Hello there,
I'm Michael Cawcutt

Design Director, a dedicated servant-leader, musician, devoted husband and father, avid gamer, & enthusiast of pixels, user experiences, & technology. I'm currently working as:

Sr. Director of Product Design at Medical Solutions.

Bringing 20+ years of design expertise to the table, I have collaborated with esteemed brands including Mayo Clinic, Optum, Nebraska Medicine, Best Buy, TD Ameritrade, Bosch, Phillips 66, First National Bank, Children's Hospital, UnitedHealth Group, Target, and American Express, among others.

Core Competencies

Design leadership, research, and systems craft, under one practice.

Download CV ↗

Case Studies

Not just what was made, but why it matters.

Approach

Design that doesn't solve a problem is only creating a new one.

I believe every person has a mission, and design is how I try to serve mine: using it to make people's lives better, not just better looking. A design that doesn't solve a problem is only creating a new one.

Core Competency

Design leadership is systems work before it's craft work. The job is building the conditions where good decisions keep happening without you in the room.

At Medical Solutions, that meant scaling the design org from 3 to 12 people, 6 direct reports, 2 of them managers running their own teams, and building design governance, competency frameworks, and real career pathways before the headcount arrived, not after.

Cross-functional leadership across a regulated healthcare ecosystem means designing for people who never see each other's workflows: clinicians, health systems, recruiters, internal teams, but share one outcome.

The measure that matters: clinician-facing app ratings moved from 2.2 to 4.9 on the App Store and 2.7 to 4.8 on Google Play. Not from one redesign, but from leading a team that treated the whole clinician journey, application through ongoing use, as one connected system.

Core Competency

Good research isn't a phase before design. It's infrastructure that either exists or it doesn't.

Embedding a Continuous Discovery operating model and cross-functional product triads across Product, Design, and Engineering grew customer research participation more than 1,600%.

Built a unified research infrastructure connecting interviews, behavioral analytics, session video, and AI-assisted synthesis, cutting time-to-insight from weeks (sometimes months) down to hours, and making customer evidence instantly searchable across teams.

Discovery only counts if it changes what ships: usability testing and behavioral analytics (Pendo, Fullstory) got clinician timesheets to an 82% task completion rate and the full application to 79%.

Core Competency

A design system's job is to make the right thing the easy thing: consistent, accessible, and fast to ship, by default.

Introducing AI-assisted workflows across discovery, synthesis, and prototyping, with rigorous human review preserved at every step, cut typical discovery-to-prototype turnaround from 5 to 8 hours down to under 30 minutes.

Earlier, at space150, that meant WCAG/ADA-compliant prototypes and user flows for UnitedHealth Group and Optum's enterprise healthcare products, accessibility as a baseline, not an audit item.

Craft and inclusion aren't separate tracks. Equity-centered design matters most in healthcare, where access to care, including mental and behavioral health, often comes down to whether an interface actually works for the person using it.

Core Competency

Tools are the least interesting part of the job, and also the part everyone asks about first.

Figma for the systems and craft side: pattern libraries, wireframes, high-fidelity prototypes. Miro for the messier work, workshops, service blueprints, the thinking that happens before anything gets pixel-perfect. Figma Make and Figma Agents now sit alongside that for pushing a concept straight into working code.

Fullstory and Pendo aren't dashboards, they're where research and product decisions actually meet, turning "I think users want X" into behavioral evidence you can act on. Lookback, UserInterviews.com, and Maze round out how research gets recruited, run, and validated at scale.

Claude, Codex, and ChatGPT are now part of daily practice, not just for writing but for reasoning through problems and building real prototypes fast. The real value isn't speed for its own sake: AI-assisted prototyping lets a team build shared understanding as fast as possible, turning an assumption into something clickable in minutes instead of days, so a room can react to a real artifact instead of arguing over a slide. Judgment still decides what ships. Human review is still the last step, every time.

Approach

For 20+ years I've designed for brands most people only ever see from the outside: Medical Solutions, Mayo Clinic, Cargill, Nebraska Medicine, TD Ameritrade, American Express, Bosch, Target, Phillips 66.

My start was in healthcare, at space150, working on Optum and UnitedHealth Group. That's where design stopped being about how something looks and started being about whether it works, because a confused interface there doesn't mean a bad review. It means a missed dose, a delayed diagnosis, a worse outcome. You learn fast what design is actually for.

Awards used to matter more to me than they do now. I've won my share, including a few Addy's, but the ones I'm proudest of are the projects that moved someone closer to what they were trying to do, not the ones that looked best in a portfolio. My talents shifted over time from design tasks to harnessing design as a tool for solving real problems.

That's still the job today: design with a kind-hearted, humanitarian intent, whether the stakes are a clinical workflow or a homepage that's quietly costing a business leads it doesn't know it's losing. If it doesn't solve a real problem for a real person, it isn't finished yet.

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