Today we have an exciting guest, Yuval Rubin, CEO of Ada Health, – an app made by doctors to check symptoms for thousands of diseases. Usually, our guests have been active in life since college – they run marathons and participate in charity programs… But what about military intelligence?
Exploring Career Pathways
A lot of women are serving their work with a lot of coding. Isn’t that the best way to get experience in data analysis? Yuval worked in the office of the Israeli prime minister, working closely with the Ministry of Health. She was deciding how to anonymize a lot of patient data to provide value on a larger scale, and that was really interesting and also was a very big stepping stone for the collaboration with Pfizer.
If you’re more after ideology or certain values that you want to promote, the public sector is the way to go.
But at the same time – unlike the private sector, the public sector is not dynamic. So Yuval left her position and went to London to study at the London School of Economics – she got a master’s degree in social innovation and entrepreneurship, which was a great way to introduce herself to social startups.
Next was working as a lead data analyst and then CPO, changing my specialization from pure data person to a more business-oriented PM – “I learned to work smarter, not harder.” Ironically, working smarter is “easier” because you do most of the work yourself. And working smarter means learning to delegate work to ensure it gets done well and on time. You have to ask questions without fear of losing credibility if you don’t know something.
People need to have access to the KPIs; they need to be sure that they can refer to them daily and that it helps them make decisions.
Yuval talks about her product – we have a symptom assessment. We also have a test like diagnostic tests in the U.S. we now have some tools to assess your eligibility for covered medications to avoid severe coveting. So we are launching more and more things to help users remain healthy, so on the prevention aspect and focusing on those at high risk of getting comorbidities or any more significant health concerns.
Ada Health educates the user but does not that much into self-medication.
The app is aimed at users who should constantly monitor their vitals. These are patients with diabetes or high blood pressure and the elderly. But healthy people could also benefit from doing health checks. The product uses AI algorithms.
Engineers and designers have much better ideas than product people; the only thing is that you have to work together to make sure it actually happens and sell that idea.
A good product manager needs to have the prioritization skills to make decisions by finding trade-offs. Sustainability is also important – “you’re always kind of in this interchange between business technology and UX.” Finally, you have to be proactive, curious, want to do more, and have good soft skills.
Not making a decision is also a decision, but while we’re not making a decision, the industry is changing; a new competitor is coming.
If you have too much or not enough data, you can delay a decision for a long time, which is detrimental to the business. This is also the problem of the product manager – too much information leaves us very little time. If 20 years ago, people were trying to keep up with the times through discipline, that’s not going to work anymore.
I try to set aside a few hours a day when I’m checking external information so that I can focus on my work during the other hours of the day so it doesn’t bother me all the time.
Yuval sees understanding the audience, as well as building the correct Cultural Map that works for multicultural companies, which Ada Health is, as important success factors. Also, get physically active to relieve your head.
The APP Solutions launched a podcast, CareMinds, where you can hear from respected experts in healthcare and Health Tech.
Who is a successful product manager in the healthcare domain? Which skills and qualities are crucial? How important is this role in moving a successful business to new achievements? Responsibilities and KPIs?
Please find out about all this and more in our podcast. Stay tuned for updates and subscribe to channels.
Listen to our podcast to get some useful tips on your next startup.
Today our guest is Estee Goldschmidt, VP of Product Management at Parsley Health. Her experience varies from launching a startup and fundraising and understanding everything about that culture to managing multi-international product development teams. Estee came to the US at 17 and immediately got involved in the student community, holding responsible positions.
Interestingly, Estee’s first job was a position in the marketing department of a cosmetics company… Estee Lauder. Such concurrencies sometimes happen! One of her most important decisions involved a strategy for distributing free product samples. Instead of making everyone go through the headache of planning samples twice a year, Estee offered to match this with an actual sales pipeline, and it resulted in huge savings for the company.
Even if you’re sort of one person out of thousands, there’s still a way to have an impact and improve things.
Not all of Estee’s decisions were winnable. But she was not discouraged; on the contrary, she made more effort. In particular, she was fired up by the idea of creating a startup. Estee spent a summer in Israel at a startup gas pedal, watching other founders do it. Instead of writing business plans, founding companies, assembling teams, pitching contests, and trying to find funding, they just started creating a product and offering it to customers. And when they got customers, they started saying, how do I make something official out of this? How do I get funding to launch this idea?
Getting people to pay for a product that’s essentially free is brilliant.
Esti then went back to the US and got 4,000 active users within two months-that was the result of creating a sales map, where people open it and see what events are happening near you. Esty shares the experience of reaching goals, “We didn’t have millions of meetings where we were trying to make a lot of different parts of the group happy, it was like whether or not we were doing it, and if we were, we all agreed, and we were working on it.”
The ability to move fast is something that has to be maintained.
