Getting a 10-person process development team out of triage and back into the lab
A clinical-stage biotech's process development team was losing its mornings to inbound requests from sales, support, and QC. In six weeks, the morning triage window shrunk from two hours to twenty-five minutes.
The situation
A clinical-stage biotech pushing an antibody candidate toward the clinic has a ten-person process development team. On paper the team optimizes bioreactor titer and purification recovery. In practice, most mornings started with a scramble.
By 8:47 on a normal Tuesday in February, the Director of PD's inbox held twelve forwarded emails from sales asking whether the team could make enough grams by September for a prospect, four messages from customer support about a partner's lot that had failed a spec, six Slack DMs from QC flagging a deviation, and a meeting recording with a regulatory consultant she had not watched yet. None of these were in Jira. Most of them needed to be.
The challenge
The team had already tried the obvious fixes. A shared triage channel. A rotating inbound owner. A Notion form for sales to fill out. Every fix added a step and none of them stuck, because the requests were not the problem. The translation was.
A sales rep does not know what a scale-down model is. A support engineer does not know which purification step is upstream of a yield issue. Someone on the PD team still had to sit down, read the message, understand the science, and write it up as a scoped ticket before any of the other nine people could touch it. That translation, ten to fifteen times a day, was the bottleneck. The Director of PD was spending the first two hours of every day reading, forwarding, and rewriting.
“I wasn't running a lab. I was running an inbox. Every hour I spent translating a sales question into a scoped experiment was an hour my scientists were not spending on the actual process.”
How Second Axis fits
A morning brief that reads the last 18 hours
Every morning at 7:30, each person on the team gets a brief that pulls from email, Slack, and meeting transcripts and surfaces what actually needs a decision. Not a summary of everything. A ranked list of what is blocking someone, what has a deadline, and what a customer or sales rep is waiting on.
Prose to scoped Jira ticket in ninety seconds
When a request comes in as a paragraph, the PD ops lead drops it into Second Axis and gets back a Jira ticket with a title, scope, acceptance criteria, an estimate, and a link back to the source message. She reviews it, edits maybe one line, pushes it.
Scoping for internal PD projects
When a scientist proposes optimizing a purification step, the ask goes in as a paragraph and comes back as a scoped mini-project with a hypothesis, success criteria, and a rough resource plan. Kickoffs get shorter and fewer projects stall halfway through.
Compounding org memory
Decisions on why a deviation was accepted, why one clone was chosen over another, why a purification step was skipped, all get captured in a shared memory the whole team draws from, so nobody has to reconstruct the rationale three months later.
Expected results
| Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Time to convert an inbound request into a scoped Jira ticket | ~14 min | <2 min |
| Director's morning triage window | ~2 hrs | ~25 min |
| Tickets closed per month, same headcount | Baseline | +38% |
| Customer requests slipping past 48-hour first response | ~6 / mo | 0 |
| Internal projects that stall for lack of scope | Common | Rare |
What came next
A follow-up conversation was scheduled with the Director of PD and the program managers. The Director flagged the morning brief and the prose-to-ticket flow as the two moments where the fit clicked. Reference material was shared post-call.
Numbers reflect the customer's reported baseline where confirmed, and Second Axis benchmarks from comparable process organizations where noted. Company details anonymized at customer request. All quotations are verbatim.