Five Growth lessons from scaling up DailyRounds to 4,50,000+ Healthcare Professionals
In 2017 our focus shifted “from just empowering doctors to all healthcare professionals globally”. This ‘transition’ brought a wealth of learning as more than 300,000+ healthcare professionals joined in 2017 across our platform to share 25,000+ verified clinical cases, get updates, read journals and attend CMEs on DailyRounds, solve specialties cases on Anesthesia & Radiology Rounds, and learn from top medical sciences faculties on — MARROW. That’s 800+ healthcare professionals joining each day in 2017, up from 400 each day in 2016.
MARROW itself clocked 50,000+ healthcare professionals in 60 Days! Medical video lesson across a range of subjects from top faculties have been viewed for 7,80,000+ hours, that is 4000+ hours of medical lessons viewed every day since launch.
The failings and learning of the journey are embedded in the ‘transitions’ mentioned below:
‘From Conversions to Conversations’
This rapid growth also added the responsibility of engaging the users and understanding their needs deeply, which required us to shift our focus from just digital connect & pitch to have more in-depth one on one conversation. One of the mistakes that we did while changing the medium of conversation is we kept the content and approach same, like just enumerating the features. This was certainly not working and sales & support team was not as productive as we expect them to be. So we shifted gears & built the team centered around the conversation on how each of the features empowers the users on day to day basis.When speaking to users it also revealed how they described DailyRounds/Marrow to their friends and colleagues giving us more insight on the branding and what features to work on. The impact of this transition revealed that customer support and care is not a department its an attitude!
‘From failing normally to failing fast’
Normally Product is designed with a lot of effort and put through rigorous testing to make sure it works on the ground. This is validated when the user provides feedback. This product or its feature may fail and its resolved based on the feedback. And that is normal. But with such rapid growth and user interest, we realized scaling up user delight is a lot tougher than just scaling up the product usage. And this requires failing faster. So now we put effort proactively to make the product fail before release in different varying condition based on the understanding of users need like device OS, internet speed etc. In this process a realization dawned on us, the attitude to fail fast and correct mistakes faster is the raw material to scale up user delight.
‘From Design thinking to Systems thinking’
One of the product update(with the most requested feature) was perceived as the cause of poor user experience while the root cause was the failure of user verification channel altogether prohibiting them to use the platform, which was aggravated by the fact that the new features which our user are looking forward were prominently advertised. The impact of this backlash was we shifted gear form just designing the product to redesign the internal team system with more interaction among the teams.
‘From Selling to Evangelizing’
Our earlier effort in ‘conversation’ also revealed that our users apart from leveraging the product to become better healthcare professional need guidance and someone to understand the challenges they face. This insight helped us to design a framework to understand the user persona and design a journey based on the features best able to serve them. Gradually we realized our inside sales and support team is no more selling but bringing good news to them. A win-win situation created with the initiation of understanding the emotional state of our user. And we learned a new word in this year ‘Evangelists’!
‘From Data-Driven to User Driven’
Growing in 2017 provided us with more & more data while having the proportionate effect of distancing us from the user behind the curtains of data. One of the bigger challenges this year was how to strike balance between the approach to growth based on quantitative data, qualitative user feedback & intuition. It was also critical to understand what drove word of mouth and what metrics we need to incorporate a feature and price accordingly. This is still a work in progress and we look forward to striking the balance in 2018. Do suggest if you have already solved this balance issue.
