I’ve been a product manager at accuRx for just over a year now, and coming into the role having never worked in a tech company or in product before, I always assumed everything we did with product at accuRx was industry standard and completely normal. Of course the way you do something is likely not the way everyone does it, so my PM teammate Jen and I hosted a three-part series on ‘How we do product at accuRx’ for our wider internal team. With her permission, I am sharing the content outside the company.
The PM is accountable for the health, delivery and outcomes of the product team.
Product managers at accuRx own a wide range of responsibility for how our products are built. We are responsible for writing a vision for our product or product area, setting OKRs to progress us towards that vision, and manage a transparent roadmap of what that practically means in terms of implementation. We are responsible for the full product lifecycle, including delivery, mitigating risk, and staying on top of bugs and maintenance needs. We are the face of our users and have first hand experience shadowing and speaking with GPs and patients to understand their needs and pains, as well as digging into what their data tells us. We need to think about balancing priorities across the business and our product areas, and engage with both internal and external stakeholders. And maybe most importantly, we are responsible for our product team.
Below is the accuRx progression framework for product managers, senior PM, and lead PM:
Product 101: Building a new thing
At the essence of product at accuRx is the product development process, with a heavy emphasis on user research. accuRx puts a lot of efforts into trying to ensure that what we build fulfils user needs and is intuitive and simple to use (without users needing any training to use our software!)
Our product quality principles are:
Whenever we are evaluating a new product opportunity, we start by speaking to our users. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, that meant visiting GP practices, shadowing, and watching staff use their computers in their day-to-day work. Now in a remote-first world, we do lots of video calls, screen shares, and testing Figma prototypes on Zoom (see a real example here). We come in armed to these sessions with some insights, assumptions, and hypotheses about the product we are working on and work to validate (or nullify) everything before it gets committed to build. Our product engineers are also encouraged to regularly join our research calls in order to have a better idea of what the user’s pain points are.
Once we have validated our assumptions and we have strong conviction about the need for a certain feature, product at accuRx also includes the delivery phase. This is the part of product management that is most like project management in terms of the focus on shipping something and getting it into the hands of users. At accuRx we use Azure DevOps to manage our backlog and analytics. PMs write and prioritise stories for new tickets, product engineers break those stories down into tasks, and the team together can track progress. Delivery at accuRx is also an iterative process where we aim to ship the smallest possible increment that can bring value to users (a minimum viable product or MVP). This helps us learn and tweak things along the way.
See the slides for “Building a new thing” here.
Product 102: Make thing more good
Once we’ve shipped an MVP, the product life cycle has just begun. If your product is in the hands of only some users, you likely will want to get it into the hands of more. Here we have to think about an important distinction between our early adopter habits and preferences and the late majority. Early adopters are enthusiastic about trying new things and open to change. This can be scary for the later majority who often prefer stability and a proven track record for the products they use. To gain adoption, it’s important to consider the needs of users across this spectrum.
From a product delivery perspective, you now have the opportunity to expand your product’s features and functionality. To decide what to improve on, we once again go back to speaking to users to learn about their pain points and what they are hoping the software can do for them. We then need to decide between these requests (along with the product vision, commercial priorities, stakeholder requests, data, product intuition, etc.) what makes the most sense to build next.
This will all feed into our product roadmap which the PM is responsible for maintaining. The roadmap is a precious balance of stories that indicate progress from a variety of sources, including user feedback from targeted research sessions, requests or suggestions from support, community forums (for accuRx we have a very active Facebook group), experiments, staying on top of tech and product debt, and any targeted metrics that the team have agreed to track.
The PM must constantly assess their product portfolio and decide whether to iterate, maintain or sunset each feature they own.
As a product manager, it is also important to understand that a product may one day reach the end of its lifecycle. This can happen after it’s seen great success, but users have since moved on, or it could mean that the product never truly product-market-fit. At these times, it’s important to not be emotionally blindsided by the “sunk cost” of time, energy, and money that has already been invested in building a product. When this time comes, sometimes the best option is “killing the product.” This gives you an opportunity to clean up your code and keep things slick for your users. A product nobody wants is not one worth keeping around!
See the slides for “Make thing more good” here.
Product 103: Competitors and market analysis
When accuRx first started finding product-market-fit with one-off SMS sending in primary care, there were not many competitors in the market offering a comparable service. Since then, accuRx has started expanding its product offerings and has needed to consider other companies and what they are doing in the space. This helps us understand how we differentiate and what unique value we can provide to our users.
When doing a competitor analysis, we would look at direct competitors (those offering a product to the same customer group, solving the same problem), but also to indirect, potential, or substitute competitors to fully understand what is happening in the market. We then analyse these competitors by their product offers, user based, design, brand, and speed at iteration. Because accuRx has been alone in its individual market for some time, we are still fairly new to this, but we’ve had a play with feature tables, plotting products/features on an axis, and spider diagrams. This also involves constant monitoring of competitors as companies grow, get acquired, or shift priority.
One most recent comparison is looking at different companies that offer batch SMS messaging, a service that accuRx is working on building.
See the slides for “Competitors and market analysis” here.
accuRx was founded in 2016, and has been fortunate to see incredible growth and adoption in the last four years. However, as a product lead company, this means the time to continue to innovate and push our product boundaries has only just begun (see our public product roadmap here). accuRx envisions a world where “everyone involved in a patient’s care can communicate with each other” and we see this vision being realised using communication tools very different from what is available today. To get from where we are, to where we want to be, there is still a lot of work to do.
Interested in working in product at accuRx? Check out current openings at: https://www.accurx.com/careers
