How PMs practice over communication at accuRx.
BY: Donald Belfon
A couple weeks ago, I finished my first development cycle since joining accuRx as a Product Manager in December.
What’s a cycle you say? At accuRx, we use six week periods to time-box product development. This doesn’t mean we deliver a new fully baked product every month and a half, nor do we only spend six weeks working before moving on to something new. What it does mean is that every six weeks, each product team will sit together and carve out a piece of concrete and well defined work that they commit to taking on and delivering..
Our product teams then jump into these neatly contained development cycles to deliver on the goals that we’ve decided on and put in front of our senior leadership. Or at least… that’s what’s meant to happen.
At the start of the new year, I was charged with leading my team first through planning and then into our cycle. After a week of vision review, OKR setting, and roadmapping — I charged into our first week of development with a clear set of deliverables and a fired up team.
At accuRx, we build software that helps improve communication in healthcare. My team in particular works in the Secondary Care field, trying to streamline communication between Hospitals and Family Doctors. Since the onset of the pandemic last year, the team has been focussed on building and improving our remote clinic product which allows for Hospitals and to conduct clinics and appointments over video. Essentially, we knew we wanted to add additional ways for hospitals to reach out to their patients.
Our goal: Let users use our web product to make phone calls.
Spoiler Alert — Things went awry.
From my first six weeks leading a product team at accuRx as product manager, I’ve strung together some thoughts on the lessons in communication I learned. It’s not beautiful prose, nor genius guidelines to live by — however reflecting on them has helped me understand and better strategise how I can grow in my role.
Asking for help
Early on in our cycle, we started to run into communication and delivery issues with a vendor we had partnered with. We found ourselves outpacing how quickly they iterated on feedback received and were concerned that we weren’t getting what we needed fast enough to meet our six week goal.
After some back and forth with various team members on the other side, I pulled the trigger and escalated internally at accuRx to our senior leadership team. Within 48 hours we had daily stand ups with the vendor, shared access to a communal Slack channel and tangible leadership buy-in across both the vendor and accuRx.
The first big lesson I learned was that it’s a good thing to ask for help. When you’re new to leading a team, there’s always pressure to show that you can deliver on what you’ve been brought in to do. It’s human nature to internalise this pressure as a need to get things done without help, that it shows weakness and vulnerability to ask for help. I’ve found the opposite at accuRx. Knowing when to ask for help means that you’re doing your job as Product Manager and unblocking the team of obstacles.
Learning to let go
In a cruel twist of fate; walking home one Friday evening in the glory of unblocking my team and confident we were pushing through the work required to achieve our goal at pace — I got a Slack message from our Head of Product.
At the time, accuRx was a couple weeks into researching a vaccine recording solution to help support the UK rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination program. I was told that our team might be pulled off of what we were currently working on to build this new product. Tl;dr we needed to build something to record vaccinations and ensure the national immunisation database was up to date so that the NHS had correct data on vaccination uptake across the country.
That weekend I spent some time digging into what the problem was and what we knew so far along with another newly hired product manager, Maya, who had started on some discovery work for vaccine recording the week before. I didn’t know it at the time, but letting go of my attachment to our cycle goal, asking for Maya’s help in getting up to speed, and hoping on that Friday evening call set the tone and foundation for a kick-ass partnership.
Maya and I then got underway leading the team on building a product to record when patients received their COVID-19 jab. Because of the heftiness of the task at hand, we split the PM responsibilities into research/design (led by Maya) and delivery (led by me).
Managing curveballs from stakeholders
We quickly learned that building the new vaccination record product called accuTrack (it’s a cool name, we know it) was going to be different from building other products at accuRx…
In normal circumstances, the PM has to manage two major stakeholder groups; our users and our internal leadership team. With accuTrack, we had a third stakeholder — the digital infrastructure team at the NHS. The need for a Point of Care recording product was born out of a tender, which is more or less the NHS’s way of asking tech companies to build something for them. Because something like the national vaccine rollout program has never been done at the scale and magnitude that the country is currently facing with COVID-19, there were and continues to be frequent changes to specification of what gets built and how.
We kicked off our development of the process with two immediate goals;
- Have accuTrack clinically approved within 8 days
- Get the product in the hands of pilot users in 2 weeks.
It’s a huge testament to the sheer powerhouse of the team that “Mayonald” (nickname patent pending) inherited that we were able to deliver on the first goal. Our team was laser focused and worked like lightning. We just about to meet our second goal when we received some show-stopper information in the 11th inning: An updated list of additional functional requirements with 4 stages of formal reviews before we could rollout in our pilot sites.
The whole team took this set back hard. We’d busted our asses to deliver accuTrack on time and having our timeline so affected because of bureaucracy and vigilance meant there was no one to blame or fault.
But alack, we persisted.
Your team can take the difficult news
After the blow of additional requirements and testing stages, I made a bad call. I responded to the change in pace by inventing a brand new grooming process which included researching, double-checking, validating and then triple-checking every word in the specification for good measure. As you can imagine, this quickly became a blocker in the team’s productivity. Our backlog was messy and un-prioritised, our weekly planning sessions were unfocused and circuitous, there was a disconnect between engineering and product within the team.
In trying to protect the team from the chaotic unknown, I introduced the number one delivery killer in product development: ambiguity. Mercifully, the feedback culture at accuRx is such that this became apparent before it became detrimental. We held an open discussion around ways of working and discussed what problems were plaguing the team (largely mine). Improvements included; more transparency to the NHSD specification, a dedicated kanban board, and clear priority badges attached to each ticket.
Take the time to invest in relationships
Product teams at accuRx are built on one rock solid foundation: partnered leadership between product managers and tech leads (TLs). Every team at accuRx has one of each, and the duo are charged with shepherding their teams through planning, stand-ups, retros and leadership check-ins. It works.
New to both the team and the company, I was still building my relationship with my TL Michael before our team was unceremoniously plucked into the world of vaccine recording. As PMs, we’d been told early on that this is the most important relationship we’d build at accuRx. I was incredibly nervous to get it right, but after some determination, initially -we kicked off the cycle on the right foot.
And what a duo we were; Michael, a stalwart genius who’s helped weave the fabric of accuRx over the last year- and I, a wet-behind-the-ears but earnest PM who hadn’t yet faced the obsequiousness of navigating the NHSD.
Something they didn’t warn us about however, was how adding a second PM to the mix would complicate things. Now, don’t get me wrong — Maya, Michael and I work really well together. However, something I learned the hard way was how not having your Tech Lead at your side every step of the way does not look good. No matter what the reason, whether it’s to protect the TL from additional meetings, trying to avoid “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome, or you’re confident in your relationship and don’t think you need to be partnered at the hip — you’ll inevitably come across a question that you might not be able to answer, but your tech lead could.
Realising the error of my ways, Michael and my dynamic duo swiftly became a terrific trio. We started prepping presentations and planning sessions together, eventually getting to the point of being able to effortlessly hand off conversations seamlessly across the (virtual) room. We were in lockstep and feeling newly unstoppable.
Well, nearly unstoppable. Vaccine recording is a huge product, with a massive number of moving parts. We fully intend for accuTrack to make a lasting impact on the vaccination effort, and we continue to work closely alongside NHS Digital to ensure that what we deliver live is safe, reliable, and efficient.
All in all, the last six weeks were a rollercoaster. We made significant strides on a new product, became intimately aware of the inner workings of the NHS’ assurance processes, and started to learn how to rely on each other and grow as one unit. I’m thrilled to share our soon-to-be finished product with the world, and couldn’t ask for a better team.
