AI-Assisted Lab Management Platform for Life Sciences Company
Defined a first-to-market centralized AI lab management solution in just 2 weeks, identifying a significant competitive gap in the scientific research market. The strategic vision enabled technical teams to build working prototypes while projecting higher research throughput by freeing scientists from time-intensive administrative tasks.
Role: Lead Designer | Timeline: 2 weeks | Year: 2025
Situation: A leading life sciences research company recognized that scientific personnel spent excessive time on manual administrative tasks—inventory management, data searches, literature reviews, and protocol adjustments—reducing capacity for core research work. These time-intensive, error-prone processes occurred frequently, creating compound inefficiencies across research workflows while scattered data hampered collaboration.
Task: Lead rapid design sprint to envision an AI-assisted lab management platform automating routine processes while maintaining precision, security, and compliance requirements critical to scientific research environments.
Action: I facilitated executive workshops identifying customer value drivers and business differentiation opportunities, developing multi-phased implementation plans connecting features to benefits. I designed AI-assisted workflows carefully balancing automation with human oversight—full automation for data entry, human-in-the-loop for protocol adjustments, and researcher control for scientific decisions. I created natural language processing interfaces for data queries and protocol generation, integrated smart inventory management enabling proactive protocol adjustments, and designed literature intelligence with AI-generated summaries maintaining source access. I developed granular data controls for intellectual property protection in scientific collaboration scenarios and created a comprehensive vision document addressing unanswered questions about business model, pricing, integrations, and key differentiation to guide next steps.
Result: In just 2 weeks, the strategic sprint defined a first-to-market centralized AI lab management solution, identifying a significant competitive differentiation opportunity. The comprehensive vision document successfully aligned stakeholders on strategic direction while transparently identifying unanswered questions about business model, pricing, and integrations, enabling productive next steps. The strategic foundation proved robust enough that technical teams built working prototypes demonstrating the necessary architecture to bring the experience to life. The projected business value centered on operational efficiency gains: higher research lab throughput by freeing scientific personnel from time-intensive manual tasks (inventory, literature review, data entry) to focus on their core competency—actual scientific research. This time reallocation, combined with optimized resource usage through better inventory management and experiment planning, positioned the product as a transformative efficiency tool for scientific organizations.