Monica Singh: “Product managers own problems and experiences”
In April, Women in Product Austin spoke with Monica Singh, Director of Product Management at Everlywell, which offers access to at-home lab tests. At Everlywell, Monica manages digital product managers across all segments of the business: consumer, enterprise, and operations.
Monica’s career began in online education and academic advising. With the benefit of domain experience, she traded academia for an edtech startup. While at General Assembly, which offers adult courses in tech-focused areas such as web development and UX design, she transitioned into product from a role in instructional design. Since then, she’s taken on roles with increasing scope, culminating in her current role at Everlywell.
I spoke with Monica about her path into product, product teams managing experiences, and user research at Everlywell.
Can you share about your background and professional experience?
I planned to be a middle school social studies teacher when I started college. I loved working with students and seeing their growth. Along the way, I developed relationships with faculty and staff at my university and learned about adult learning. I ultimately pursued a master’s in higher education and went on to work in the university setting with a focus on online education and academic advising. I used this experience to enter the edtech space.
What was your path into product management?
It was at these edtech startups that I got exposure to “wearing many hats” and learned about lean methodologies. I started off in instructional and content roles and developed relationships with leaders that were willing to invest in me. It was their willingness to take a bet on me and my commitment to being uncomfortable and trying something new that I was able to make a transition to digital product management.
What was edtech like? How does it compare to healthcare?
Starting my career in edtech was eye opening. In particular, I learned a lot about understanding user personas (students vs. faculty vs. staff) and how student information systems could help provide data that personalize learning experiences. I see a lot of synergies between education and healthcare: both industries can be challenged with iterating quickly and adopting new technologies due to bureaucracy and regulation.
What about healthcare appealed to you? What did you find helpful in that transition?
I decided to transition to a healthcare tech company because I wanted to see how I could leverage my PM skills in a new vertical and learn something new. When I started job hunting for a new opportunity, I spent a lot of time creating and articulating a story of the transferable skills: in addition to having foundational PM skills, I understood things like data privacy, predictive analysis, and the difference between user and buyer personas.
What does being a product manager for a home health testing product entail?
We consider our overall offering to test takers as our end-to-end at-home lab testing experience. Product owns both the physical test kit and digital experience — from registering a kit to reviewing results — and how they come together. My role is focused on the digital product; however, the product team collaborates with one another as well as our colleagues in supply chain, marketing, and medical affairs to make that physical and digital experience seamless.
Our product managers own problems we want to solve across the user journey, as opposed to products: how is the user receiving their at-home collection test kit? How do we make it easier for them to collect their sample and get it back to us? How does our physical kit connect back to our digital results dashboard? How do we communicate to them in the various channels along the way?
Has there been a trend towards product teams managing experiences?
There has been a trend of product teams managing experiences, not just software. For example, during my time at General Assembly, the product team was thinking about how adults learn new skills and navigate a career shift, and building flexible learning paths for that. Those problems are people-focused and don’t always have to be solved in a software-first manner. Solutions included building spaces that were conducive to collaboration, providing career coaching services, and building remote and blended learning offerings into our curriculum. There were software components to each of these but at the end of the day it was creating an optimal learning experience for adults who wanted to pursue a career they loved.
What are the challenges of owning a product that combines the digital and physical?
There’s a lot more operational complexity when your product offering combines the digital and physical. Our operations-focused product teams are thinking about these problems regularly as they partner with our supply chain, lab, and customer care teams. We need to ensure we’re managing inventory, bringing pertinent data into our system to track the kit lifecycle, and partnering with fulfillment providers and labs across the country to provide a consistent service.
We’re managing both an e-commerce business and a lab testing operation. When we build our kits we are working with our medical affairs team to make sure we have the right components, directions are clear so test takers can provide a viable sample to the lab, and a user knows they are using a trusted healthcare experience when navigating the end-to-end flow.
How do product managers at Everlywell assess market opportunities and conduct user research?
The goal is for PMs to define high-level hypotheses when developing business cases and then refining these as they move to product requirements documents when they are scoping an epic’s worth of work. We’re building out a product research function for PMs to partner to understand the problems we want to solve.
Recently we completed a round of product research about our membership offering. We wanted to understand what customers found valuable, how they assessed joining memberships in general, and what they were looking for from us. Our findings are now defining our roadmap for the year. In our current phase of growth, we’re competing with other startups and disrupting conventional providers.
Who are your key personas, and how have they evolved over time?
We started off focusing on women who were looking to drive their own health and wellness journey. Several years later, we’re expanding to organizations like employers, health plans, and physicians that are looking to provide large scale testing programs for their employees, members, and patients.
What’s interesting is that our user personas have evolved over time. With the growth of our enterprise business we have a number of administrator personas: the HR rep implementing a COVID-19 testing program, the health plan administrator implementing diabetes and colon cancer testing. With our growth, we’re able to serve a larger set of personas and empower people to take control of their health by making lab testing simple to access, understand and afford.
Thanks to Kristina Kernaghan for editing.
