The challenge

Moderna grew from roughly 1,000 employees to 5,000 during the pandemic, while its clinical-trial systems still placed much of the burden on participants and research sites. Enrollment, consent, study communication, and sample processing lived in separate workflows. The company needed to make participation clearer and more inclusive, especially for Black and Hispanic communities historically underrepresented in trials, while improving the reliability of lab-kit handling at study sites.

My contribution

I directed two connected products and established a team model that kept Moderna’s product owners and clinical-operations leaders responsible for decisions from the start.

• Defined a shared experience strategy across participant recruitment and site operations, linking enrollment quality, participant trust, and sample integrity instead of treating them as separate service problems.
• Directed a production-quality Flutter prototype for prescreening, study matching, plain-language consent, onboarding, reminders, and ongoing communication. The app gave participants one place to understand what a study required and what would happen next.
• Set the product roadmap around measurable barriers to representative enrollment, including eligibility comprehension, practical participation demands, and confidence in how personal information would be used.
• Guided the Smart Lab Kit from field research to a physical system using color coding, a lid-mounted process guide, and task-specific inserts to reduce sorting and memory demands for site staff.
• Partnered with Public Digital and Moderna’s technical teams to test feasibility alongside the experience design, keeping the app architecture and kit specifications within systems Moderna could operate.
• Built an operating rhythm across two product teams so clinical, technical, and participant-experience decisions reached the same owners instead of splitting into parallel approval paths.

The impact

The participant app gave Moderna a build-ready product direction for recruiting, consenting, and supporting people through a study. The Smart Lab Kit moved further: Moderna built it in-house and shipped it globally within seven months.

Together, the products showed how participant experience and clinical operations could share one product strategy. The kit changed a daily physical workflow at research sites, while the app entered Moderna’s roadmap as a foundation for a more understandable and inclusive trial experience.