Meet the People Behind Labguru - Revital Kristal, VP Product Management

Revital Kristal

Tell us about yourself and your background

I have a BSc in Biochemistry engineering and an MA in Biomedical engineering from the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel. Prior to BioData, I worked on developing a unique tool that allows anticipating cancer metastatic tumours using cancer cells biopsies. I first joined Biodata as a QA specialist and since then held various positions in product development. Last year I was appointed as VP Product Management.

How long have you been with BioData?

I have been with Biodata for over 6 years and love every minute of it. It’s been challenging and interesting.

How do you develop Labguru and decide on new features?

We develop Labguru according to our strategy and innovation plan. We are extremely customer oriented and base our development according to our users’ needs.

We adhere to our users’ challenges and requests. We document all users requests and use Labguru ourselves to manage the company’s knowledge. Once we start working on a new feature or improving an existing one, we start reviewing those relevant requests and interview our customers. We invest a lot of time on innovation, research and technical development, aiming to establish thought leadership and create a state of the art product that will answer the needs of life science and biotech companies. Each feature goes through a comprehensive UX process, making sure that features are properly tailored and easy to use.

Tell us about a feature you recently worked on and of which you are most proud?

Lately, I am investing a lot of time on enhancing Labguru’s ability to create workflows. The workflow tool allows our users to create unique automated processes that are tailored to their needs. Users can create workflows on their own, by using basic functionalities that we provide or write their own scripts. Using workflows enables life science and biotech companies to be more efficient and analyze results faster and more accurately.

I am most proud of our latest R integration which empowers our users with ample analysis options, covering broad research areas and provides a great solution for our users. Integrating R enables our users to work together in the same environment as their bioinformatics and data scientists, implementing methods that assure data integrity and keep all data organized in one place.

R integration

How do you make sure your users work with Labguru and use all the features properly?

When a feature is done and deployed we invest additional efforts to make sure it is adopted by our users. We acknowledge the fact that many of our users have tight schedules and can’t always attend a webinar or a training session and therefore prefer to learn how to use Labguru by themselves. We took the time to develop Labguru Academy, which allows them to learn at their own pace. Labguru Academy is designed for companies working with Labguru and can ease the ability to train new employees to work properly with Labguru, as well as existing employees who can deepen their knowledge in advanced Labguru functions.

The advantages of using Labguru Academy are clear:

• Train your new employees individually, at their own pace, without relying on other employees or trainers
• Labguru Academy is always available and allows users to go back and refresh their memory at their preferred time
• Monitor employees course advancement
• Better deployment of labguru across the organization will save you time and money

How do you keep in touch with your customers?

Every day I take the time to personally read all the incoming messages from our users. We have a dedicated customer success team that are in touch on a daily basis with our customers and we have regular meetings to discuss users needs and requests. We see ourselves as a customer oriented company and we make sure that our customers’ needs are well attended. In addition, as I travel often to meet potential customers, I make sure to meet as many existing customers as possible in the same area, as do my team.

What do you like about your work?

I love the challenge. Labguru covers many biological and chemical fields and requires me to learn new material all the time and broaden my knowledge. In addition, it is always challenging to find ways to tailor Labguru to each unique customer.

I enjoy playing with ideas and being creative, using new tools to continue to develop Labguru. I am enthusiastic about my job, I enjoy being in touch with customers and seeing how an idea we imagined realizes to wireframe and takes shape into a live, working and used feature in Labguru.

What are your future plans for Labguru?

We have so many exciting plans. We are working on enhancing the existing Labguru platform in addition to developing new innovative features and modules. I advise to stay tuned and follow our releases.

Anything else?

I believe that Labguru ELN is a great research and inventory management platform for life science, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, enabling them to better deal with data integrity issues and improve team communication, in addition to better analyzing their results using the workflows and dataset tools Labguru offers. I know that Labguru improves lab work and saves time and money.

I encourage companies that haven’t tried us yet – to contact us for a demo.

Read more blog posts:

Why Equipment Calibration is Important for Maintaining Data Integrity

The Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) selects Labguru to further pioneering cancer research and treatment

Manage Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC/MS) Data Analysis