Nexa

About the company

Nexa was an emerging startup inside the Dasa conglomerate, a Brazilian-based giant in the clinical diagnosis space, with thousands of hospitals, labs, and employees under its wings. By the time I left, Nexa had around 30 to 40 people in the team, with the design team being 5.

Product context

Nexa was sort of born out of a crazy tragedy. The company's single president, in the style of Logan Roy⎯sorry about the spoiler, though⎯died suddenly which culminated in his son taking over. With a much younger drive, and getting a tighter grip on the operation, he wanted to better leverage technology to create something more useful within the health-care space.

That's all to say that, when I joined, Nexa had nothing more than a working prototype of a potential product, which consisted of enabling a much more efficient access to lab exam results. Dasa owns most of the clinical analysis labs in Brazil and they weren't at all connected with each other, data-wise, but... they could be, as they're all within the same umbrella, after all. That product was called Livia and it was meant to do just that: centralize diagnostical data.

At some point, we realized that the most valuable thing we had was hundreds and hundreds of health data points. Nexa had a consultant doctor at that point and he guided us to lean towards developing a product to help doctors in examining lab results, pitching to us that it was a major problem. We needed something to start with anyway because we knew the potential we had at hand.

My journey there

Right before I joined, they hired a Head of Design who quite quickly managed to form a team of 5 or 6 designers. It's very unusual to see a small company with a relatively large team of designers. So, with many of us on board, there was plenty of manpower to work around concepts, possibilities, and explorations for proving that Nexa was worthwhile to the whole Dasa group.

Projects

Closing thoughts

Nexa was a quick experience but, at the same time, such an interesting experience. Aside from making new friends and deepening my connection with old ones, it was an enriching experience, to say the least, to be within a huge corp and feel the complications of trying to reinvent stuff with tech.

I sort of still keep a soft spot for health tech as I keep hopes up that technology has much to improve here, especially direct-to-consumer products. Of course, it's relatively easy to think about the revolutionary, edge-cutting, advancements but honestly, simple bumps in patients' and doctors' experiences would go a huge way already and it's about these that I'm the most excited about—fortunately we kick-started some of it at Nexa.