Design, Business, & Leadership
Impact
I prioritized design and research as fundamental principles and catalysts for product innovation.
I expanded the design and research teams to 8 personnel (from two) to reach to new product verticals and internal tools. Challenged the team to overhaul existing product experiences with a simplified vision for results-driven workflows.
I worked to establish cross-functional five-year growth strategies and annual department objectives and goals.
I collaborated with our technology division to create a design system for both internal and external use. This empowered the design team to collaborate with engineers, breaking down silos and establishing a shared language for products, their components, and features.
I oversaw the design and launch of four external products, a complete overhaul of our internal curation tools and workflows, and the deployment of agentic AI to optimize the user experience.
I developed metrics to measure customer satisfaction, specifically CSAT and NPS. I also prioritized the integration of accessibility (WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliance minimums) for all products and services.
Guiding Principles
Culture
Vision
Efficiency
Growth
When I joined the UX team as a designer, the product division was just being created. CAS had just hired a VP of Product and product maturation was low.
When I became the head of product design and research, both the team and CAS were on the verge of the biggest changes in their respective histories. The company was moving toward expanding our product content offerings to life sciences and the editorial tools—the workspace which directly sourced our product with data, were over 40 years old.
The UX team prior to my joining had a number of conflicts and culture issues which caused a exodus of all but two team members.
I was hesitant to take on a people leader role—but as they say, “crisis is the mother of invention”…and maybe a little opportunity. As I planned how to overhaul what remained of a tumultuous group, I spelled out what running the department and collaborating with various areas of the organization would look like. I also needed to hire solid designers who could hit the ground running.
Culture
Establishing Leadership Style
CAS is a unique company, nestled somewhere between academia through its not-for-profit designation and an ever-increasing trajectory towards corporate efficiency. While the company employs just over 1,000 individuals, the product group, which houses the design and research teams, is just 29 people, including the 8 design team members. Due to understaffing at the time of my promotion, it was necessary to prioritize pragmatism, constant communication, and collaboration with the remaining two designers for all work to ensure continuity of work.
I lean toward a straightforward approach. Feedback is critical and bidirectional. Without feedback we cannot improve. The key to good feedback is making sure its focused and constructive, whether for designs, research strategies, or intrapersonal relationships.
While some folks prefer artifacts for communicating leadership styles, I frequently met with the two designers to communicate expectations. I established a cadence of meetings to reestablish team dynamics.
All designers were equipped with the latest MacBook models and high-pixel density screens and were grouped at a pod when we returned to the office post-pandemic for continual collaboration on cross-product consistency and functionality. We also began migrating our tools from the Adobe Creative Cloud to Figma. This established best-in-class tools to organize artifacts and assets in a way that would augment transparent collaboration with product owners, engineering, and product leadership.
The research coordinator and I vetted databases to securely store and archive all research data, making it accessible to the design, product, and marketing teams. I collaborated with the head of marketing research to aggregate all research-based materials on Dovetail and tasked the researchers and coordinator to properly index and organize all consumer-based findings based on the product vertical and their respective projects.
Rebuilding a Team
At the time I was taking on direct reports, I was still culpable for the delivery of designs. As we were a not-for-profit, I made the pitch that allocating an investment in UX design would yield a greater return on investment to streamline development cycles and give technology and product a consistent pipeline for making.
My goal was to recruit and retain world-class talent. During that time, I interviewed 39 candidates, welcomed 5 different designers, hired two satellite research agencies (one to focus on operational research for existing products and another to spearhead innovation and create new products through generative exploration) to directly integrate with our product teams, a coordinator to manage the inner workings of the company, and terminated one employee.
Regular meetings include:
“Week ahead” meetings would occur on Monday mornings, giving individuals time to ingest emails, slack messages, and attend stand ups and then assess obstacles and goals for the remainder of the week.
Wednesdays are for 1:1 meetings, the cadence of which was defined by my direct reports, though a minimum of one touch base per month—and of course not too often. My philosophy with these are to give employees agency to discuss whatever is on their mind, but also provide feedback when necessary or course-correct if performance has become problematic.
Friday “Roundtable" meetings. This is where all team members present challenges or brainstorm on feature designs, report out on research findings, and present their work to peers and myself. Roundtable is always scheduled before lunch so we have team-building lunch on Fridays, if available.
Setting the stage for team operations proved challenging, and I discovered that leading in a highly specialized subject area necessitated my background in biochemistry to define user flows for specific in-application tasks.
