The digital infrastructure behind complex, high-touch experiences.
When the experience you deliver depends on forms, spreadsheets, inboxes, staff memory, and disconnected software, I design and build the system underneath it.
Strategy, design, and development through one accountable partner.
with technology
ecosystems
iOS & Android
Your digital experience deserves equal thoughtfulness.
Universal Awareness Fellowship
One organization. One connected operating system.
I didn’t arrive as an outside developer. I help operate the organization, which is why I saw the problems before they became feature requests.
Today it connects the participant journey, member experience, staff operations, forms, payments, communications, internal knowledge, public website, and native iOS and Android apps.
The pieces understand each other.
One payment clears. Nobody tells the rest of the system.
The technology follows the actual journey.
Generic software fits organizations that work like everyone else.
The interesting ones never do. They develop their own journeys, approvals, responsibilities and rhythms — and then spend years bending software that was built for somebody else’s.
I build around the way the organization already works, not the way a product assumes it should.
What I build
One system, three audiences at once — whether they are members, tenants and owners, clients, students, patients, or the staff looking after them. A stack of separate tools cannot do this.
They apply, pay, sign, submit, request — and come back.
They see only what is theirs to do.
It runs whether anyone is watching or not.
Every engagement starts with the one piece that changes the most.
This is most organizations’ real architecture.
Not the diagram in the handbook. The one where every loose end is tied to the same person, and it holds until they take a holiday.
I move every one of those lines onto the system — so the person in the middle can do the work you hired them for.
Sometimes another tool is not the answer.
The first question is never which tool. It is: how should this actually work?
Replace the patchwork
When several tools each solve a fraction of the problem, build one system around the workflow.
Connect what already works
Keep the systems worth keeping and build the missing layer between them.
Start with one critical workflow
Fix the process that has outgrown being done by hand, then connect outward.
Build what never existed
Sometimes there is nothing to replace. The organization needs something designed around a way of working that is uniquely its own.
The goal is not more software. The goal is a better system.
Shrugged Collective / Barbell Shrugged
Creating coherence across a rapidly growing digital ecosystem.
Years before UAF, I worked with Shrugged Collective, the media and fitness-education network built around Barbell Shrugged. Barbell Shrugged alone reached an audience of more than 200,000, and the network around it was larger still. At its peak it spanned roughly 13 shows, multiple operating teams, ecommerce, training products, marketing systems, and a growing collection of interconnected digital properties. I ran the marketing systems for Barbell Shrugged and for the network itself; each other show ran its own.
My work crossed web strategy, product design, development, CRM, email marketing, ecommerce, analytics, digital-product launches, show identities, and the architecture connecting the broader network.
audience alone
The challenge was never one website or one campaign. It was making a growing ecosystem feel like one organization.
“The best part really is the intangibles. They are constantly exceeding my expectations... I actually told Yoni I didn't want to write this because someone may read it and may end up taking his time away from my business.”
Other selected work
The Swig Company
Digital strategy, design, and development for an 80-year San Francisco real estate investment company with a multi-billion-dollar commercial property portfolio. My work included digital experiences supporting sustainability and h3, Swig's workplace-experience initiative.
WorQFlow Solutions
I built an interconnected commissions and company-performance system early in WorQFlow's growth, giving individual team members visibility into projected commissions while giving leadership a live view of company health and where attention was needed. WorQFlow has since grown into a roughly $10M enterprise staffing firm serving Fortune 100 clients across the Microsoft ecosystem.
Start with the piece that can change the most.
Nobody commissions an entire ecosystem on day one. We start where the pain is, prove it there, and connect outward from something that already works.
Where it breaks, who compensates for it, and what becomes possible if the software actually fit.
The single thing that changes the most. Small enough to ship, big enough to feel.
Each addition joins a system that already works, instead of another tool to reconcile.
Understand the organization deeply enough to see the whole system, then personally carry that understanding into what gets built.
Twenty-plus years as a developer, designer, founder and practice owner — from early-stage companies to multi-billion-dollar businesses.
About Yoni HavanaWhat has become harder than it should be?
Most conversations start in one of three places.
What you offer has moved on. What runs it has not.
Your team keeps it moving by hand, and everybody knows it.
The idea is clear. There is nobody to make it real.
Tell me what is happening.
Start a conversation