I work on services people can’t opt out of. Financial aid, housing, public parks, city websites. The kind where a confusing form costs someone money they’re owed, a buried page costs a neighborhood its event permit, and unclear rules cost staff a week on the same question.

The sector changes, the problem doesn’t. A city, a bank, or the studio hired to rebuild the site: tangled rules, compliance that won’t bend, and people who need it to just work.

Most of what’s broken isn’t on the screen. It’s two departments using the same word to mean different things, or a policy written in 2009 that nobody has read since, including whoever wrote it. So I get the people responsible in one room and ask them to describe the same process out loud. It’s usually the first time they’ve heard each other’s version. The gaps become blueprints, an information architecture, a governance model that holds after I leave.

I grew up between Mexico and the US and work in English and Spanish, so I notice when a service only works for people who already know how it works. If we work together: I document what we decided and why, I hand over work your team can run without me, and I tell you what I’m finding while there’s still time to act on it. That last one is usually the most useful