Science Community Platform

Context

An academic networking platform (research posters, journal clubs, crowdsourced peer review) already had a public mobile app with a small feature set when I joined as part of an outside consulting team. Engagement was effectively at zero — publications had almost no comments or discussion activity, and there was no way to have direct conversations on the platform, despite user interviews showing researchers expected chat as a baseline feature.

What I did

• Led the requirements and rollout of webinars as a new mobile feature, including integrating a major video-streaming service for seamless in-app viewing
• Worked directly with the designer to redesign the publication-viewing experience toward discussion and peer-review submission
• Ran user interviews that surfaced direct messaging as an expected, missing feature — informing the chat/messaging roadmap
• Mapped journeys for early-career researchers, where the engagement problem was most visible
• Coordinated a cross-functional team (2 full-stack engineers + 1 designer) on a biweekly release cadence

Impact

• 500+ downloads on Android following the mobile expansion
• Shipped webinars with integrated video streaming, and a redesigned publication view built to invite discussion
• Moved engagement from near-zero (no comments, no messaging) to a platform with the roadmap and core features in place to support active researcher discussion