Leadership is Knowing When to Say No
Three months ago I became CEO of a company with an execution crisis. On one hand, a transformative CTO had cleaned house on underperforming employees and re-built a strong technical and operations core-team. On the other, poor strategic leadership and a lack of focus had inflated a product roadmap resembling disparate clusters of ideas rather than a unified vision. Of the gravest sins committed was building features directly at the behest of customers and business partners. (Note: Your app or website reviews are not a forum for product development!) And as a result, things just seemed to move a lot more slowly than than they should have considering the team I saw. Harking back to one of my favorite courses at Apple University led by Stanford GSB Professor Jim Phills, we had the dilemma of A+ talent not delivering at its potential due to a lack of vision. And vision isn’t just knowing where you’re going, it’s also being merciless about what isn’t going to get you there.
Our vision at Kumu Wellness is beautifully simple: transform health into a daily conversation. We believe getting healthy should be as easy and personal as texting with a friend, and so we built a team of the friendliest Wellness Coaches to give clients the knowledge and support needed to get fit, lose weight, or just feel better. We began to cut everything that was not in support of that vision; if it didn’t allow us to message customers faster or motivate customers better, we didn’t do it. From a product standpoint it meant doing three things very, very well:
Screening Coaches.
Do you remember the last time you met a really good friend for the first time, someone you immediately clicked with? You might even need to think back to elementary school, summer camp, or even the awkwardness of meeting a college dorm-mate for the first time. You can bet that its probably been a few years, though, and that’s because it’s a real challenge to meet someone that you can connect with on a deeper level. Now imagine yourself trying to screen resumés to look for those special individuals…it just doesn’t work. So, being an LA startup we had to channel our Entourage thinking caps and turn Coach recruitment into a kind of mass casting audition instead of an interview. Personality is equally as important as credentials, and that’s why only 4% of applicants become Kumu Wellness Coaches. That’s more selective than Stanford.
Triaging messages.
Messaging a Coach should be as simple as texting with a friend, but that’s easier said than done when dozens of clients are messaging the same Coach. Thus, we were tasked with having to rethink a fluid conversation between two individuals as highly-unique communications, each with a different level of priority and urgency for a response. As an extreme case, it’s like walking into the emergency room where patients are triaged by the time of arrival as well as the severity of their ailment.
Creating Residual Motivation.
Kumu coaching is based on the science of Motivational Interviewing, a methodology used by therapists and military leaders alike to involve clients in their own wellness. MI is about active listening and asking questions as a method to behavior change, not force feeding someone cookie-cutter meal plans and exercise regiments; because no two people are the same. Each of the four feeds in the Kumu app are designed to provide a unique element of motivation independent of the Coach, from the positive reinforcement of checking off a Goal Card, to giving a High Five to a fellow team member, and on to tracking your active time for the day. A great messaging app needs to make you feel great even when you’re not sending a message.
Along with the addition of two amazing product hires to lead design and coaching, we now have the team and the focus needed to move fast. And with a clear vision of what is not going to bring us success, team members are empowered to say no to expensive product features, to say no to partnerships that don’t align with our vision of the future of health, and to even occasionally say no (*gasp*) to customer feedback. It’s allowed us to design, build, and ship Kumu in three months, which would have taken us twice as long had we not been meticulous as a team about what was most important to our customer experience. And when we hear comments from our early adopters like, ‘I lost 5 pounds in two weeks texting with my Coach. I can’t believe this works’, we know we’re on the right track.
J.C. Mauricia is CEO of Kumu Wellness. Kumu (pronounced koo-moo) matches you with a wellness coach, a best friend that you can text, video chat, and photo message to meet your health goal. Kumu is Hawaiian for “teacher”, and J.C. is still very much a student at heart.
