Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Stacey Caywood of Wolters Kluwer Health On The Five Things You Need To Know In Order To Create A Highly Successful Tech Company

Ensure strong alignment among and between functional teams so there is a common, strong sense of purpose.

As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women Leaders in Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stacey Caywood.

Stacey Caywood is the CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, a global leading provider of trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers, students, and the next generation of healthcare providers. The division operates globally, with 2,400 employees and 2022 revenue of €1,448 million.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Since the beginning of my career, what’s always excited me is content and software that can deliver insights and make an impact. In my previous role in the Legal and Regulatory division at Wolters Kluwer, I worked on solutions that used data insights to create a more effective workflow. In the end, these efforts helped to improve lives and environmental outcomes.

Moving into my current role leading the Health division, I’m passionate about leveraging technology and domain expertise to deliver better health outcomes for patients. For example, our content and software solutions use advanced technologies like AI and augmented reality to positively impact clinicians and students.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

In my current role, I have to say that supporting clinicians and students during the COVID-19 pandemic has been incredibly rewarding and impactful. With 3 million searches by clinicians worldwide every 5 minutes in UpToDate, our clinical decision support resource, researchers were able to analyze search data to help predict where the next wave of COVID-19 was going to hit.

We also created a COVID-19 resource page and made our COVID-19 topics free worldwide to aid clinicians globally in diagnosing and treating the disease with the most updated evidence-based treatments.

Historically, healthcare has been slow to evolve. The pandemic changed that in a lot of aspects, and my team found innovative ways to support not only clinicians on the front line, but also students who were trying to get practice ready and join the workforce. For example, when it was unsafe for medical and nursing students to be in a clinical environment due to COVID, we provided essential clinical learning opportunities using virtual simulation.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of the lessons I learned early in my career was that not all great products are going to be successful. The key to the innovation process is learning early whether there is enough market demand and willingness to pay. I learned this lesson the hard way because I was convinced of the need for a certain product. My team and I went pretty far into the process only to discover that there wasn’t enough customer interest to support further development.

In my role now, I focus on ensuring we have the right allocation of investment for high growth segments and that we have the right processes and people in place to drive best practice innovation. We use approaches like contextual inquiry and Lean-Agile principles to make sure our teams learn early whether it makes sense to proceed or to fail fast.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

I have to say in general that change — especially driving change in a fast-moving tech environment — can be hard at times. For example, driving the adoption of tech standards and technology at scale across a business is challenging. It’s about change management, not just technology. You must be effective at answering the why — the rationale for customers and for the business.

The hardest part about change and change management for most people in tech is that it’s not always about the technology itself. However, if you can focus on why change is necessary and get alignment on that with the people involved, you will have the foundation you need to be successful.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Listening to people and customers is one of the most important skills you can learn as a leader in any industry. In tech, it’s especially important because it’s easy to become caught up in the hype of the technology itself. However, technology should have a purpose of helping people, and it can only help people if you listen and understand their challenges.

A quote that I believe illustrates this best is one from Stephen R. Covey: “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to respond.”

We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

In the Health division at Wolters Kluwer, we are helping to deliver the best care everywhere with information and software solutions for clinicians, medical and nursing students, health systems, payers, and life sciences businesses.

We leverage the deep domain expertise of clinicians on our teams and the skill of our tech team to create products that solve issues for those in the healthcare field. From helping with coding medical bills, supporting clinical decision making, preventing infections, and learning essential clinical skills, our clinician experts and data scientists create technology that helps where it matters most.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Wolters Kluwer has a 185-year history of delivering deep impact for our customers, and likewise, our customers are making significant, positive impacts in the world.

I’m always so inspired by the passion of our teams and so honored to lead this group today. People take action to “Make it better,” which is one of our core values. For example, more than a year ago, about 40 of our employees banded together from across three businesses to work together in a purposeful manner to drive change. As a result, they created and launched a DE&I Content Guide to improve our evidence-based content.

They brought together expertise across areas and educated us on ways we can improve our content with inclusive language, images, and approaches to treat people fairly and eliminate unconscious bias in the healthcare environment.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We have a lot of new product development underway, and I’m really excited about a recent launch for nursing students called vrClinicals for Nursing. It is a virtual reality solution that prepares nursing students for the real-world pressures of nursing practice. Using a VR headset, students encounter fast changing scenarios with multiple, complex patients — not unlike a real hospital. I see this as critical to addressing the nursing shortage and helping nursing students prepare for upcoming changes in their licensing exams. It’s our first real foray into the metaverse.

Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in Tech? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

To change the status quo of women in tech, we need more mentorship, better recruiting practices, and tech leaders who require diverse candidate representation on their recruiting slates.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in Tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

The biggest hurdles that women in tech are still facing is a lack of representation and a lack of female mentors or advocates at their companies. While more women are joining tech, it’s important to be able to see yourself climbing the ladder or in a position of management in order to know what’s possible.

A few initiatives at Wolters Kluwer that we have to address these challenges are mentorship programs, Women in Networking panels, and spotlighting women in tech.

What would you advise to another tech leader who initially went through years of successive growth but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?

This can be really challenging when you feel like you’ve been doing all the right things. My advice is to take a strategic look at the portfolio, determine growth areas, resources, and capital for growth and distinguish yourself by addressing those. Determine whether there are pain points or needs and create an action plan on how to address them. This is where listening to your customers and employees will be key.

Based on your experience, can you share 3 or 4 strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

I think the most important strategy is to solicit customer feedback continuously. At Wolters Kluwer, we use the Net Promoter Score survey process regularly seeking feedback. As a result, we:

1. Listen more. Learn what customers want us to focus on for improvement.

2. Respond quickly. Getting responses to customers quickly is critical — and may save lives!

3. Continue to look for ways to add value for our customers. We focus on using our deep domain expertise coupled with advanced technologies to find ways to solve problems and address pain points for our customers.

Here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful tech company? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Focus on a customer segment that has strong growth characteristics, has a need for technology-enabled solutions, and that isn’t already saturated.

2. Deploy an agile process that encourages experimentation and to fail fast.

3. Partner with customers for ongoing feedback through the development process and establish if there is a strong willingness to pay.

4. Understand the customer ecosystem and be open to partnerships to ensure that you can be a part of the customer workflow.

5. Ensure strong alignment among and between functional teams so there is a common, strong sense of purpose.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?

I would really enjoy the opportunity to sit down with Anne Wojcicki, the founder of 23andMe to get her views on NextGen for Healthcare and the latest prospects for personalized drug therapies. As we learn more about the human body, these types of therapies may be the answer. I would like to hear more about what she thinks, and where she sees the future of medicine going.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!