CipherBio · 2020–2024 · Biotech intelligence

Aligning product, engineering, and growth around one customer value.

CipherBio had valuable life-sciences data, but the experience was difficult, the product was free, and its commercial story was fragmented. I led the work across product strategy, UX/UI, front-end delivery, pricing, and acquisition to turn database access into a paid intelligence product.

MandateFree database → paid intelligence product
RolePrincipal product designer; strategy through release
AlignmentFounders, data, engineering, QA, sales, service, agencies, SVB
ScopeProduct, Angular front end, onboarding, pricing, analytics, and growth
$0 → $200K+2022 digital sales revenue
600+Paid subscribers
$269 → $23LinkedIn cost per lead
+62%LinkedIn leads in three months
CipherBio Funding Insights platform showing life-sciences funding data for founders and investors.
The opportunity was not more data. It was making a large data asset useful enough to guide a decision, and clear enough to buy.
Alignment

Made customer value the shared unit of work.

Product, data, delivery, sales, and marketing were solving adjacent problems. I created one working model that connected the customer job to the interface, technical choices, release sequence, and commercial message.

Working whiteboard mapping CipherBio navigation, features, analytics, and release considerations.
A living working model made assumptions, dependencies, and decisions visible across disciplines.
Customer

Founder and investor jobs, willingness to pay, onboarding, and evidence of use.

Product + data

Information architecture, profiles, funding insights, watchlists, and analytical controls.

Engineering + QA

Angular implementation, data behavior, interaction quality, testing, and release constraints.

Commercial

Packaging, pricing, positioning, sales enablement, SEO/SEM, content, and acquisition.

Shared cadence Frame the customer job Make the trade-off visible Build and test in parallel Release one coherent promise
Three consequential decisions

Leadership showed up in what we chose not to preserve.

Each decision crossed a departmental boundary: business model, accumulated product work, or technical implementation. The same test applied, does this help a specific customer make a better decision?

Price distinct jobs

Sold outcomes, not database access.

Founders and investors came with different questions, rhythms, and levels of urgency. I helped turn those jobs into Basic, Pro, and Enterprise offers with clearer value boundaries, rather than treating every visitor as the same database user.

  • Connected packaging to founder and investor jobs.
  • Made the upgrade path legible inside the product.
  • Aligned pricing, onboarding, product access, and sales conversation.
CipherBio Basic, Pro, and Enterprise pricing tiers.
Three offers made customer fit, value, and the path to paid use explicit.
Evidence over sunk work

Removed 70% of the company profile.

Analytics and research showed that a large, editable profile had become a destination without a clear job. We removed most of it, including user editing, and redirected attention to the personal dashboard, watchlists, and signals people returned to use.

  • Used behavior and research to challenge accumulated scope.
  • Accepted the cost of removing already-built work.
  • Reallocated the interface to monitoring and decision support.
Earlier CipherBio company profile with a large editable profile area.
Before A large profile with editing and low-value content.
CipherBio personal dashboard with watchlists, company insights, and clinical-stage data.
After A personal dashboard organized around monitoring and action.
Explicit analytical controls

Replaced clever charts with usable analysis.

Tableau created responsiveness and interaction problems for everyday product use. We moved the experience toward Highcharts, explicit filters, multi-select, readable tables, and curated exports, controls customers could understand and use without training.

  • Separated impressive presentation from useful interaction.
  • Made filtering and comparison visible instead of implicit.
  • Connected data exploration to a practical export workflow.
CipherBio Funding Insights table with investor filters and funding-stage details.
The product favored explicit controls, readable comparison, and exportable evidence.
One release system

Moved product and go-to-market as one connected release.

Under slow SVB production approvals, design and development progressed in parallel. The customer promise then continued through onboarding, product access, content, campaigns, analytics, and the sales handoff.

Promise

Jobs, positioning, packages, and pricing.

Product

UX/UI, data behavior, Angular front end, and QA.

Entry

Registration, onboarding, entitlements, and upgrade.

Demand

SEO/SEM, content, lead forms, campaigns, and attribution.

CipherBio LinkedIn lead-form campaigns offering reports to biotech founders and investors.
Acquire with the same value. Useful data products became focused lead forms and commercial entry points.
Mobile version of the CipherBio personal life-sciences dashboard.
Deliver the promise everywhere. The dashboard preserved watchlists and signals on a small screen.
Outcomes

A clearer product created a measurable commercial system.

These were shared results across founders, sales, data, engineering, QA, customer service, agencies, and SVB. My contribution was connecting the product decisions and the commercial execution so they reinforced each other.

$200K+2022 digital sales revenue, from a free starting point
600+Paid subscribers
90%Of leads attributed to digital marketing
42%Of all sales completed through digital channels
$269 → $23LinkedIn cost per lead
0.9% → 2.76%Google Ads click-through rate
+62%LinkedIn leads within three months
+40%Page-speed improvement
What lasted

The durable result was a repeatable way to lead the work.

CipherBio proved that product, engineering, and growth do not need separate strategies when they are aligned around the same customer decision.

Start with the job

Name the decision the customer is trying to make.

Expose the trade-off

Put assumptions, evidence, cost, and constraints on the same surface.

Choose across boundaries

Make product, technical, and commercial decisions as one system.

Carry value through release

Keep the promise consistent from acquisition to everyday use.

Leadership was not a layer above the work. It was the connective tissue between customer value, product judgment, implementation, and growth.

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