Over the last six months I have been on a journey to do a better job marketing myself. To achieve this, I have been building, writing, and talking to people. A bunch of this is for me, but I've also been picking up some fractional work that has helped me level up.
I've found it freeing to be more creative recently, and I've really enjoyed pursuing what interests me, experimenting with how I work, and building out my own resource library. I also find it's the clearest way I know to show the skills I want to bring to my next role.
The work has added up faster than I expected, so I'm excited to share it here.
I'm trying something new and writing this up quarterly to showcase what I've been working on. This is the first one.
I relaunched cwagner.co and ImpromptBrü, moving from Carrd and Obsidian Publish onto self-built static sites using Astro and Vercel. Behind the scenes, they now share a single design system, and I like the new visual direction and the snappy performance on Astro. One particular pain of moving a blog is the redirects. I verified 126 of them by hand, so every link anyone has ever shared still works. All told, a pretty smooth transition.
I hosted 24 one-on-ones, several with VP- and SVP-level product leaders at diagnostics companies. On top of those, 4 standing weekly calls: 2 biotech networking groups, one of which I facilitate, plus 2 product-management groups. One warm-intro chain led straight to a conversation with an SVP of Product that I'd be jazzed to work for.
Working fractionally with a founder, I designed and shipped a complete welcome experience for a paid Circle community: the content map for a member guide, customized welcome emails, plus a seven-message automated DM sequence. I'd never built onboarding before. I learned it by building it, next to someone who knew the community better than I did, and by asking the same questions I'd ask about a diagnostic: where do people drop off, what does a member need on day 3 versus day 16, what does the first fifteen minutes have to accomplish. It went from a blank page to a live production workflow, and now runs automatically for all new members, allowing me to spend more time making connections in the community.
I continue to build. I have a backlog of ideas for the tools I've already made and for new ones, and I want to keep refining the sites. Next up is a quotebook for the blog.
I'm also looking for my next role. I help oncology diagnostics companies get their products to clinical adoption using hard-won regulatory experience, and I'm looking for a growth-stage company in liquid biopsy, microfluidics, or spatial biology that's navigating that arc. Alongside that, I'll keep building out my resource library.
And I'm excited for the future of The Library.
Issue 02 should come out in November. You can hold me to the quotebook, and I'd like to be writing that one with the added perspective of starting a new job.
I'm not full-time at the moment, and I'm looking forward to finding the right opportunity. The skills above sit alongside the rest of what I bring: product sense, hands-on development experience in diagnostics, and a platform taken through De Novo clearance. It all points where it always has: getting breakthroughs out of the lab and into the world, and making the experience of using them light and delightful and grounded in sound science.
More about what I'm working on at cwagner.co.
Christopher