Product UX Leadership & Team Enablement

Employer / Thermo Fisher Scientific

Leading UX Strategy & Team Effectiveness for a Regulated Clinical Product

In my role as UX Manager for Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Clinical Decision Suite (CDS) in 2025, I led design strategy and people leadership during the first year of development for a high-stakes, and compliance regulated product in the clinical studies operations space. My role sat at the intersection of product strategy, team development, and building a predictable, trusted UX practice—ensuring the UX team could deliver high-quality, user-centered work while navigating data and technical complexity, an evolving understanding of compliance requirements, and shifting program needs.

Creating alignment in a high-ambiguity environment

The CDS program launched during a period of organizational flux, including gaps in product management and evolving business strategy. To maintain momentum, I stepped in to facilitate user story mapping sessions that brought engineering, UX and stakeholders together around shared assumed user goals and workflows. These sessions became a critical alignment tool, accelerating design progress while building a shared understanding of how the product would support real clinical study decision-making.

I also established recurring cross-functional UX review sessions and UX-specific collaboration rituals that created space for diverse perspectives to shape product direction. By serving as a consistent translator between design, engineering, business, and occasionally compliance partners, I helped reduce friction, minimize rework, and keep delivery on track without sacrificing design quality or team sustainability.

Leading user advocacy

User research for CDS initially relied heavily on internal subject matter experts due to stakeholder concern about exposing clients to ideas before we had confirmed our technical ability to follow through. This is a valid concern but created potential risk around unvalidated assumptions. I made these gaps visible—documenting them as program risks—and advocated for usability testing (even a small pool) as an important quality metric to mitigate risk.

I oversaw planning and execution for the program’s first usability test, mentoring team members through recruitment, facilitation, and synthesis to build internal research capability alongside delivery efforts.

Accessibility was an area I personally felt was important to address and to help educate our product and business partners on. While I was not successful in securing dedicated support at the MVP stage, I took advantage of an available, no-cost UI resource to focus on our core area of challenge: how direction around HTML semantic tagging was communicated between UX and Engineering. This work has laid a practical foundation the team can build on once accessibility support from business becomes available beyond the MVP.

Building strong operational processes

In parallel with product delivery, I focused on strengthening UX operations. I authored GxP-compliant UX Standard Operating Procedures from the ground up—work that passed gap analysis with minimal findings and now serves as a scalable, auditable model for other teams. These SOPs improved consistency, clarified decision-making, and enabled UX to operate with greater credibility in a highly regulated environment. Although the type of GxP compliance required for UX was later deemed to be a less rigorous type, this exercise and it’s outputs were valuable to developing strong operational practices for my team.

I also experimented with practical applications of AI to improve efficiency and alignment, using it to accelerate planning for usability testing, accessibility conversations, and strategies for data visualizations within the application. This freed the team and myself to focus more deeply on strategic and creative work.

Mentorship and culture building

A significant part of my impact came through people leadership. I hired and onboarded a new designer, providing close mentorship to build early confidence and support growth. In parallel, I invested in strengthening rapport and trust with a senior-level direct report, creating the conditions for more open collaboration and a more effective working relationship.

Beyond my immediate team, I created the “Shuffle Share” series—a cross-team forum that encouraged relationship-building, knowledge sharing, and open dialogue across silos. This initiative became a valued space for collaboration and helped reinforce a culture of inclusion, trust, and shared ownership.

Outcomes & Impact

Under tight timelines and complex constraints, the UX team consistently delivered on commitments while maintaining high standards for usability and design quality. Stakeholder feedback highlighted the team’s clarity, preparedness, and collaborative approach, and leadership recognized the UX function as a stabilizing force within a high-pressure program.

This work reflects my core strengths as a UX leader: creating alignment where none exists yet, building systems and processes that enable teams to do their best work, and advocating for users while delivering real business value.