trust erodes over time.
The ones I care about most are balancing a few tensions at once: automation against observability, flexibility against determinism, and scale against the human on the other end.
That's the work that excites me.
If you're building a system that has to hold up once people rely on it, I'd like to hear about it.
Get in touch