Case Studies
Business Development
We are an early-stage startup with a digital therapeutic product aimed at improving mental health and as an alternative to drug-based treatments. When our core team, all faculty at Yale University, connected with Alex via a customer discovery program, we were unsure what market would be our best entry point into the field. Early users were enthusiastic, but we needed to better define our first best target market and refine our value proposition. With Alex’s expertise, we learnt how to conduct customer discovery sessions and completed several interviews. Our prior assumptions around the kinds of clinics that would be interested in our product and the therapeutic benefits we would need to demonstrate to garner interest were both challenged during this process. Debriefing sessions with Alex were very insightful, helping us redefine our target market and goals, and we discovered an unexpected market in the process! We also gained a better understanding of the value we could provide based on the environment in which the treatment was provided. These insights have enabled us to define our market more precisely and refine our go-to-market strategy. This experience has been immensely helpful to our team. We continue to employ the lessons learnt and were incredibly fortunate to have as knowledgeable and experienced a mentor as Alex!
Mohini Ranganathan, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine
Digital Transformation
When a traditional hardware company launched its first SaaS product they faced critical challenges on the path to delivering a digital experience for clients. I partnered with leadership to operationalize the end to end client experience. I conducted cross-departmental stakeholder interviews to uncover operational gaps and identify key responsibility issues—areas with fragmented ownership, multiple owners with competing priorities, or complete ownership vacuums and created a detailed journey map tracking the full customer lifecycle—from product discovery through onboarding, usage, and retention. Based on in-depth customer research I established clear customer experience principles based on actual user needs and expectations of SaaS, rather than legacy hardware assumptions, and where needed I organized and led cross-functional teams to resolve critical operational barriers, breaking down traditional silos between engineering, IT, UX, and website teams. After launch I implemented evaluative research to refine product-market fit. This work resulted in concrete improvements including successful implementation of crucial functionality that had not been in the initial requirements and enhanced cross-functional collaboration replacing siloed hardware-oriented processes.
Team Development
A digital services team working with a large US Government Agency was slow in delivering tangible results to the client. The agency assigned a team of product owners from different disciplines who were not aligned on overall goals, and the different workstreams of the digital services team--Product, Engineering, and User Experience--were working independently of each other. I was brought onboard to align the team with each other and the client so they could work toward delivery goals. I worked individually with team members to understand their work to date and the challenges they perceived, and met with key client stakeholders to understand their individual goals and the broader outcomes they shared. I reorganized the team around clear shared initiatives rather than individual projects, and restructured the overall roadmap to articulate short term goals that could be delivered quickly while also becoming building blocks to longer term outcomes.