Denali – From the Brink to Breakthrough
My role: Vice President, User Experience
The Challenge:
Agents at Anywhere were living in software purgatory. To do a single task, they often had to repeat the same steps across multiple disconnected apps. Nothing talked to each other. Workflows were slow, messy, and painful.
Denali was meant to fix that: one app to streamline everything, one app to rule them all. But there was a problem — the business didn’t understand what we were building or why. Decks were flying left and right, but none of them told a coherent story. The SVP of Product called an all-hands leadership meeting because the project was on the chopping block. Jobs, and the future of the team, hung in the balance.
I raised my hand and said, “What if instead of another presentation, we tell the story of Denali?” And with that, a tiger team was born.
This case study isn’t just about saving a product. It’s about how storytelling, design artifacts, and cross-functional collaboration can turn a project on the brink into the cornerstone of a company’s future.
The Process: From Chaos to Clarity
We broke out into intensive 3–4 hour sessions, three times a week, with product directors, engineering and architecture leads, a UX program manager, and me driving the sessions and story.
We started with design thinking exercises: go wide on everything Denali could be in three to five years, then converge on the essentials, diverge again around how they could show up in the product, and finally converge on the stories we wanted to tell.
I drafted four narrative scenarios with bulleted scripts. Between sessions, I sketched and refined storyboards that showed Denali’s benefits from the agent’s point of view. Once the team aligned on those, we defined which features belonged in our 2025 roadmap to move us toward the 2027 vision. In parallel, we scoped resources, estimated costs, and broke down tradeoffs so the business could prioritize features based on both value and investment.
The Deliverables
By the end, we had:
- Storyboards told through the agent’s eyes.
- Light wireframes illustrating how the core screens and features would work.
- Resource and cost estimates across design, product, engineering, and partnerships.
- A full deck with vision, timeline, recommendations, and next steps.
But the true outcome was alignment — the rare kind where everyone could back each other up and finish each other’s sentences.
The Magic Moment
When we presented to internal product and tech leadership, the feedback was that it was the most in sync our teams had ever been. The harmony was obvious.
Finally, we presented to Sue Yannaccone, President & CEO of Anywhere Brands & Anywhere Advisors. Afterward, she said it was the clearest Denali’s vision had ever been, and for the first time, she fully understood what we were trying to achieve.
The Outcome
Difficult conversations were had that were always been avoided in the past. Trade-offs were made that had never been considered before. And the clarity and alignment led to real, tangible outcomes for the first time since Denali had begun in 2022.
With that clarity, the business didn’t just keep Denali alive — they doubled their investment. The “blue sky” vision work we did in those tiger team sessions became the blueprint for the 2025 feature roadmap, ensuring Denali had both a future and a clear path to get there.
%
the funding for Denali
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alignment across the org
