Professional Experience
Dr. Adrian Raudaschl
Principal Product Manager at Elsevier
Former NHS doctor who traded clinical practice for building AI systems that make researchers more impactful. Focused on creating products that harness natural, artificial, and community intelligences to help academics do more good for the world through better tools.
My Approach
Define "What Good Looks Like"
I believe in defining "what good looks like" before diving in, whether it's building AI products or making pasta sauce. My approach combines the TARS framework with Amazon's "working backwards" method, often starting with fictional press releases that clarify real customer impact.
Medical Training Never Leaves
The "working backwards" approach became my secret weapon. When developing Scopus AI, we started by writing a press release announcing "researchers discover papers 40% faster." This clarity united our team. It's a bit like medicine: you can't treat symptoms without understanding the underlying condition.
Core Competencies
Product Skills
- Product Strategy
- Working Backwards Methodology
- Strategic Innovation Execution
- OKRs/KPIs Design
Technical Expertise
- ElasticSearch (Lexical + Semantic)
- Python
- Graph Database Design (Neo4j)
- Vector Space Modeling
AI-Powered Technologies
- Large Language Models
- Responsible AI
Healthcare & Clinical
- Clinical Medical Practice
- Healthcare Regulation
- Patient Safety
- Medical Research
Work Experience
In 2020, I began experimenting with GPT-2 to solve a fundamental challenge: how can we make researchers more impactful through better tools? I built the original Scopus AI prototype, along with the RAG-Fusion algorithm, focusing on creating systems that consider not just algorithmic intelligence, but how researchers actually work and collaborate to do good in the world. Working with brilliant minds like Henry Cleland and Erik Schwartz, this prototype became the foundation that enabled a dedicated team to create Scopus AI.
- Built the original Scopus AI prototype that became the foundation for a platform now helping millions of researchers amplify their impact and contribute more effectively to their fields.
- Led the transition from keyword matching to semantic understanding across five research products, enabling over 100M researchers to work more effectively and make greater contributions to their disciplines.
- Developed RAG Fusion, a patent-pending approach to improving AI-powered tools for researchers, with over 800 GitHub stars on the open-source implementation.
- Pioneered AI ethics frameworks for academic tools, ensuring transparency whilst respecting the collaborative nature of the research community and supporting researchers in doing good work.
Coming in to improve acquisition and onboarding, Mendeley became my product management bootcamp. I learned how academics actually work — discovering papers, building libraries, writing research.
Through proper A/B testing, user research, and cross-team collaboration, I implemented onboarding flows that actually worked. But the real education came from rebuilding search from scratch — understanding how to make discovery faster and more intuitive for researchers.
- Rebuilt search from the ground up: Led complete overhaul of Mendeley's search, creating a tool that genuinely helped researchers build better libraries. This deep dive into search tech became the foundation for my later AI work.
- Doubled acquisitions after the search integration — a massive success that gave leadership confidence to trust me with bigger projects touching search across all products, from Scopus to ScienceDirect.
- Improved onboarding flows that increased new user engagement 3x, which in turn improved overall product retention by 25%.
- Learned the fundamentals: user behaviour analysis, A/B testing, measuring real product success, understanding needs vs assumptions — skills that define everything I build today.
Team achievements and collaborative success at Elsevier.
Transitioned from clinical medicine to digital health education, focusing on making complex medical concepts accessible to children facing serious illnesses.
The experience taught me that effective communication requires meeting people where they are, a principle that continues to inform how I approach product development and stakeholder engagement.
In full superhero mode - bringing medical education to life for children
- Our comics reached millions of children globally. The skill of making complex things simple, particularly technical concepts for diverse audiences, has remained central to my product work.
- Grew user base by 200% while ensuring medical accuracy and child safety in everything we built.
Turning complex medical concepts into engaging stories for children through creative sketching and character development.
Foundation training across general medicine, A&E, surgery, and obstetrics provided intensive experience in clinical decision-making under pressure.
Working in the NHS developed essential skills in prioritisation, evidence-based decision making, and managing competing demands, all of which continue to inform my approach to product management and strategic planning.
- Returned to programming during medical training, self-teaching Objective-C to build Ward Round for iPod Touch, a medical education app for junior doctors. This project marked the transition back to technology.
- Awarded Junior Doctor Representative of the Year by the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Glasgow.
During my medical career at NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde - the foundation that shaped my approach to problem-solving.
Junior Doctor Rep of the Year Award
Ward Round app prototype
Technical architecture planning
Side Projects
Fun experiments & weekend builds
IAM46 - Live tracking prototype (2015)
Built a real-time tracking system for activities and locations. Early exploration into data visualization.
Paper of the Day Chrome Extension
Used ML to surface trending academic papers with beautiful Unsplash backgrounds. Making research discovery delightful.
3D Medical Education Characters
Designed 3D characters to teach children about insulin management. Combining art and medical education.
Patents & Innovations
RAG Fusion
A patent-pending approach to retrieval-augmented generation that improves how AI systems understand research queries beyond simple keyword matching. The technique has gained significant adoption in the research community, with the open-source implementation receiving over 800 stars.
SeqRAG
"Agents for the rest of us" started as a blog post about making AI agents less intimidating. Turned into a patent-pending framework for sequential reasoning. Sometimes the best innovations come from trying to explain things simply.
Vector-Based Research Trend Analysis
Currently developing a system that uses vector mathematics to identify emerging research trends and patterns across academic disciplines, helping researchers identify opportunities to maximise their impact earlier in the research cycle.
Education
University of Glasgow
- Bachelor of Medicine
- Bachelor of Surgery
Professional Development
Formal Education
- Mastering Product Management
Reforge (2022)
- Product Management Course
General Assembly (2015)
Self-Learning
- iOS Development
Self-taught (2010-2013)
- AI/ML Technologies
Continuous learning (2018-Present)
Personal Interests
Cultural Exploration
Exploring Britain's oddest local traditions (cheese rolling, anyone?). There's philosophy in the absurd.
Creative Pursuits
AI-assisted cooking experiments, sketching comics to explain things, occasionally dressing like I'm from Dune.
Coding & Philosophy
Applied philosophy enthusiast. Still code for fun (the medical degree didn't kill the computer nerd).
Publications
Industry Publications
"Enhancing Search Relevance: User-Driven Personalized Vector Search"
Proceedings of the 7th Annual RELX Search Summit, 2024
"Using ChatGPT to Evaluate Search Results"
Proceedings of the 7th Annual RELX Search Summit, 2024
"An Efficient Method for Identifying Conflicts of Interest in Peer Review Using Graph Analysis"
Proceedings of the 6th Annual RELX Search Summit, 2022
Medical Publications
Get in Touch
Interested in discussing AI product strategy, tools that amplify researcher impact, or collaborative opportunities? I'm always open to meaningful conversations about helping researchers do more good for the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn for professional dialogue, GitHub for technical projects, or Medium for in-depth articles on AI and product management.
Looking for a speaker?
I speak at conferences about AI, product management, and why your RAG pipeline probably needs fixing. Also available for explaining complex tech through increasingly ridiculous analogies. Drop me a message on LinkedIn.
You scrolled all the way down! Yes, still a Dragon Ball fan. Used to fill notebooks with Sonic character designs too. Some things never change.