Led and shipped a 0→1 product to speed up drug target assessments
CHALLENGE
A critical part of target assessment was missing. Scientists had to leave the platform, search external databases, and interpret pathway diagrams on their own. There was no dedicated team, no clear mandate, and later a restructuring nearly killed the work.
WHAT I DID
Defined the opportunity with a staff scientist, tested early concepts before engineering support existed, shaped the strategy with commercial leadership, won buy-in from product, engineering, and science leaders, and helped assemble the team.
OUTCOME
Despite the project being cut to the lowest priority tier, I managed to recover it and ship the feature with a six-person team to Merck, Sanofi, and Amgen. Usage and adoption validated that visualizations are needed by scientists. Internally, it showcased to leadership what a small team could deliver.
ROLE
Principal Designer
TIMELINE
Apr – Sep 2024
TEAM
Started solo, scaled to 8-person team
DETAILED PROJECT BREAKDOWN
Scientists had to leave the product to understand pathway context.
BenchSci was building a new GenAI platform to help pharmaceutical scientists discover drug targets faster. A core part of it was missing. To understand how a drug target related to the broader biology, scientists had to leave the platform, open external databases, interpret pathway diagrams separately, and then return to continue their work.
That context-switching created friction in an important workflow and weakened the product’s positioning as an all-in-one tool for target discovery.
Research, strategy, and early prototypes won leadership buy-in and staffed the project.
Before any engineers were assigned, I worked with a staff scientist to define the use cases, prototyped early concepts, and tested them with users.
In parallel, I shaped a two-part strategy with our SVP of Commercial Strategy:
Short term: integrate trusted external databases so users could access pathway context inside the product
Long term: move toward a more complete and accurate representation of biology across the platform
I packaged the user research, product strategy, and project proposal into a clear case for investment. That won support from the CPO, VP of Engineering, and VP of Science, and gave me the backing to form a small cross-functional team.
A restructuring cut the project to low priority, but the work was documented well enough to recover.
The team started building. But then came a company reorganization. The project dropped to the lowest priority tier. Engineers had been reassigned. There was no formal mechanism to recover it.
I worked with the product manager to meet with engineering and product leadership and personally recruited contributors back. What kept the case alive was documentation: clear briefs, research artifacts, a validated vision. It gave the project legitimacy and made the path to approval straightforward. We got the resources back.
The team shipped the feature in four sprints and brought pathway context into the product.
A team of six delivered pathway visualization directly inside the Target Assessment product. Scientists assessing a protein could now view relevant biological pathways from an external database within the platform instead of leaving the workflow to gather that information elsewhere.
The feature supported enterprise sales and showed that design can lead complex product work.
Six people shipped it in four sprints. It went to production for Merck, Sanofi, and Amgen, and became part of enterprise sales cycles supporting seven-figure deals.
Internally, the project also changed how the work was seen. Our CPO cited it as proof that meaningful features could be built with a relatively small team. For leadership more broadly, it showed that design could lead a strategically important initiative from concept to launch.
Clear documentation is now a key part of my execution strategy.
The synthesized research, lightweight briefs, and living prototypes reflected the team’s latest thinking. From the beginning, that documentation served to bring together my collaborators and stakeholders. It also helped the project survive the restructuring.
Since then, I’ve treated shareable strategy artifacts as a core part of execution, especially on projects that need stakeholder and cross-functional alignment to move forward.
