Meet Applications Manager, Beena Agarwal
My name is Beena Agarwal and I’m an Engineering Manager on the Applications team at Clover. My team builds applications that inform and empower our internal operations teams, as well as healthcare providers, to provide the best possible care for our members. For example, if a member ran out of medication and hasn’t picked up a refill, we send them a reminder. Synthesizing information from multiple touch points across the healthcare system (lab tests, medical claims, nurse visits, etc.) we are able to holistically understand our members’ health and provide the appropriate care, while simultaneously reducing costs.
I have a background in computer engineering and moved to the Bay Area from the Midwest to work at a network security startup, then worked in a few different industries (network security, gaming, mobile, education) before landing at Clover. Most recently, I headed up engineering for a mobile studio at Electronic Arts before founding my own Education Technology startup. One of the main reasons I joined Clover was because I love learning about different industries and discovering the potential impact of technology. When I was considering a change, it was super important to me to find a company that was using technology to make a difference in people’s lives. After meeting and chatting with several members of the team, I was immediately attracted to what I heard about Clover’s mission, values and the technology built.
After learning more, I resonated with Clover’s management style of coaching and guiding people to be the best versions of themselves in order to do their best work. As a manager, I personally believe it’s important to hire the best people and know when to get out of their way. My experience has taught me that its important to have a toolbox of different management approaches and know when to use the right tools. For example, it’s important to know when you need to set the direction and when to gain consensus on the team. Similarly, its important to know when to guide a team and when to dig in, be hands-on where processes and systems are not working as expected. Ultimately at Clover we believe that success comes from uplifting people and creating a multiplier effect on teams.
When I accepted the offer and joined the team, the on-boarding experience was different than anything I’d ever seen. In the past, I was just thrown in and had to learn to survive and thrive! Here it was a well thought out experience of different sessions to describe every team and how they worked cross-functionally, and I had an engineering manager “buddy” that I shadowed for several weeks. I attended all their meetings with them (except for 1–1s of-course) and learned about the daily work and life of managers at Clover. Also, my buddy was there to answer any questions I had, show me the lay of the land. This helped tremendously in learning the ins and outs of how the team worked both internally within engineering as well as cross-functionally.
For example, Clover has project groups composed of front-end, data, infrastructure and application engineers. We all work cross-functionally in product vertical areas that align to business needs. The shadowing helped me to see how the managers transition between the role of guiding engineers in their functional and business areas. Being new to healthcare, my buddy was patient as I asked questions around the seemingly countless healthcare acronyms, and about the system architectures and tools.
Clover has worked to grow and develop technical managers internally, and I was actually the first outside engineering manager hire. Engineering teams are different in every organization and while I’m not new to engineering management, the on-boarding process was invaluable to developing deep context on how teams worked at Clover. Observing the culture and functions across teams helped me build my mental model where I can draw upon past experiences and effectively solve problems with added context. The only downside was that my buddy is in a lot of meetings, which meant that learning systems was a little slower than I expected due to time constraints. That said, I wouldn’t trade it for the context gained.
Now about four months in, I’m working on a roadmap for the team to incorporate the technology vision for provider and member experiences in 2018. We’re going to build exciting applications for our members where they can manage all their medical information in one place and get answers to their pressing healthcare questions. For our providers we’re building products that give them holistic views of their members to be able to engage with them more effectively. Guaranteeing accuracy and consistency is essential, so we’re creating robust systems and APIs that integrate complex data sources.
In order to do this, we need to scale out our teams significantly in 2018. It’s no easy task, but we’re up for the challenge.
If you share our philosophy on doing your best work and are passionate about healthcare, come join us!