During this period, I made a conscious effort to be acutely aware of how I was leading in various scenarios. I provided direction when necessary but also prioritized listening to the team, their concerns, and asking for feedback from their peers and stakeholders to identify opportunities for improvement and enhance our operational efficiency.
I always save space for folks to ask questions, and encouraged them to speak up when they “didn’t know” something. I challenged myself to employ “asking” for tasks, challenging thinking, encouraging others to challenge my opinions, and giving the team agency to complete their work with their teams.
Vision
Less is More
As the team grew and became more established, I had a larger objective towards increasing the accessibility of the product, not only from a compliance perspective, which was notoriously omitted from product processes, but the general use and time-to-task of all products in the portfolio.
CAS data was structured in an old-school command line interface system, requiring the users of specific personas to know the proper language to get good answers. Other products sequestered results into query-types. Both were fine paradigms, but less acceptable for multimillion dollar software in the early 2020s. I also challenged our team to think about the business value of renewals and how younger demographics of users could be accounted for (in high school or university). I also challenged them to think about how to best integrate AI capabilities after watching ChatGPT and Claude make their debut.
After scheduling a brainstorming day and time-boxing the proposals. We rallied around my vision of simplifying the search paradigms and results listings, with a stretch goal of the agentic experience being the forefront of our product experience. While our data scientist division was drastically understaffed, those decisions quickly went to research to test the efficacy and desire of a large-scale experiential pivot.
We found that a large majority of users (82%) wanted simplified platform results, but were skeptical on the trustworthiness of the results. The designers and I agreed that answers augmented by citations and sources were the best way of getting users to trust the outputs. Though our chemist personas are additionally curious about how answers were delivered, so we needed to develop a way to scale a query interpreter to coincide with exposing our content QA model without giving away proprietary information.
One by one, each product moved toward a unified search bar, to account for all content types on one page, giving the users a summary of what data was relevant to their questions. This would later extend into AI summaries for intellectual property data, freedom to operate queries, drug intelligence, and biomarker data for the top three product verticals.
Outcomes
The simplification was first implemented in CAS SciFinder, our most prevalent platform focused on chemistry data. The designers thoughtfully implemented aggregated answers, which saw an increase in interaction with multiple content types and a substantial increase in more niche search capabilities. This led to an increase in renewals and revenue for the 2025 fiscal year.
Answer summarizations were critical to the value increase. When users would ask “what is the boiling point of [a substance],” the interface would return the exact measurements and provide evidence from where that answer was sourced. Our strategy was to inform, but our users learned to trust thanks to the ability to verify answers in real time.
^503%
Increase in usage for value drivers like CAS Lexicon, Retrosynthesis, and sequence searching.
^28%
Increase in result content like substances, reactions, and references/patents.
March 2020
August 2024
October 2025
An example of the summary result set in CAS SciFinder which was later implemented in CAS STN, our intellectual property product.
Lead Designer of CAS BioFinder
“Nate leads with confidence, conviction, and humility—empowering teams through efficient communication and clear direction. He brings exceptional expertise and cross-functional support, driving alignment and impact to every project he is involved in.”
Efficiency
My goal of making the team more efficient was expanding the capability, while maintaining capacity of workload. That also meant focusing on other best-practices that CAS wasn’t doing due to its lack of maturity on the product and UX front.
Research Optimization
Discovery was not a concept that existed prior to my tenure as leader of the design and research team. Formal research was intermittent in some areas, and completely absent in others. As a means to increase the research-driven roadmap, I asked the designers to partner with the research team and their product managers to have at least one study going constantly. Generative research was done by one group partnering with myself (due to my background in life sciences), and the other group would partner with the lead designers and research coordinator. Candidates would be recruited by in-product surveys, a first for us thanks to the integration of Sprig—allowing us to directly recruit users around a topic based on their usage of a feature.
Thanks to this effort, we expanded the research pool 38% in the first year, and have maintained a constant landscape of research across various topics for the past three years. Discovery calls happen weekly, where myself, or a designer and a project manager, would jump on a call with users to gauge their interests and talk generally about their experience using the product. Frequently, these conversations would veer into discussions on the quality of content and data in the products. For those instances, I would partner with our content operations group to ensure they were on the call, or at the very least could hear feedback as a means to improve processes on that side of the house and mitigate quality issues.
My goal was to feed the backlog of ideas while preventing research from becoming a bottleneck on design and development progress (perceived or otherwise).
