Industry
Publishing
Challenge
CAS faced the challenge of evolving from a century-old, single-product legacy to a scalable, multi-product business—amid rising customer demands, long development cycles, and the pressure to prove value in new scientific domains.
Solution and Results
CAS tackled its growth challenge by launching BioFinder—not just as a product, but as a blueprint for repeatable innovation. By aligning business, product, and data teams around a faster, more scalable delivery model, CAS proved it could enter new scientific domains and lay the foundation for a multi-product future.
“We went from taking over a year to process a single data source to doing 14 in one go—including $8.3 million worth of biomarker data. That’s what transformation looks like.”
About CAS
CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is a trusted provider of scientific curated data products solutions. Known globally for its substance registry and curated chemical information, CAS supports scientific discovery through deep domain expertise, rigorous content curation, and advanced data platforms. With a mission to empower innovation, CAS now extends beyond chemistry into biology and materials science, embracing modern technologies and strategic partnerships to deliver next-generation research tools.Setting the Scene
Preparing for a multi-product future
For over a century, CAS’s business had revolved around a single flagship offering: the CAS Registry. This registry served as the foundational data product for scientists, researchers, and institutions worldwide.
But as the scientific landscape evolved, so did customer expectations. Pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers were no longer satisfied with just chemical data; they increasingly needed high-quality biological and materials science content.
For CAS, this shift represented both a risk and an opportunity.
The risk: relying too heavily on a single product line in a fast-changing market.
The opportunity: applying CAS’s deep expertise in data curation to adjacent domains and expanding into new, high-value product offerings.
To stay ahead, CAS needed to become more than a product company. It had to evolve into a product platform. One that could support multiple offerings, new revenue streams, and faster go-to-market execution.
The Challenges
From legacy strength to growth constraints
While CAS had an unparalleled reputation in chemical data, building a second product meant rethinking how innovation happened across the business.
Key business challenges included:
Dependence on a single product that had served well for decades but limited revenue diversification.
Lengthy time-to-market for new data products, often exceeding 12 to 18 months.
Customer demand shifting toward curated biological content, which CAS had never before commercialized. 
Uncertainty around delivery models for complex, curated products in unfamiliar scientific domains. 
Need to prove the business case for launching future offerings in new disciplines, starting with biology.
To unlock future growth, CAS needed to prove it could deliver not just one, but many new products—each faster, smarter, and aligned with evolving customer needs.
The Solution
Proving a repeatable path to product innovation
The BioFinder initiative became the proving ground for CAS’s transition from a single-product model to a multi-product growth engine.
BioFinder was more than a standalone product. It represented a strategic investment in learning how to deliver curated scientific content in new domains - biology being the first.
To ensure success, CAS partnered with Datavid to reimagine the product delivery process.
The focus was on:
In just 90 days, CAS re-platformed and delivered a new version of BioFinder. However, the real breakthrough was the operating model that emerged - one that significantly reduced time-to-market and could be replicated across future product lines.
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The Outcomes
From product launch to business transformation
The transformation was both immediate and strategic.
- CAS expanded into a new product category for the first time in its 100+ year history, demonstrating its ability to innovate beyond its core domain.
- The product integrated 14 new high-value data sources, including $8.3 million worth of biomarker content.
- CAS now had a repeatable framework to launch additional products, with materials science already in development.
This shift marked the beginning of a new chapter for CAS: one where growth is driven not by a single product but by a scalable product strategy powered by curation excellence, market insight, and faster execution.
What it means for Product Managers
CAS’s journey is a powerful example for product leaders seeking to evolve legacy businesses. Instead of overhauling everything at once, CAS focused on proving out a single product success and then using that model to scale.
If you're leading a product in a data-rich but transformation-resistant organization, this story shows the impact of aligning vision, process, and execution to fuel sustainable, scalable growth.
Want to see how CAS made it happen behind the scenes?
Watch the full webinar to explore the strategy, process, and lessons learned from CAS’s multi-product transformation.
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