Octave Bioscience
Octave partnered with me to envision and execute their AI-powered ecosystem of care for neurologists and MS patients.
APPROACH
Octave’s team spent a lifetime learning and practicing healthcare, our challenge was to quickly bring value:
Strong design method: Use design thinking to leverage experience across healthcare experts, specialists, scientists, and patients.
Solve for the near and far: Update investors, build/test prototypes, and design solutions that would take years to develop.
Beyond digital: Design for the ecosystem with multiple touch points, mediums, and stakeholders.
SOLUTION
We set 3 month work plans with tracks for short, medium, and long term horizons. Octave continued to re-up for 4 years without interruption.
Design Thinking, UCD, and Service Design methods were game changers that worked across all horizons.
Strong design method: collaboration
From Day 1, we translated expert domain knowledge into shared visuals:
—Created a shared understanding of the future
—Established a foundation for decision making
—Clarified highly complex topics
Strong design method: frameworks
We facilitated creating the “4 P’s Ecosystem”—positioning Octave beyond just technology, but a holistic ecosystem of care management. This framework was useful for decision making, road mapping, and positioning in the market.
Solve for the near and far: startup speed
Our studio space was the informal Octave offices, where we hosted investor updates (such as Brook Byers of KPCB)—condensing hundreds of hours of work into posters that could be digested in just minutes.
The poster format continued to be updated and set up in the future office space, helping bring new hires and investors up-to-startup-speed.
Solve for the near and far: seeing the future
Real world challenges
Empathy is a strength of designers—using visual storytelling can help technologists, scientists, and even skeptics connect.
Seeing past the problem
Envisioning a holistic impact of how the world will be after change, is much more compelling than mockups of screens.
Solve for the near and far: single source of truth
From Pilot to GA, visualizing what the team was building simultaneously reveals the big picture and provides persona-centric flows with an action/object model.
This skeleton remains true across time while details are iterated at the respective disciplines of product management, UX/UI, and engineering in Scrum teams.
Solve for the near and far: prototyping
Early stage ideas benefit the most from rapid design prototypes. These validate fundamental functionality, not just usability—saving resources.
Beyond digital: Service design across multiple touch points
Championed a holistic execution of design across the entire experience, resulting in the highest standards from the patient-facing app to onboarding a medical group to physical packaging of the tests.
The printed MRI Report, below, brought sophisticated information design to a highly technical and data dense report, allowing the specialist and patient understand key points.
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Over four years we built a multi-touchpoint platform of care for neurological diseases that harnesses complexity and saves lives.
Bringing Vision to Reality
Design thinking methods throughout helped Octave bring their vision out of PowerPoint and into the hands of neurologists and patients.
Fundraising to Onboarding
I was fully involved from co-pitching to top life science VC’s, to delivering the onboarding of MS centers that ultimately saved lives.
User-centricity Wins
Hyper focus on who we’re helping made for effective decision making, critical for a deeply difficult field like life sciences.