An Expert Tool for Expert Users
2018–2019 · Enterprise SaaS · Diagnostic Systems · Oracle
Unifying Five Legacy Diagnostic Tools into a Single Workbench
Oracle's most experienced support engineers were diagnosing critical customer issues using five different homegrown tools that didn't talk to each other. Leadership wanted them consolidated. My job was to figure out how to do that without breaking the workflows that actually worked, or condescending to the people who'd built expertise over decades.
Impact
✓ Replaced five fragmented diagnostic tools with one unified platform
✓ Adopted by Oracle’s most senior support engineers across Database, Middleware, EBS, Fusion, and Linux
✓ Became the primary diagnostic tool for on-premise product support
✓ Contributed production patterns back to the Redwood Design System
The Problem
Oracle’s most experienced support engineers were diagnosing critical customer issues using a patchwork of homegrown tools—each built by different teams, with overlapping capabilities and no shared workflow.
These engineers had decades of domain expertise, but their tools forced constant context-switching, duplicated effort, and inconsistent analysis. Leadership wanted consolidation—without losing the specialized capabilities experts depended on.
The challenge was consolidating five tools into one without simplifying away expertise or disrupting workflows that already worked.
Five tools. Different mental models. No shared platform.
My Approach
Immersed
Embedded with senior engineers across Database, Middleware, EBS, Fusion, and Linux, becoming a reasonably informed student of what they actually do.
Mapped
Documented critical workflows and non-negotiable capabilities by distinguishing between what users needed to keep and what they'd simply grown accustomed to.
Unified
Designed a workbench organized around how expert diagnosis actually unfolds and the improved mental model evolved from use of each existing tool.
Delivered
Transitioned design to the shipping team with enough specificity that the intent survived handoff and the product reached production with identifiable user success.
The platform made diagnostic intelligence visible, inspectable, and usable.
The Outcome
The engineers who had spent years navigating five different tools adopted a single platform that finally matched how they thought when diagnosing product issues. Patterns developed made it back into the Redwood Design System, which meant the work had downstream value beyond the immediate product.
One unified platform supporting expert diagnosis across Oracle’s on-premise products.