Case Studies
Explore case studies from Emilia Breton-Lake’s work turning strategy into shipped outcomes. These stories span infrastructure and platform modernization, delivery excellence, and leadership operating rhythms—showing how clarity, alignment, and human-centered change design create measurable progress that actually sticks.
01
Breaking Silos to Improve Provider Experience
In this engagement, Emilia Breton-Lake partnered with Anthem Digital IT leadership to build a cross-functional “virtual organization” focused on removing barriers for doctors and improving the provider experience. Over six months, they formed an Executive Action Team spanning seven business groups, four IT groups, and three vendors, using lightweight facilitation (including a “string game”) to surface bottlenecks and missing voices in the system.
The team then introduced shared portfolio intake and Lean-Agile portfolio management—replacing “whoever yelled the loudest” prioritization—and established planning rhythms that helped teams deliver in smaller increments. The result: a major early win reduced the time and human intervention required for new providers to join the organization—from months to days.
02
Integrating Communities
Emilia Breton-Lake supported a merger integration by treating each organization not as a set of org charts and processes, but as a living community of people with shared identity, norms, and ways of working. Using a co-created integration story map—built with the community lead and cross-functional partners—she aligned leaders on outcomes, surfaced differences early, and designed operating rhythms that helped teams integrate without losing trust or momentum. The result was a clearer path from strategy to execution, faster alignment across groups, and an integration approach that made change feel human (and actually stick).
03
Play as a lens
Emilia Breton-Lake partnered with an Engineering Management team to build trust and shared understanding—fast. Instead of jumping straight into “working agreements” on a blank slide, she used carefully chosen games and experiential activities to surface hidden dynamics: how the team communicates under pressure, how decisions get made, where assumptions live, and what people do when uncertainty shows up. The playful format created a safe space to experiment with new behaviors and give candid feedback without defensiveness. From those insights, the team co-created practical working agreements and launched an organizational improvements backlog—grounded in real patterns, not guesswork—and designed to make change stick.
04
Bringing Customers In to the process
Emilia Breton-Lake helped shift planning from “inside-out” assumptions to real human connection by inviting customers directly into portfolio planning events and the company's All Hands. Hearing customers describe their needs, constraints, and moments of delight in their own words created shared context across every function—not just Product—so priorities were grounded in what mattered most. The result was stronger alignment, clearer tradeoffs, and a company-wide sense of purpose: teams weren’t building for “users” in the abstract, but for real people they knew and cared about.
05
Make it Visable
Emilia Breton-Lake implemented Big Room Planning to give the entire organization a shared view of outcomes, work plans, dependencies, and risks—at the same time, in the same room. By making the portfolio and delivery system visible, leaders and teams could align priorities, surface constraints early, and make smarter tradeoff decisions based on capacity and impact. The result was less thrash, fewer surprise dependencies, faster alignment across functions, and a clearer path from strategy to shipped outcomes.