Paweł Czerski UX & Interaction Designer

From front-end coder to team leader

I joined Roche as one of only three front-end developers on the team. The digital unit at the time was just a small fraction of what it would become. During my years there, the organization scaled rapidly, and with that came both opportunities and friction. What started as a developer role quickly expanded into full design ownership, and eventually into leading a cross-functional front-end and UX team of 12–15 people.

Throughout this journey, I worked on dozens of internal products used across the company—ranging from administrative tools and workflow apps to data-heavy dashboards and highly specialized tools for drug research and development. The wide variety of contexts required careful adaptation of our approach to technology, UX, and collaboration.

Key challenges

• Scaling while maintaining purpose: The site expanded from around 80 to over 700 people during my tenure. This kind of growth inevitably brings increased complexity, formalization, and process-heavy governance. While necessary, it can risk stifling creativity and reducing morale. My role involved constantly rebalancing these pressures—matching the right people to the right projects, nurturing intrinsic motivation, and shielding the team from unnecessary bureaucracy.

• Navigating organizational shifts: With size came change. The company culture evolved to include more formal corporate processes, which often put creative initiative at risk and could demotivate teams. My position often served as a bridge—ensuring projects remained user-centered and viable despite structural constraints, and carefully balancing the need for alignment with space for autonomy.

• Balancing compliance and design ambition: While many of our projects enjoyed some flexibility, others, like the validated Cold Chain dashboard suite, had to strictly follow waterfall methodology and meet high regulatory standards. Cold Chain was particularly rewarding: a data-rich application aimed at identifying weak links in temperature- and humidity-sensitive medical product transport. It demanded both an elegant design of complex metrics and compliance with exhaustive documentation and deadlines.

• Building a resilient, multidisciplinary team: My leadership extended beyond line management. I mentored team members, defined hiring profiles, and created systems to promote consistency across projects. We brought together specialists with diverse skill sets and backgrounds—spanning interface designers and full-stack front-end developers—and built a strong team culture grounded in clarity, care, and craft.

My role

• Led a team of 12–15 front-end and UX professionals across 20+ concurrent projects annually
• Took full responsibility for the planning, design, and implementation of complex internal tools
• Acted as a liaison between project stakeholders, developers, and corporate compliance
• Defined and advocated for UX strategy in organizations where it had little existing foothold
• Designed scalable front-end architectures and introduced tools that improved development efficiency

Impact

My years at Roche helped establish a sustainable UX and front-end practice that outlasted my time there. We brought modern usability thinking to a range of complex enterprise systems, in contexts where design quality is often an afterthought. I shaped not just the interfaces of internal tools, but also the way digital product teams operated—grounding them in user needs, collaborative design, and a shared sense of responsibility for outcomes.