I also asked for studies that prioritized better knowing our personas. The sales and marketing division had created personas, but for our organization, the direct users of our product were not the individuals buying, nor were they the C-suite executives. Throughout this process, we sought to define who used the product, and how they best worked. We started with the chemistry personas, and worked toward defining biology personas and the hybrid roles where collaboration and drug discovery was happening.
Design Optimization
Migrating the team to Figma proved to be a large morale boost. Great designers deserve great tools to do great work. The collaboration with product managers and analysts increased to allow for more focused feedback on feature inclusions. Collaboration and brainstorming between designers (both thanks to desk juxtaposition and file access) allowed for the cross pollination of ideas and removing silos between product verticals. This also increased the ability for UX to be represented to leadership either by me or the other members of product leadership.
Feature design cadence was dictated by the product teams, but I removed the company’s bad habit of asking for sketches before requirements or scope were determined. Slotting the designers into classic two-week sprints proved to be an effective time box to prevent analysis paralysis or excessive iteration.
This was also where the creation of the design system increased our development cycle times. Developers and designers spoke the same language and engineering was heavily encouraged to reuse existing components, in lieu of disconnected repetition of buttons, form fields, and other widgets.
Expansion of Capabilities
I wanted to ensure that we were progressing as a division to be on-par with other best-in-class organizations. While written strategy was done annually, there were various inflection points throughout the year which would cause issues when evaluating performance on OKRs at the end of the year. Making goals dynamic, “S.M.A.R.T” and attainable made it easier to track employees against those goals, even if leadership wanted to go a different direction.
I also began to take my vision and document it in the form of a roadmap. We then were able to point to that artifact when drafting the 5-year growth plan, which was a collaboration with various c-suite individuals.
Operations drastically grew to increase exposure for designers and augment their ability to speak to design choices and how those translated into value for the organization. I also focused on crafting annual heuristics, annual VPAT updates to provide legal with documentation to send to inquiring and potential customers. We collectively sought to standardize the design language across the organization, creating a cohesive language to elevate the brand as well as display data in digestible and consistent ways.
Growth
My philosophy is to coach and work with designers and researchers to empower them to be able to work anywhere. I find the best culture and environments exist when they want to stay at the company. Throughout my time as head of design and research, I have made sure to invest in their careers; listening to their desires and goals for growth, albeit in role or skills. CAS already had standardized company training for employees, but I found it too generic for what my team was bringing to the table.
When I was still an individual contributor, I lobbied our leadership to have design training to ensure we were keeping current on the latest trends, through leadership, and analyzing how other companies were conducting business.
In order to create wayfinding maps on advancement in the organization, I developed a development matrix which each member of the team is responsible for. These living documents give clarity to the direction each employee wants to take in their careers, and define what skills they’re specifically interested in building.
These are frequently the topics of conversation during 1:1 meetings and allow the tracking of progress on development as well as a notebook for accomplishments for employees to reflect upon during quarterly check-ins. Progress is flagged as such:
Green - On track or above target, feedback will augment or optimize performance
Yellow - Requires slight adjustment to meet goals and objectives, consider critical feedback
Red - Performance is unsustainable for meeting objectives. Concrete feedback must be addressed in a timely manner.
Another goal of mine was to expand the footprint of the team into other areas of the company and diversify the skillset some designers had to consult on technical implementation of features. Our junior-most designer came from a background in software engineering, but showed a keen interest in learning to be a designer. While in the intern program at CAS, she worked closely on an ancillary product, but that was a great trial to evaluate skills and coach her to adopt the designer mindset. She joined our team, and rapidly expanded her knowledge of design thanks to the dynamic we had. She was instrumental when it came time to feeding the accessibility roadmap on the flagship product and had direct input on training for developers and accessibility.
When in these discussions, if someone is in the yellow, it is meant to be a motivator. I convey often that failure is not bad, but an opportunity for learning and growth. Unwillingness to discharge the duties of one’s position or fix issues would be dealt with swiftly.
I hire researchers and designers with agency in mind. It is my responsibility to ensure they can speak toward the greater vision of the company’s objectives. At the same time, it is my responsibility to foster a healthy and safe environment for individuals to grow, learn, and do their very best work.
To date, employee churn has been limited to one termination, and another designer who had a great opportunity. I’m proud to see others on my team achieve their goals and move on to something they’re truly passionate about.
I’m ever thankful for the opportunity to lead such a thoughtful and driven group of individuals.
Lead Designer of Retrosynthesis and Internal Tools
“I really appreciate the considerate way Nate leads our design team. He treats us all as equals, and gives valuable feedback and support.”
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager