Zach Soudan joins Benchmark Labs as Head of Design & UX Research. He leads design and user research across our platform, shaping how our interfaces affect businesses and how its people use our forecasts to create real impact.
He brings fifteen years of experience, including Science37’s clinical trial platform, enterprise systems at Xerox, innovation design at Arvest, and a large breadth of UX work at IDEO.
Let’s learn a little more about Zach.
What problem are you here to solve?
Two things, and they work together.
Firstly, I will be paying special attention to elevating Benchmark Labs’ digital footprint. I want everything customer-facing, the website, the product surfaces, the reports, to line up with what the business offers and how intelligent the platform actually is, under a visual language as mature as this company has become. I cannot do this without the team, so this will be a highly collaborative approach.
The second is design and user research workflows built on AI agents. That agentic work is foundational. It holds up as we grow, and it gives future teams something solid to build on. I also want to apply agentic automation to our insights and our design decisions, using the on-site data our weather stations already produce. There is so much potential in AI automation and how it surfaces to our customers within our interfaces.
What in your background prepares you for it?
Most of my career has been on products where people have to trust what they see: platforms for running clinical trials, hardware and software systems used across large organizations, and products in finance, healthcare, and the public sector. Regulated work, where every detail gets checked before it ships.
Despite my time in enterprise, my design process doesn’t always live in hierarchal red tape. I’ve learned to internalize business-side metrics and goals in dynamic startup environments from my time at IDEO and Science37. Additionally, I know what it takes to break into new markets, and how to hone in on innovative products that bring disproportionate ROI via my work at Arvest. The connector between all of my experiences, despite the tools and context shifting over the span of my career, is the speed with which I prototype and build ideas into something functional – a product that has real-world impact.
This real-world impact mindset is what I intend to bring to Benchmark Labs.
How will you work here?
Three ways. First, with customers. I’ll dedicate time to understanding the people we support and who depend on our forecasts, as that will be the cornerstone of the work I do. What I learn goes back to the product and to our science team, so customer needs shape what the models learn next.
Second, with AI. I will manage AI agents across design and research, from synthesizing interview notes and data to building working prototypes. That lets a small team put real ideas in front of the team and our partners in days, not months.
Third, with the team. I intend to bring a collaborative design leadership approach to how design operates at Benchmark Labs. Design never lives in a vacuum, and by leaning on the expertise of the team to bring the design, both outward and throughout our process, to a higher level will be a key priority of mine.
What will customers notice first?
The number one goal of my involvement with Benchmark Labs is to communicate the power of our platform and how it delivers results for our customers. This is accomplished with a visual and tonal elevation of our digital presence on benchmarklabs.com and beyond. Additionally, listening to and utilizing the voice of our customers to improve our product. I want to lean into our industry partners to glean insights to elevate our digital surfaces – moving from casual capture of these conversations to a structured user research workflow. A steady pipeline between our customers and our outward messaging is, in my opinion, pivotal to driving value for all.
I’m excited to join Benchmark Labs at this point in their trajectory and dig in with the team to make an impact through our work together.
Welcome, Zach!
More about Zach Soudan
Zach leads design and UX research at Benchmark Labs as its first design lead, shaping how asset-specific forecasts become decisions businesses and their teams can act on. He brings fifteen years of product design and field research across IDEO, Xerox, Arvest, and Science37, designing for high-stakes, regulated settings like clinical trials, financial services, and enterprise hardware. At Benchmark Labs he directs all design efforts and customer research across the platform that aligns our designs closer to what our customers truly need to be successful. He holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and is based in Rochester, New York.
For more information, visit www.benchmarklabs.com or email info@benchmarklabs.com.