Shavone Sears' business analysts are the bridge between internal users and engineering. Researching instance context and writing a single story used to take days. With Echelon, that work now takes minutes.
OptumRx is the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) business within UnitedHealth Group. Shavone Sears, a Senior Capability Manager, leads a product team that gathers needs from internal users and translates them into the epics, stories, and requirements her ServiceNow engineering team builds.
At OptumRx, producing one user story meant reading documentation, researching a highly customized instance, and often consulting an engineer — by the time that became a buildable story, new tickets were piling up.
The result was missed sprints & potential rework as new tickets requested changes on inflight work. This cascaded across dozens of teams, feeding a backlog only more labor could clear. The same drag hit executive reporting, where reporting decks took half a day to build.
"…having to go and bother my solution architect, or the engineering lead."
Growing backlog with development taking days
Constant need for more ServiceNow-skilled humans
Difficulty governing standards instance-wide
When an analyst receives a request, Echelon takes that input and produces a full story in a fraction of the time — often minutes. It expedites the time-intensive, error-prone work of sourcing documentation and instance context, without removing the human judgment that makes a story good.
Some tickets are vague. Before Echelon, that was often surfaced later as rework. Now, Echelon walks users through plain-language, outcome-focused questions, so the input is accurate and fully understood up front. Combine this with Echelon's training on ServiceNow docs & Optum standards, and work output is engineer-ready first time, every time.
"It definitely isn't just 'I need to be a professional prompt person.' It leads you through that experience so that you get the best output possible."
Stories written in hours, clearing backlog
Stories developed to consistent standards
Executive reporting in minutes unlocks time for other critical tasks.
The same translation work that once stalled delivery now moves at the pace of a conversation — across story creation, executive reporting, and instance questions.
I can just put in a one-word question and it creates a 10-page PowerPoint for me in the same format each time… less than 10 minutes. It's saved me 100 hours in 6 weeks.
The real bottleneck in ServiceNow delivery often isn't team size or engineering capacity — it's the translation layer between business intent and technical specs, where context gets lost and rework begins.
The people closest to the business are best positioned to produce detailed requirements; what's held them back is tooling to output that in a format complete for developers.
Standardization beats speed alone — output that's consistent and complete on the first pass reduces clarification cycles far more than just working faster does.
