Standing Up a Mobile COVID Testing Lab in Two Weeks to Unlock a Government Contract

This was my first project after college and my first as a product manager. I'd been in the role roughly two months when our partners at Nomi Health came to us with a problem and a deadline. Nomi had just won a government contract to run COVID testing for a port of cruise ships. The contract was material. The problem was that they didn't have the lab capacity to execute it. Their existing infrastructure could handle 30,000 tests per day; the contract required them to handle double that, immediately, on a fixed footprint of land at the port that wasn't large enough for a conventional lab build-out.

If Nomi couldn't deliver, the contract would unwind. If the contract unwound, our most important commercial relationship—Nomi was Lightspeed's anchor customer for our lab information and sample management software—would be on the table.

I was a brand-new PM and I got pulled into the executive strategy session because our software was the constraint that mattered most for this build. I worked through the problem with our VP of Operations: the constraint wasn't capital, it was footprint, regulatory speed, and time-to-stand-up. Conventional lab construction was off the table—too slow, too large.

The idea we landed on was unconventional: partner with a company that converts shipping containers into prefabricated living spaces, and have them deliver six containers—four lab processing stations and two administrative offices—we'd convert into a fully functioning modular COVID testing lab. The footprint fit Nomi's port-side land. The build timeline was measured in weeks, not months. We pitched it to Nomi's executive team and they approved it on the spot.

The deliverable wasn't software. It was a working lab—physical, regulatory, operational, and software all at once—and somebody had to own all four.

I went to Florida with our VP of Operations and we built the lab on-site. I designed the lab flow—the physical path a sample takes from receipt through processing to result—so that the testing stations followed a clean, regulated, one-direction workflow. I worked with the container conversion team on the spatial layout. I integrated the lab hardware with our custom data management software so that each station's instruments fed live results back into our system, which then routed results to Nomi's reporting infrastructure.

This was the first hands-on physical operations work I'd ever done as a PM. The lessons compounded fast. I learned that a product manager's job is whatever the customer's success requires that day—and on that project, what the customer's success required was someone who would integrate hardware, software, regulatory workflow, and physical space into a system that worked end-to-end.

We shipped the converted-container lab to Nomi at the port and they began processing tests immediately. Their daily throughput moved from 30,000 to 60,000 tests per day—a 2x increase achieved on a fixed footprint with no permanent construction. The government contract executed successfully. Nomi's position as the cruise port's testing partner was secured.

Cross-functional leader who delivers at the operational level. The reason a brand-new PM got pulled into the executive strategy session was that the problem couldn't be solved from any single discipline—it needed product, operations, regulatory, hardware, and software thinking simultaneously, and somebody had to own the seams. I was junior, but I was the person who could hold all of those threads at once. That's the same instinct that's defined the rest of my career: when a strategic partner relationship is at risk, put a PM on it who will own the whole system, not just the software.