In a fast-moving company, there’s a powerful alignment of mission and what needs to be done. In big companies, most of the work that needs to be done is already completed, everything is stable, the processes work, you know it’s a well-oiled machine, so if you bring in a new person or someone comes in, first of all, there are a lot of cases where there’s no work to justify team X, so many teams start working to understand what their purpose is, and that kind of white space can provide opportunities to discover new areas or what can be done better, but it can also lead to places where another big.
You could have the smartest people in the room, the most educated people, the most experienced people, but if everyone’s focused on their own thing or rowing against each other, it’s very hard to accomplish anything.
About the experience at Cerebral: I was working on what needed to be fixed, so in the beginning, I just made sure that our offering was relevant and that everything worked as it was meant to, and that was the first step and the second step was to strategize the following steps, what we offer, how to make what we offer better and stronger by listening to our customers and understanding where their pain points are, what we can fix, what we can take away, so the customer experience is better. The product manager doesn’t have to tell team members how to work, the developers and designers are professionals in their field, and they know better.
When it comes to making product decisions, it seems to me that the answer should always be: what’s best for the customer?
If you follow that path and use that as a guiding star, you’ll have a good strategy. There’s a precise balance in management between “get away from me with your micromanagement” and “I care about feeling your support”-the key is establishing trust.
The last thing you want as a manager is for your team to be afraid of you.
And if something goes wrong and you don’t know about it and then things blow up in your face, you want them to feel safe and be able to say, hey, this is going wrong, and then I’ll help them solve it, because I end up hiring people for work that I don’t want to do for them.
You have the financiers, you have the marketers, you have the doctors, but who represents the customer, and everything is done for the customer, so the job of products is to sit at the table and be that customer, be that voice of the customer.
Three examples of these qualities the most talented professional product managers have been. The most important is an obsession with customers as a guiding star. Another quality is the ability to execute. A third is an ability to step back when necessary and let your associates do their job.
I have a work style and an idea of how to impact things, and ultimately, I want to be in a place that “wants” those skills and recognition instead of hiding and trying to conform to something I am not. You can be great at one place and wrong at another.
The APP Solutions launched a podcast, CareMinds, where you can hear from respected experts in healthcare and Health Tech.
Who is a successful product manager in the healthcare domain? Which skills and qualities are crucial? How important is this role in moving a successful business to new achievements? Responsibilities and KPIs?
Please find out about all this and more in our podcast. Stay tuned for updates and subscribe to channels:
Listen to our podcast to get some useful tips on your next startup.
In this latest episode of CareMind’s podcast, we delve into the fascinating intersection of psychology and product management. We had the privilege of interviewing Shane Blackman, the Director of Growth at Noom, who brings a unique perspective to the field thanks to his Ph.D. in psychology and social policy.
Shane’s background allows him to provide deeper insights into human relationships in product development and management. Join us as we uncover valuable tips and actionable advice that you can apply to your own career, and learn how understanding the human element can lead to more successful products.
From Psychology to Product Management: Shane Blackman’s Unique Journey
Shane’s path into product management began unexpectedly after getting his Ph.D. in 2014. A colleague from grad school introduced him to the world of user research at Priceline.com, where he eventually started running experiments on the website using his psychology background. Working with designers and developers, Shane found his passion for product management, despite not knowing much about it initially.
Every product manager has a unique story, emphasizing that there is no one-size-fits-all path into the field. Shane’s experience in investigating people’s perception of objectivity, beliefs, opinions, and decision-making within social groups aligns well with the day-to-day responsibilities of a product manager. By chance, during his time at Priceline.com, Shane transitioned from a product manager to the head of product analytics, leveraging his expertise in analytics.
The Importance of Growth Opportunities in Product Management
According to Shane, he began working on opaque hotel booking products, focusing on the front-end user experience. He ran experiments to improve the booking process and achieved success in this area. Shane attributes his accomplishments to his background in statistics and experiment methodology, which allowed him to understand the components of a good experiment and how to interpret the data.
I believe there’s a big opportunity for product managers to apply psychological concepts to their organizational practices, including recruitment, structure, feedback methods, leadership representation, and more.
Shane admits that by embracing opportunities and leveraging his expertise in his passionate area, he discovered the challenges and limitations of the A/B testing infrastructure. This piqued his interest in addressing the problem of determining what was actually good or bad when testing, and how much data was enough to make quick decisions. An opportunity arose to rebuild the core A/B testing infrastructure, which led to collaboration with Booking.com and learning from their advanced experimentation approach.
As more data-oriented opportunities emerged, Shane found his path eventually led to the role of Head of Product Analytics. In this position, he oversaw the A/B testing program, system, and a team of analysts generating insights from product data. He believes the core themes of his journey include curiosity, willingness to leverage strengths, and openness to new opportunities.
