The Bugs Nobody Reports Until They’re Living With Them

Devika joined the team as a frontend developer, and the project behind her Rising Star Award is the kind of work that's easy to overlook precisely because it doesn't announce itself.

The Challenge: A healthcare platform used every day by care teams had grown slow and frustrating to work in. Some of the friction was general slowness; some of it was sharper and more specific — a document viewer, for instance, that wouldn't scroll sideways properly until you'd already worked your way to the bottom of the page. It's the kind of bug that's easy to miss in a test pass and impossible to miss once you're the person stuck using it every day. That gap is common in software built for a specific industry rather than a general audience: the core functionality ships, edge cases get treated as someday-problems, and eventually those someday-problems become everyday friction for whoever's stuck using the product.

The Approach: Alongside fixing issues like the scrolling bug, Devika took on a full redesign of the care plan experience itself, which had grown clunky in its own way over time. Different problem, same underlying habit either way: on every build and every fix, the standing question was what could break this down the line — because something can work perfectly in the one scenario that got tested and still fall apart the moment someone uses it differently. Asking that question early is what separates a system that technically works from one people actually enjoy using.

The Outcome: The friction that had become routine — the scrolling issue, the redesigned care plan, the general slowness — was gone. The product moved from something people worked around to something they stopped thinking about entirely, which is usually the clearest sign it's working. It's a slower way to build. But it's exactly why things don't fall apart later, and it's the same habit that helps any team shipping into an industry where the people using the product aren't the ones who got a say in how it was built.

“It's a slower way to build. But it's exactly why things don't fall apart later.”