Work / Merit America
From scattered signals to one view of the service.
Merit America's career program is a service. Learners move through it, coaches guide it, and a dozen systems quietly record every step. I treated it that way: working alongside the coaches, I read the whole journey across 300+ learners and pulled outcomes, engagement, and coaching into one picture leadership could act on.
The problem
Merit America was making high-stakes calls about learner success without a map of the service delivering it.
The signals that mattered sat in different places, Salesforce records, learner surveys, and coaches' own observations, so no one could see where the journey lost people, or step in before it did.
300+ learners across multiple cohortsMy role
I led the research and synthesis. With the coaches as frontstage partners, I built the interview guides and surveys, ran the qualitative interviews, and pulled the quantitative data out of Salesforce.
Then I stitched the lived experience and the system data into a single narrative, the kind leadership could read in one sitting and act on the next morning.
The process
No single source told the truth on its own, so I read them against each other.
Stakeholder interviews to agree on the questions that actually mattered to the program, before gathering a single data point.
Structured surveys with learners, 1:1 interviews with coaches across cohorts, and cleaned quantitative data from Salesforce.
Read side by side, the three streams surfaced patterns no single source could: where the journey held, and where it slipped.
Key findings
Outcomes
Leadership took the findings straight into the service. The early weeks got a new intervention protocol, aimed at the exact touchpoints where the journey was quietly failing people.
Coaches were retrained around the check-in rituals that worked. Cohort outcomes measurably improved, and the work fed Merit America's wider organizational growth strategy.
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