One diagnosis. Three journeys.

The situation

A global biopharmaceutical company preparing an oncology launch asked our consultancy to bring customer-experience discipline to it: understand patients, the care partners beside them and the clinicians around them; define what the patient-facing digital experience had to do; and measure experience, not just sales, from day one.

From research to shared picture

None of this was written alone at a desk. The method was design thinking, run in Mural: research onto shared boards, then clustered into themes in working sessions with the client’s product, research, medical, access and commercial partners. Themes became personas, personas became journeys, journeys surfaced the opportunities. The boards were the argument — by the time the deliverables existed, the people who had to act on them had already seen themselves in them.

What I designed, and with whom

• Personas that carry decisions, not demographics. A newly diagnosed patient and a care partner, built from interviews and secondary research: what matters most, the questions in the order they get asked, what earns trust and what breaks it. Each persona names the variance it stands in for, because people who share a diagnosis do not share a journey.
• Journey maps across the three audiences. The patient’s path from first symptoms through diagnosis, treatment and living forward; the clinician’s path from referral to decision to first dose; the care partner’s path alongside both — mapped stage by stage with the questions, emotions and hand-offs at each.
• The digital front door. Experience strategy and requirements for the patient-facing site: two ways in — a guided path for “what does the road ahead look like?” and a browsable timeline — a dedicated route for care partners, plain-language and accessibility standards, and governance separating regulated content from what could be personalized.
• Experience measurement. I worked on the launch measurement framework: the audience ecosystem from patient to referring physician to logistics partner, their journeys, and the metrics that would show whether the experience was working. The difficulty was the point — journeys that run independently but have to be orchestrated, outcomes that depend on actors the company does not control, and perceptions that form long before a conversion metric moves. Experience as a leading indicator, not a report card.

The same discipline went to two adjacent problems: twenty-eight clinician interviews across eleven roles synthesized into twelve failure modes for an immunology access journey, and an enterprise opportunity map that went into executive discussions.

A second engagement

The same client asked for the discipline again on a harder edge of the experience: the path from a prescription being written to a first treatment, across referring and treating clinicians, pharmacies, specialty pharmacies and in-office dispensing. Stakeholder interviews and document review became a current-state assessment, a future-state fulfillment journey and an experience blueprint of how those parties hand off to one another, with the friction points prioritized for the launch teams. Where the first engagement mapped what patients and clinicians feel, this one mapped what has to work between organizations for the therapy to arrive.

The complexity

Client product, design, technology, market research, market access, medical, legal/regulatory review and commercial teams, each with a veto and a deadline; an unlaunched asset; pharmacovigilance and privacy constraints on anything patient-facing; and a consultancy model in which the same lead moves between programs. The collaborative method was not a nicety. It was how work in a regulated category got agreed.