Building Products With Purpose
This was a big week of disruption for the healthcare industry. Three of corporate America’s heaviest hitters — Amazon, Warren Buffett and JP Morgan Chase — sent a shudder through the health industry Tuesday when they announced plans to jointly create a company to provide their employees with high-quality, affordable healthcare. The potential disruption from these three renowned innovators in tech and finance sent a shock wave through the health care sector on Wall Street, erasing billions in value in seconds.
Women in Product hosted an event this week on “Building Products With Purpose” to discuss how the product management community is altruistically approaching healthcare, the country’s most complex and expensive problem. Our conversations focused on what it is like working for a company with mission and businesses model alignment, and what success means for the industry.
Our speakers consisted of product leaders from across the tech industry including: Moderator Louisa Henry, Director of Product at Clover Health; Ha Nguyen, Product Partner at Omidyar Network; Jyotika (Jo) Varshney, Founder & CEO at VeriSIM Life; Amy Li, Founder of Dance4Healing; Alicia Beckett, Senior Product Manager at Clover Health; and Clara Wu, Product Manager at Clover Health.
The evening started with a fantastic talk from Ha Nguyen on the “Power of Purpose.” Following her talk, we had a panel discussion on building products with purpose for the healthcare industry.
Here I share my top takeaways from the panel. I hope these insights can help other women in product, and engage men, women and companies in solutions we can all build together:
The Power of Purpose
- Purpose-driven companies are more likely to have loyal customers, engaged employees, and better business outcomes.
- There is often a misconception that companies must be either purpose-driven or profit-driven, but cannot be both. This is no longer the case. Research proves that purpose fuels profits.
- Purpose-driven companies attract the best minds, have the most passionate customers, achieve wild success and change the world.
- Read my article in Forbes on “The Power of Purpose-Driven” here.
What does it take to build great products for healthcare?
- Practice deepening your empathy. Empathy is the first step for building products with purpose.
- Think about the motivations driving the end user.
- Educate your customer on the benefits of your product — they will live longer, travel more often, be able to see their children walk down the aisle.
- Innovation adoption in the healthcare industry is notoriously slow. Everything in healthcare is a systems design problem.
- You must build trust in healthcare where switching costs are high and sales cycles are long. Business tradeoffs do not compromise patient outcome if the business model and incentives are aligned.
What does it take to be a healthcare Product Manager?
- Industry knowledge is helpful but not necessary to become a PM in the healthcare industry.
- Passion, humility and a desire to continuously learn are the most important attributes to have to become a PM in this field.
- Be comfortable with the fact that you will never know everything, and know that it is always good to ask questions.
- It does help a lot if you have technical knowledge because it gives you an edge when tackling problems, and having this knowledge gives you credibility when working with people in this industry.
- I will always choose to hire someone with more passion over someone with experience and technical knowledge.
How do you sell to VCs as a healthcare startup?
- Asking just for money when pitching to VCs is the absolute worst thing you can do as a founder.
- When pitching, ask VCs for their experience and expertise not money.
- As a founder you need to say: “I will continue to build this, but having your support will enhance my process and help me build this thing faster to positively impact society.”
Watch the “Building Products With Purpose” livestream on our Facebook page.
Women in Product® is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in product management. Founded by senior women product leaders in Silicon Valley, Women in Product’s mission is to educate, empower, and create a global community of women product managers to build impactful products at scale. Join our community: http://www.womenpm.org/join/
