 Over the past few months, I have been asked quite a few times about two things: my thoughts on building a startup in the healthcare industry and how to approach a brand new industry from scratch. Obviously I don’t have a magic recipe however I thought I would share a little bit of my thoughts so far, after 4 years …. Why? because I feel that first, I am at a junction (I’ll elaborate in future posts) but also because
I am going to make this short: only three points. To get this started, more than ever, I am a big fan of setting clear strategies for success, in particular being absolutely intent on creating the right teams at any level, tying products to services in an efficient and value driven way and most importantly execute, execute, execute! (and be kind, compassionate and have lots of fun too). Now, here are my few points: First of all, I think healthcare SaaS will require you to build high-touch services in order to deal with extreme variability in your customer’s operational environments - for example, make sure you build across a large product surface area (if you’re “just an app” you will fail) and transactional depth (scheduling, payments) to immediately show utility, value and ROI and make a really airtight case for your risk-adverse buyers at any level. Second, about the other end of the funnel — it’s critical that the customer-facing front line is stacked not only with industry insiders who understand the culture of your users and customers, but most importantly, these insiders also must be absolutely fluent in technology and be able to understand and diagnose issues quickly and efficiently to your internal dev and product stakeholders. In other words, if your customer service folks are awesome with doctors but have no idea about the ins-and-outs of your API stack, prepare for a lot of hurt and wasted opportunities. As a result, extend your engineering and product teams to include field application engineers and run away from low quality, cheap call centers. On the engineering side, hire world class engineers and data scientists who have a deep knowledge of the latest and greatest techs but also have the patience and courage to want to deal with age-old legacy systems that you will have to — without any doubt — integrate with. And lastly, make sure you’re super specific in defining your target market segment because this will immediately define your sales and service delivery model, pricing strategy and sales team profile. But most importantly, you will have to clearly anticipate extra long sales cycles and heavy buyer education needs … As a result, you must be clear (at least in your mind) to favor and prioritize evangelist customers ahead of revenue: they will help you communicate a strong vision and having excited customers who can see the long term “end game” is super important for your survival. As a conclusion, I think that healthcare tech is not for the faint of heart … Check your hubris at the door, be humble and work hard. And most importantly, always aim at building products and services that will delight your customers and change their lives! Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader
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This weekend I went a little bit overboard with photoshop and smart objects (for play), I thought I would share a little ... Enjoy!       Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader  It’s Easter Sunday and I feel like I am turning a major page and as such I thought I would gather my thoughts around products creation and dev. Of course I am always in continuous learning mode, so I may change my mind down the line, but as the way we interact with products is being radically changed by software, data and machine learning, right now, I think it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the progress we’ve made in the past 20 years. The first thing I have encountered along the way are all the flavors and even in-between of engineering-driven, design-driven and product-driven product and user experiences. Not that any of it is bad per-se, times have changed and we have evolved from a hardware-driven world very much so into software and data-driven in tech over the past decade (yes software is still eating the world @withfries2). And as a result, I have come to the conclusion that today it’s all about being absolutely and fiercely product-driven when it comes to user experience. I’d like to thank Allen Zhang (CEO of WeChat) is at the forefront of this philosophy and his drive to make it front and center in product teams today. Thanks! #1 We view our users front and center. This means we have the honesty of building products with the most sincere best intentions for our users: this genuine empathy in treating our users will result in our products to be used for a longer time. This also means that processes aren’t really the way we design products today, rather, we optimize continuously using the data we gather from usage and other sources. Process optimization will never solve for the unpredictable and the most mischievous users. #2 Technology is for efficiency. Every day I am dealing with clients who are not immersed in the Silicon Valley tech groupthink and most definitely don’t need or want to place technology at the center of their lives. In fact I think technology is only of value when it’s absolutely not interfering with anything or anyone’s life, it just makes things better and more efficient. I remember my motorola razor’s 300 page user manual … As I said before, today we don’t use products, we train them …. In other words, the mission of technology is only to improve a user’s efficiency and delight. To that extent, the vanity usage metrics we’re using today to measure success are very flawed. Instead we should care about the question “Are we the most fast and most efficient” with our product, and do we enhance our user’s lives without interfering with them. Small nudges are humble and this is precisely where we should be. #3 KPIs are indicators, not drivers. I am seeing many senior managers, including board members, being absolutely obsessed with key metrics - this is in fact counterproductive. It’s of course very important to track metrics however we need to always put them in context, and most importantly they should support the product strategy instead of driving it. As a result, we can put user needs more front and center, instead of traffic acquisition and retention for example, because our job is to create the best products, not the best traffic - organic and natural growth is the most important vector of adoption. In short, KPIs are secondary only; intuitive, user-friendly product is paramount and at the core of every decision. Conclusion Of course this approach can be taken with a grain of salt, and some will immediately say that a challenging aspect of a strictly product-driven philosophy is that it’s more long-term driven and may not be very compatible with the short terms requirements of company survival, investor patience or even team harmony: how can an opinionated product creator not become an issue for their team, when “design by committee” will necessarily contain a lot of different opinions and fragment the product’s character? But just the act of considering such product-led principled thinking can push us to new ideas, frameworks and innovations, such as — in what ways can these principles be adapted for different business models? Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader.  In the past decade and a half, I have seen entire industries being disrupted by upstarts using absolutely none of the traditional resources businesses needed in the past to keep growing. Examples: Uber vs. Taxis, Twitter vs. the Press, Netflix vs. Cable. Uber doesn’t own a single car, Twitter doesn’t have a newsroom, Netflix doesn’t own a content distribution network. How are they doing it? They’re all platforms, they use technology to connect and manage supply and demand in real time. Platforms are powerful because they eliminate gatekeepers and create community feedback loops called network effects. Example: more demand attracts more drivers, more drivers increases geographic coverage, more coverage gets faster pickups, fast pickers means more users join the platform, and so on. In turn, driver downtime goes down, which reduces prices, which leads to more scale. In the past, dominance was achieved through supply economies of scale via increased production efficiencies. Today, it’s all about creating demand economies of scale using technology on the demand side to create ever larger networks of value and scale. Building a platform: This isn’t about creating a good or service and channeling it to customers! First, a platform starts with enabling a direct interaction and the exchange of value between participants – producers and consumers. The platform also enables the quantification of value by creating a sort of value unit between participants. Example: for AirBnb the value unit is the listing information created by the seller that is served to buyers based on their search criteria. Second, platforms are really good at attracting users and encouraging interactions. The most difficult is to generate pull because it’s pretty much a chicken-and-egg-type problem: users won’t come to a platform unless it has value and a platform won’t have value unless it has users. The solution to that is called the feedback loop. Example: Facebook realized it had no value unless users had a meaningful number of connections. So instead of trying to get more people to the platform, they focused on getting the existing users find their friends and help them connect. Third, platforms use the data they collect about producers, consumers, the value units created and the goods or services exchanged in order to get the best matching between supply and demand possible, and most importantly, in real time: the more data a platform has and the more effective it becomes to use this data to foster more effective matching and more interaction the more successful it will become. That’s the feedback loop. Iterate to remain: Once a platform has established its core interactions, it’s time to iterate by layering more peripheral interactions on top of them. Let’s by the way take this with a grain of salt, as we need to remember that platforms aren’t entirely planned – most of the activity is controlled by the users which means platform builders must allow themselves to expect serendipitous discoveries by closely monitoring usage behavioral data to unlock new value … Uber X and Uber Pool are great examples, cloud kitchens and Doordash are also coming up to change the way we eat (see my note about cloud kitchens here). Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader. |
i blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech, Experiences and anything holistic.
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