Courtney Aquilina
VP of User Experience Design · AI Product Builder
Design executive who ships AI products, not slideware. 18+ years building UX organizations in healthcare and enterprise software, from a 58-person design org at CVS Health to IDC’s first global UX team. Hands-on builder: full-stack AI products, production design systems with MCP integration, and prompt frameworks distributed to an engaged practitioner audience.
North Andover, MA · courtney.aquilina@gmail.com · LinkedIn · courtneyaquilina.com
Areas of Expertise
Building with AI
- Designed, built, and shipped a full-stack AI consumer product solo: React/TypeScript, multimodal Claude API, Supabase, and Stripe, with a live conversion paywall, six research-defined personas, and a complete go-to-market plan.
- Maintain daily Claude Code practice outside of work, spanning automations, internal tools, and shipped products, directly informing the AI workflows and prompt patterns deployed across the IDC design organization.
- Publish AI + UX prompt frameworks (customer journey mapping, design systems) to an engaged LinkedIn practitioner audience; a single framework post drew 300+ comments requesting the prompt, distributed to practitioners via direct link.
- Scaled AI-augmented workflows (Claude Code, Figma Make, and custom prompt pipelines) across a 16-person global design and research organization, cutting manual research analysis time 70%; prototypes that once required a data pull from an analyst or PM now generate from a single prompt against live MCP (Model Context Protocol) data in minutes.
- Prototyped an agentic AI research application (four persona archetypes with live data connectors), advancing it from concept and PR/FAQ to a production-ready Next.js scaffold with typed MCP connectors, streaming API routes, and CLAUDE.md context files for AI-assisted engineering handoff.
- Author a growing library of reusable Claude skills encoding IDC’s persona framework, brand system, and recurring executive workflows; deployed a live AI usage analytics dashboard and automated monthly spend reporting, establishing AI cost governance for a global UX organization.
Professional History
- Stood up the first global UX organization at IDC, a Blackstone portfolio company, recruiting and mentoring a 16-person international team across research, accessibility, and design systems to deliver an AI-first product vision.
- Led UX strategy for IDC Quanta, IDC’s flagship AI intelligence platform built on 15B+ annual data points; authored the Ask–Verify–Analyze interaction framework, designing for trust and verification in AI outputs, driving a 60% jump in customer satisfaction during early pilots.
- Architected WCL, IDC’s first unified design system, spanning WordPress VIP, React, and Angular web components across IDG, IDC, and Foundry, replacing fragmented patterns with one accessible foundation for global markets.
- Brought WCL to full WCAG 2.2 and JIS X 8341-3 compliance across six languages for Japan market entry, replacing manual multilingual QA with an AI-driven simulation that ran translations through Quanta to replicate exact production output; partnered with Legal and Product on VPAT/ACR documentation, eliminating outsourced accessibility testing and saving $130K annually.
- Engineered the team’s React and Storybook prototyping infrastructure with Claude Code, translating IDC’s Figma design system into working components via MCP; prototypes ship with live IDC data and validate against Quanta’s 15-persona, four-archetype framework before engineering investment, cutting delivery timelines 50%.
- Ran UX research for IDC’s MCP beta program, identifying entitlement scope as the dominant satisfaction variable and three recurring trust gaps (source attribution, recency, authentication), and used the findings to redesign Wave 2 recruiting and entitlement strategy.
- Authored a 7-step customer journey framework applied across IDC Quanta’s 15 buyer personas, grounding product requirements and persona-fit risk analysis for new platform features.
- Instrumented AI experience quality: established a quantitative UX scorecard program with baselined improvement targets and piloted AI-powered behavioral analytics to surface user frustration signals in production.
Built and led a 15-person UX team at a leader in precision cancer care, driving research-led design across the platform.
- Consolidated 13 legacy applications into a next-generation platform, cutting accessioning time 34% for commercial and biopharma clients; OCR integration delivered an additional 60% efficiency gain.
- Owned an executive OKR, lifting digital orders from 60% to 75% against a 70% corporate target, and built sales and marketing playbooks that opened new digital revenue channels.
- Shaped corporate roadmap and product strategy with product marketing, grounded in ethnographic research across ordering, clinical decision-making, and clinical workflows.
- Increased research capacity 40% with a self-service research and usability platform enabling independent validation by cross-functional teams.
Built and led a 58-person UX organization at Aetna Health, partnering with executives and the customer advisory board to expand digital care access.
- Grew the design org 50% in under a year to support 13 Scrum teams.
- Integrated design into Aetna’s SAFe framework with Scrumban, coaching, and training, driving a 40% efficiency increase across four Agile release trains.
- Led digital task forces expanding patient access to COVID-19 testing and vaccination support within Aetna products.
- Formed a data-driven design partnership program with analytics teams to set strategic direction and validate designs early.
Before the AI era
Led a 10-person global design team across the U.S. and Ukraine supporting 14 Scrum teams; cut design delays and development costs with a new methodology and UI kit; chaired Women in Technology.
Directed a 15-person global product organization; migrated the flagship on-premises PIM product to the cloud in nine months and led the company’s Waterfall-to-Agile transformation.
Led a 15-person global design team unifying acquired companies into a single monitoring platform; launched the company’s first native iOS and Android applications.
Directed 20+ designers in the global Microsoft alliance; designed the complete UX for an intelligent personal assistant in 2007, three years before Siri, and co-patented Microsoft Office integration on Nokia devices.
Qualifications
Rochester Institute of Technology
Graduated with Honors
NC72194-US
Manager as Coach · Hudson Institute of Coaching