Gosia Dzienisowicz - Product & Design Executive
I transform complex digital ecosystems—and build the design organizations that scale them.
Transforming Pharmacy Operations at Enterprise Scale
Reimagining a fragmented ecosystem of legacy pharmacy applications into a unified, role-based experience designed to help pharmacy teams understand what needs attention, prioritize the right work, and act from one connected starting point.
Context / Role
Walgreens pharmacy operations relied on a fragmented ecosystem of legacy applications built over decades, many with different technologies, navigation models, and workflows. Pharmacy teams moved between dozens of systems to manage prescription fulfillment, clinical services, inventory, patient preferences, reporting, scheduling, and operational tasks—often without a clear view of what required attention first.
I joined the modernization initiative as a Senior UX Designer and became Director of UX as the scale and complexity of the transformation grew. I built and led a multidisciplinary design organization spanning UX/UI design, research, and content, while establishing the experience strategy, research practice, design framework, and operating model supporting the modernization.
Working across Product, Engineering, Pharmacy Operations, Clinical, and Business leadership, my role was to transform a collection of disconnected applications into a more cohesive pharmacy experience—while navigating legacy technology, regulatory requirements, competing business priorities, and a multi-year modernization roadmap.
The Challenge
Walgreens’ core pharmacy platform had evolved over decades into a highly complex ecosystem of applications, workflows, and technologies. The primary fulfillment system alone was approximately 25 years old, difficult to maintain, prone to failures, and could take pharmacy team members months to master.
Modernization was not simply a matter of redesigning the interface. Years of incremental development had created limited documentation, deeply embedded workflows, regulatory dependencies, and connections across dozens of supporting applications. Previous attempts to replace the platform had demonstrated how difficult it was to recreate this complexity without introducing significant risk.
At the same time, pharmacy teams were navigating disconnected applications with little visibility into what work required attention first. The challenge became larger than replacing legacy software: how could we progressively modernize the ecosystem while creating one coherent experience for pharmacy teams - without waiting for every underlying system to be rebuilt?
The Strategy
Create one entry point into pharmacy work
Rather than waiting for every legacy application to be rebuilt, I proposed a unifying layer across the ecosystem: a role-based pharmacy dashboard that could surface the status of the pharmacy, prioritize what needed attention, and connect users directly to the underlying tools required to complete the work.
The goal was to move from an application-centric experience to a work-centric experience. Pharmacy teams would no longer need to remember which system contained a task or decide what to tackle first. Instead, the experience would surface the right work based on role, urgency, business value, and operational context.
Aligning the Organization Around the Vision
Creating the vision was only the beginning. Delivering it required alignment across Product, Engineering, Pharmacy Operations, Clinical, and multiple business domains - each with its own roadmap, priorities, technology constraints, and measures of success.
I worked directly with leaders across these organizations to understand their roadmaps, identify opportunities for consolidation and modernization, and build support for a shared pharmacy experience.
Rather than attempting to replace everything at once, we created a progressive roadmap: prioritize the products with the greatest user and business value, modernize them using a shared design framework, and connect the remaining applications through a unified experience.
ALIGN PRIORITIES
Design-led workshops brought domain leaders together to establish a shared prioritization framework across patient safety, regulatory urgency, business value, customer experience, and operations.
PARTNER WITH TECHNOLOGY
UX worked with Engineering to understand technical dependencies and determine how the vision could be progressively delivered rather than waiting for a complete platform replacement.
BUILD THE BUSINESS CASE
Modernization priorities considered not only user experience but operational and financial value - including identifying opportunities where rebuilding legacy applications could eliminate significant ongoing technology costs.