Led ethnographic research and designed production flow applications for pharmaceutical manufacturing operations at Cognite.
Interactive Prototype
Explore the live demo of the Production Flow and Maintenance Support applications.
View prototype ↗The Challenge
AstraZeneca's manufacturing operations relied on a fragmented set of tools to understand production flow, bottlenecks, and maintenance issues. Operational insight was distributed across physical Kanban boards, static dashboards, spreadsheets, and specialist analytics systems.
As a result, operators and stakeholders struggled to answer simple but high-consequence questions:
- What is running right now?
- What is waiting, blocked, or out of specification?
- Where is flow breaking down across the process?
- Which assets require attention next?
The aim of this engagement was not to build another dashboard, but to explore whether a single, coherent operational surface could replace fragmented views and support faster, more confident decisions.
My Role
This was a three-week engagement with AstraZeneca, delivered through Cognite's Value Delivery team - a small, cross-functional group comprising a product manager, subject-matter expert, CDF engineer, and myself as designer.
I was responsible for research, design, and all front-end development, owning the work end-to-end. Specifically, I:
- Led on-site ethnographic research at AstraZeneca's Sweden facility
- Conducted contextual inquiry directly with operators
- Designed two applications: Production Flow and Maintenance Support
- Built both applications as working front-end systems using Cursor and Cognite's design system
- Ran multiple rounds of usability testing, both on-site and remotely
There was no hand-off between design and development - the same code that was prototyped was what shipped.
The Outcome
The Production Flow application quickly became the focal point of the engagement. Usability testing showed that operators needed fast, reliable situational awareness - not more analytics.
During on-site testing in Sweden, stakeholders articulated the impact:
"90% of multiple people's time at Södertälje is spent looking for data in Excel. With the use cases shown, we can 'add' ~5 FTEs via efficiency gains."
"What I've seen in Sweden is going from slow horses to fast helicopters."
"What the Atlas AI team did in 2 days took our UX team 18 months."
AstraZeneca formally decided to pivot away from fragmented dashboards and consolidate business-facing operational views within Cognite.
Feedback
"Everything you committed to was delivered with quality and speed. Your preparation and execution during customer sessions made a real difference."
- Product Manager, Cognite
"Sam brought a relentless focus on the end-user, breaking problems down to first principles. His ability to move quickly from concept to near production-grade solutions was a highlight of the project."
- Engineer, Cognite
What I'm Proud Of
I'm proud that this work moved beyond design artefacts and into real operational use.
In a short time frame, the project progressed from ethnographic research on a factory floor to a deployed system running live data, used by operators in context. The "horses to helicopters" moment captured something important: not just faster delivery, but a fundamental change in how work was seen, discussed, and acted upon.
In high-consequence environments, good design is not about adding intelligence, but about making reality legible.