Role:
Assoc. Director, Design & Stragegy
Team:
10
Challenge
IQVIA’s product teams operated largely in silos with little coordination across products. Competitors were winning clients with more cohesive user experiences, while employees and clients hesitated to adopt Ada because they did not yet trust it.
strategy
I mapped leadership and customer definitions of product value, assessed each product team’s readiness for product-led change, co-authored an enterprise UX strategy with Jaime Levy, and built the operating model around it. In parallel, I created Ada’s trust-based AI adoption framework and experimentation tools.
Results
During my $4.4M UX pilot, I uncovered executive resistance driven by feature-based performance metrics. I helped shift leaders toward outcome-based incentives, unlocking 30+ product upgrades while Ada’s rollout across 15+ products accelerated patient recruitment by 67%.
Examples of IMS/Quintiles various styles in 2016
Phase 1
Observer
Watch Ada work. No delegation. Build pattern recognition before trust is asked for.
Phase 2
Peer
Collaborate with Ada. Review outputs. User retains the final clinical call.
Phase 3
Assistant
Delegate to Ada. Full AI assistance. Advancement triggered by comfort, not calendar.
Example plot of AI adoption by users from Observer (phase1), Peer (phase 2), to Assistant (phase 3) over 6 weeks.
Example of flow diagram used to map tasks and evaluate UI concepts
Annotated key features and screenshot of the AI admin console.
Example of client-facing research dashboard with Ada (Phase 1) active.
Design Foundations
Scaling the organization behind the transformation
While Ada was rolling out, I was building the organization needed to support IQVIA’s remaining 250 products.
I co-authored the enterprise UX transformation strategy with Jaime Levy, creating the phased approval model that funded the expansion. The original six-person pilot team grew to 45 across research, design, content, and product management in 36 months, expanding coverage from 5 to 30+ products.
I built research operations from scratch, embedded designers directly into product teams, and introduced a six-pod operating model that reduced cross-team bottlenecks by 40% and tripled delivery capacity without proportional headcount growth.
I also founded a storytelling studio with Disney animators to help clients and executives understand complex product strategy.
Map of the IQVIA Design Org (2021)
Example "sizzle reel" the team created at the end of each year highlighting outstanding stories, events, and craft from that year.
key trade-off
The CTO wanted 150 designers. I told him to wait.
The choice
Challenge: My 1-year design pilot worked. The CTO wanted to scale it across 250 products in 160 languages immediately. The problem: the success came from a small SWAT team. We had proven design could work. We had not yet built the infrastructure to scale it responsibly.
The decision came down to two paths
Outcome
I slowed the rollout. Adding 150 designers before establishing shared systems and governance would've buried the organization in debt we couldn't unwind later.
It cost the CTO face internally. It cost me goodwill. By 2022, the org peaked at 75 designers instead of 150.
But the slower path held. Design became part of product strategy instead of a downstream service function. Over time, that decision earned me a voice in nearly every major initiative, and the CTO became one of our strongest advocates, presenting our work company-wide for three consecutive years.
Results
Select Highlights
What started as a year-one pilot to prove design's value at IQVIA evolved into a new operating model for how the world's largest CRO made AI decisions in clinical research.
