The Situation
Araceli Biosciences had built a high-content imager, Endeavor, which was faster than many of its competitors. However, in order to bring on more customers, the Endeavor needed an accompanying image analysis application.
The product team's first attempt to build said analysis application missed the mark in many ways, but the top issue identified by key customers as well as the Sales and Support teams was the lack of ease-of-use, a value proposition that the Endeavor itself stood behind and delivered. Leadership decided to scrap that version and told the team to start from zero.
That decision came with a real cost. As an early-stage company competing against established players, Araceli had only so many attempts to get this right, and killing the first version meant starting over with nothing to show for the time already spent. It also surfaced the actual problem: the team building it had no design leadership at all.
I was hired to rebuild the analysis application from the ground up within six months, and make sure this version finally delivered on what the hardware had promised.
The Work
The main challenge when I joined the company wasn't the actual design of the analysis application itself but teaching a team of three software engineers, three data scientists, and a biologist who was also our in-team SME, how to work with a product designer. From week one, I ran weekly design reviews where the team could review and ask questions about my proposed workflows and designs, share their own ideas, and have me walk them through why certain design decisions were more appropriate than others given the product requirements. These were technical specialists with strong, well-formed opinions, and design decisions weren't accepted just because I was the designer. Reviews shifted, within a few months, from me defending decisions to the team bringing me their own workflow problems to solve. In parallel, I set up monthly design review calls with the Sales and Support teams with the dual intent of keeping them in the loop about product decisions (something that I had discovered they felt removed from) and building confidence in the rebuild. Ahead of launch, I ran the beta program myself, working with the exec team and Sales and Support to shortlist customers, building a testing protocol with specific tasks and surveys, and visiting one beta customer on-site to observe them using the application directly. We shipped the first version of Clairvoyance at the end of November that year, within six months of beginning from the ground up.
The new year started with me as part of a small "tiger team," led by the VP of Marketing, tasked with building a proof-of-concept for a new product direction set by the CEO and board: letting customers analyze images in real time, as they were being acquired. This product would not only expand the Endeavor platform meaningfully, but would get into a problem left largely untouched by competitors. Starting with storyboarding and moving on to prototyping, I designed the end-to-end concept for the new application. As we refined Clairvoyance with new analysis features, we built a 'shell' MVP for ClaireRT, which we unveiled and demoed as our own internal 'innovation spotlight' at SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening), our biggest tradeshow. Customer interest was strong enough that it converted into purchase orders within months.
With the successful launch of ClaireRT, I took ownership of product design across Araceli's entire platform. Though each application was powerful and intuitive on its own, together they were inconsistent and disconnected, with no cohesive cross-platform experience. In May 2025, I originated an initiative to unify Araceli's applications into a single, overarching product: one information architecture, one UI language, one taxonomy, and seamless workflows across the platform, while still leaving room for the product portfolio to grow through new applications and add-ons. I led a series of three workshops to bring the core product team, PMs, the dev lead, and our SME, onto the same page and flesh out the details together. The unified app became a recurring topic in board meetings as we discussed the platform's ongoing evolution. In September 2026, we released EndeavorOS, Araceli's single unified application.
In 2025, as LLMs became increasingly ubiquitous, I started a personal project surveying people across the company on where they thought LLMs could accelerate drug discovery on our platform. Those conversations surfaced the idea for a Protocol CoAuthor: an assistant that would take a scientist's plain-language description of their samples and generate a starting point for Endeavor's imaging parameters. With lab-in-the-loop workflows top of mind for the field, I pushed the concept further, closing the loop entirely: the assistant would generate the acquisition protocol from the scientist's description, then use ClaireRT to evaluate the resulting images in real time. With the help of a self-motivated data science intern, I built the Protocol CoAuthor in three months over the summer of 2026. We are currently testing the tool internally and discussing productization strategy.
The Outcome
The unified platform, and the products built alongside it, changed how Araceli's leadership thinks about product strategy, and what role design plays in shaping it. I now co-lead roadmap sessions with the PM overseeing the software portfolio, and present product and design strategy directly to Araceli's board.
In my three years at the company, design went from something brought in to fix a single failed product to a function that shapes what the company builds next: from a rebuilt application, to a category-defining real-time capability, to the unified platform those two now sit inside, and now, to the AI-native tools we're building for what comes after it.