Highlighted Projects (Product Leadership Lens)

“Direct My Care” Portal — Mobile-First Redesign & Modernization

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Led the full product vision and roadmap for transforming CDCN’s legacy caregiver and member portal into a modern, mobile-first experience.
  • Secured executive alignment for a multi-year modernization initiative, recruited UX/UI designers, and established a long-term cross-functional partnership model spanning PMO, Customer Experience, Quality, Engineering, and Marketing.
  • Worked with Marketing to formalize brand guidelines, improve accessibility of colors and components, and ensure the updated portal aligned with CDCN’s broader public web presence.
  • Directed a phased modernization strategy using a hybrid strangler approach: redesigned the highest-value, highest-traffic workflows as new greenfield experiences while lift-shifting lower-use areas to ensure continuity for hundreds of thousands of users across multiple states.
  • Established basic observability and auditability (App Insights, usage telemetry, and data-layer logging) to support monitoring and compliance—capabilities that previously did not meaningfully exist.
  • Introduced a scalable multi-lingual framework for the portal, replacing hard-coded translations with a vendor-supported model covering 13 languages. Established the foundation for future integration with an enterprise translation management system through collaboration with Marketing and Enterprise Architecture.
  • Early outcomes include a measurable increase in mobile usage, stable call-center volume through rollout, consistent shift submission behavior, and a significantly more maintainable, brand-consistent platform positioned for ongoing accessibility and UX improvements.

Public Website Modernization & HubSpot Integration

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Initiated and led a modernization strategy for CDCN’s network of public websites—historically owned solely by Marketing—transforming them into jointly governed digital assets that support onboarding, communication, and user-facing education.
  • Established the first sustained partnership between Product, Engineering, and Marketing for public-facing websites, aligning brand, content strategy, UX, accessibility, and technical stewardship under shared goals.
  • Collaborated with Marketing to refresh brand guidelines and introduce accessible color, layout, and component standards that now apply consistently across CDCN’s public web presence.
  • Defined a hybrid CMS strategy using WordPress for structural content and HubSpot for engagement, analytics, and lead management. Oversaw implementation of event tracking and a new custom registration calendar.
  • Guided design and development teams through a coordinated rollout, beginning with the national website and expanding toward a unified ecosystem of 13+ state and program sites.
  • Outcomes include a more secure, brand-consistent public presence, improved content velocity for Marketing, and clearer visibility into user behavior and engagement.

MFA Strategy, Governance & Rollout Planning

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Played a key role in shaping CDCN’s multi-year MFA strategy, working with Security, Product, and business leadership to balance stronger account protection with the realities of a large, diverse caregiver and member population.
  • Helped define ownership boundaries between Security and Product—establishing governance, decision rights, and a shared roadmap instead of treating MFA as a one-time “IT project.”
  • Participated in vendor selection and advocated for a configurable, buy-and-integrate approach over building everything in-house, with a focus on long-term maintainability and flexibility.
  • Led product discovery and UX definition for MFA enrollment and challenge flows, including requirements gathering, wireframes, and Figma designs for SMS and email-based factors as the initial focus.
  • Worked through cross-cutting questions such as where to roll out MFA first, how to prioritize channels, how users maintain their contact information, and how to communicate changes with minimal disruption to customer support.
  • The resulting plan emphasizes a phased rollout, SMS- and email-first factors, clear user communication, and a foundation that can support additional risk-based and event-triggered protections over time.

AI-Augmented Product & Design Workflows

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Introduced AI tools and patterns into Product, UX, and Design workflows to accelerate discovery, research synthesis, story-writing, and content iteration—while keeping humans accountable for decisions.
  • Defined reusable, source-controlled AI agents grounded in CDCN context to reduce one-off prompts and improve outcome consistency and governance.
  • Reduced friction in early-stage work (drafts, alternatives, summaries), allowing teams to spend more time on prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and higher-order design.

ERP & Microservices Modernization

App Dev Manager, CDCN · 2019–2022

  • Oversaw modernization of line-of-business systems as the organization scaled from ~16K to 60K+ users, helping connect product priorities with operational and compliance needs.
  • Introduced Scrum ceremonies, demos, and more transparent backlog practices to improve collaboration between business stakeholders and engineering teams.
  • Standardized ADO work items and reporting to better reflect product outcomes, delivery throughput, and technical work in a shared language.

Product-Facing Practices I Bring to Projects

  • Outcome-focused product management: Tie roadmaps, backlogs, and experiments to measurable outcomes rather than output alone.
  • Design systems & UX collaboration: Use Figma and shared component libraries to keep product, design, and engineering aligned.
  • AI as a product accelerator: Embed AI agents into discovery, story-writing, and research to reduce busywork and increase insight.
  • Cross-functional alignment: Work with Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Compliance so product decisions reflect the full business system.

Highlighted Projects (Engineering Leadership Lens)

“Direct My Care” Portal — Architecture & Platform Modernization

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Partnered with engineering and architecture leadership to modernize a tightly coupled, desktop-era portal into a mobile-first, PWA-based front end aligned with backend service rewrites.
  • Advocated for an API-first, domain-focused design approach so timesheet, approval, and profile-management flows were modeled around real-world usage and stable contracts rather than UI constraints.
  • Supported engineering teams through a phased strangler migration strategy, balancing greenfield UI development with risk-managed lift-and-shift of legacy areas to maintain availability for hundreds of thousands of users.
  • Helped introduce fundamental observability and auditability practices (App Insights telemetry and structured data-layer events) to monitor adoption, behavior, and error patterns.
  • Supported implementation of a multi-lingual architecture that expanded language coverage from two hard-coded languages to 13 vendor-backed translations. Helped define the future integration path for an enterprise translation management system in partnership with Architecture.
  • The resulting architecture is significantly more maintainable, extensible, and aligned with CDCN’s cross-platform branding and accessibility goals.

Public Website Modernization & HubSpot Integration

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Worked with Engineering and Marketing leadership to bring CDCN’s distributed network of public websites under a shared governance and technical strategy, improving security, maintainability, and UX consistency.
  • Helped define architectural guardrails and clarify ownership boundaries for WordPress, HubSpot, and supporting systems to reduce operational risk and increase long-term sustainability.
  • Supported designers and developers through modernization of templates, components, and accessibility patterns used across the new public site experience.
  • Contributed to integration patterns that connect HubSpot event tracking and registration workflows with CDCN’s broader technical ecosystem.
  • The refreshed national site provides a foundation for gradual modernization of 13+ additional CDCN public sites with a consistent design system and shared infrastructure practices.

MFA Platform Selection & Integration Strategy

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Worked with Security, Architecture, and Engineering leaders to evaluate MFA options and select a vendor platform that could integrate with CDCN’s existing identity landscape without requiring a full custom build.
  • Helped clarify how MFA configuration, enrollment, and challenge flows should interact with existing systems, especially around where user contact data lives and how it can be safely updated and surfaced for MFA.
  • Contributed to the definition of initial technical scope: SMS- and email-based factors, event-triggered challenges, and the supporting services required to make those flows reliable and auditable.
  • Supported UX and engineering teams by ensuring that Figma designs, requirements, and backend assumptions stayed aligned—reducing the risk of “throwing designs over the wall” to implementation teams.
  • Helped establish an ongoing collaboration model with Security so MFA standards, patterns, and rollout decisions are treated as part of CDCN’s broader modernization roadmap rather than isolated one-off changes.

AI-Augmented Product & Engineering Workflows

Director of Systems, CDCN · 2023–Present

  • Designed and implemented reusable, source-controlled AI agents and tooling patterns grounded in CDCN’s domain, security, and privacy models.
  • Worked with engineers to integrate AI into workflows for code assistance, testing support, and documentation, while preserving human oversight of design and architecture.
  • Balanced experimentation with governance by emphasizing logging, policy awareness, and auditability of AI-assisted work.

ERP & Microservices Modernization

App Dev Manager, CDCN · 2019–2022

  • Led development teams modernizing ERP-adjacent systems toward service-oriented and microservice-aligned patterns as the user base grew from ~16K to 60K+.
  • Introduced CI/CD pipelines, automated tests, and movement toward trunk-based development to increase deployment frequency while maintaining stability.
  • Encouraged telemetry and logging practices that improved operational insight and reduced blind spots in production.

Engineering Practices & Tooling I Bring to Projects

  • Defensible, self-documenting code: Emphasis on readability, consistent patterns, and separation of concerns so systems remain understandable at scale.
  • API-first, domain-focused architecture: Systems modeled around the real-world business, with stable contracts and clear boundaries between services.
  • AI-empowered engineering: Use AI agents to support code generation, testing, and decision-making while keeping humans in control of design and tradeoffs.
  • Lean DevOps & CI/CD: Trunk-based development, automated tests, and observability so teams can ship frequently with confidence.
  • Analytics-ready design: Data access layers and event streams designed with reporting, governance, and auditability as first-class concerns.

Side Projects & Independent Work

Professional Portfolio (JamesMapledoram.com)

A fully custom HTML/CSS/JavaScript portfolio built in partnership with AI. I designed the site structure, architectural patterns, and interaction model, then leveraged ChatGPT for rapid code generation, component scaffolding, and debugging. This project demonstrates my ability to pair senior-level engineering literacy with modern AI tooling — building faster, cleaner, and more creatively while still understanding every line of code that runs in production.

FHEGGS — Multi-Vendor Farm-to-Farm Marketplace

fheggs.com · UAT Site

A farm-to-farm, multi-vendor marketplace for fertilized hatching eggs, built with my wife using the 10Web platform. The hatching egg community largely relies on platforms where live-animal or fertility-related sales are discouraged or prohibited, making this a novel solution focused on legitimacy, quality, and consistency. I selected the underlying platform, plugins, and extensibility model; designed the information architecture; and ensured scalability for future vendor onboarding, listing governance, and customer communication. This project blends product strategy, platform selection, UX decisions, and light engineering to create a pre-launch marketplace with strong early interest.

torqueRight (“What the Torque?”) — Mobile App for Mechanics

A pre-AI mobile application I built independently to give home and small-shop mechanics quick access to bolt torque specifications — not engine torque, but the precise pressure required to safely tighten specific bolts during vehicle repair. I wrote a multi-threaded data extraction service that pulled specifications from official sources, stored them in a locally indexed SQLite database, and shipped a Xamarin Forms application with offline and online modes. While the app is now sunset, it was a deep dive into mobile development, data processing, and building a clean UX for a niche but highly technical audience.