Shane emphasizes the importance of amplifying one’s own strengths within the organization and saying yes to opportunities, which allowed for diversified experiences and growth within the product management field. He admits that his focus on data analysis provided valuable insights for decision-making and overall success.
Is Data Necessary for Balancing Objectivity and Ambiguity in Product Management?
Determining good data for a particular outcome involves following the scientific method, starting with a clear hypothesis and then designing experiments to test that hypothesis rigorously.
Good data is data that helps you make a decision and understand whether your hypothesis is true or not.
Avoiding confirmation bias is crucial; be open-minded and willing to change your hypotheses based on the data. Collaboration with stakeholders such as engineers, designers, and data scientists is essential for collecting the right data and interpreting it accurately.
Having a clear and specific core hypothesis protects against inferential muddiness or noisiness that can occur when looking at a set of data. If results outside the core hypothesis emerge, consider discounting, replicating, or generalizing them in new situations.
The key to using data effectively is to establish protections, guardrails, and norms when examining data for the first time and deciding what actions to take based on that data. This approach ensures a more holistic understanding of the problem and better decision-making.
The Product Manager’s Role in Clarifying Hypotheses
It’s important to have a very clear hypothesis and to be clear about what you’re trying to learn from the data, and then to design your experiments, design your tests in a way that will give you the data that you need to make that decision.
Product managers, often seen as the CEOs of their products, are ultimately responsible for various aspects of the product, including setting hypotheses and driving experimentation processes. However, this responsibility doesn’t mean they should work alone. Collaboration with teammates in user research, design, and data science can help refine hypotheses and improve the overall approach.
One of the hardest things to do in product management is identifying the fundamental assumption in a product that must be tested.
To maximize the product’s success, product managers must be open to iterating and learning as they go. Creating a culture of experimentation and learning within the team is also vital. Product managers should facilitate discussions, encourage team members to contribute ideas, and develop ways to test these ideas systematically and rigorously.
Understanding the user’s emotional journey and the psychology behind their experience can significantly improve product development. For instance, when asking for sensitive information from customers, product managers must ensure they can provide an emotional outlet that reassures users about the security and necessity of the information. Additionally, dividing the process into smaller, manageable steps, starting with the easiest, can help build user comfort and commitment.
During a period of rapid growth, product managers may also need to scale agile teams to handle increased workloads and maintain efficiency. By leveraging their skills and working closely with their teams, product managers can effectively navigate the challenges and opportunities that arise in product development.
How Can Product Managers Help Scale Agile Teams?
Scaling a team at high velocity can be a challenging yet exciting time in one’s career. To ensure a successful transformation, you should have clear counterparts in engineering and design, and to empower these team leaders to make decisions independently. Also establishing strong communication and collaboration between team members can help temas grow.
Another thing is maintaining sprint retrospectives even under deadline pressure so that emerging issues can be timely spotted, ensuring that the team continues learning and adapting. Quarterly meetings, such as “persevere versus pivot” sessions, can help teams evaluate their performance, goals, and strategies, and decide whether to continue, pivot, or spin down a team.
The collective experience of team members is invaluable in making informed decisions about the direction and opportunities available to a team. In the context of a health-focused company like Noom, leveraging behavioral science can empower people to take control of their health and manage conditions like stress, anxiety, diabetes, and hypertension through weight management programs.
Managing Team Perspectives During Product Development
Shane’s research suggests that people are predisposed to attribute bias to others who disagree with them, even in subjective domains. This holds true in product management organizations as well. When presenting experiment results and interpreting data, it’s important to be aware of our own biases and how they might affect our reactions to conflicting hypotheses. To counteract this, organizations should cultivate a culture that encourages open discussion, acknowledges biases, and fosters an understanding of how biases can influence decision-making.
Integrating psychology and product management can lead to a deeper understanding of human behavior and collaboration, ultimately resulting in more effective and successful products. Key takeaways for product managers include:
Embracing growth opportunities and leveraging one’s strengths in areas of passion allows for diversified experiences and career growth within the product management field.
Good data is crucial for product managers to balance objectivity and ambiguity; collaboration with stakeholders ensures accurate data collection and interpretation.
Product managers must be open to iterating and learning, fostering a culture of experimentation and collaboration within their teams to maximize product success.
During periods of rapid growth, product managers should focus on clear communication, collaboration, and decision-making processes to effectively scale agile teams and manage challenges
The APP Solutions launched a podcast, CareMinds, where you can hear from respected experts in healthcare and Health Tech.
Who is a successful product manager in the healthcare domain? Which skills and qualities are crucial? How important is this role in moving a successful business to new achievements? Responsibilities and KPIs?
Please find out about all this and more in our podcast. Stay tuned for updates and subscribe to channels.
Listen to our podcast to get some useful tips on your next startup.
