Take 04. De-risking product strategy; Cures act for health data; collection of great speeches
Hi 👋 Welcome to this week’s Double Take, a collection of curated reads about product management, health technology, and intriguing readings (gems). If you liked this edition, share with someone!
💻 Product
Seasoned product leader Gannon Hall shares how he made his own PM tool with Coda. Process is important as it prioritizes signals and information to support the team to ship the best products. There’s no one perfect process - every product leader has to create their own process to support their product and team.
Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman did a fantastic AMA on Capiche. Some great insights were shared about his contrarian view on product design (hint, game design); how to prioritize user feedback (half by vision and half by user issues); the value of individual onboarding, and more.
How Google uses the “HEART” framework and Goals-Signals-Metrics process to choose the important metrics for a product. Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task success (HEART) are the 5 categories that cover most metrics. Mapping top level goals with lower level signals can then help choose and refine the right metrics to track.
How to de-risk your product strategy - ie. frame strategy as a hypothesis with OKRs to demonstrate success. It doesn’t have to become a waterfall style of directing the delivery of work. A deliberate strategy answers these 3 questions: Where you’ll play? How you’ll win? And how will you know you’ve won? This gives room for agility and adjustment based on customer needs.
🌡 Health
Bond Cap/Mary Meeker’s special edition trend report - COVID edition. The failure of US healthcare system is highlighted and many undergoing trends are dramatically accelerated by the pandemic, including telehealth, point of care diagnostics, and connectivity of health data through APIs. The positive and outlook is that COVID might just be the common enemy that’ll finally push the modernization of government, healthcare, and education systems.
HHS finalizes historical rule to give patients more control of their health data with the Cures act. For patients, this means they can access their health records on their smartphones, and even compare costs and shop for care. For clinicians and hospitals, the call for open APIs provides more choice in apps. For health IT providers, there is a 2 year timeline to adopt FHIR based API standards and certification.
An overview of today’s direct to consumer digital health landscape. Direct-to-consumer health care is a US$700 billion industry. As demand grows, the industry matures with better regulated labeling of digital health facts, and better frameworks for user-focused design and privacy.
COVID is normalizing telehealth. Medicare now pays for telemedicine at the same rate as in-person visits, and has loosened previous requirements such as having to travel to a local facility for the virtual visit. Private insurance companies such as Aetna are waiving copays for these visits. The pandemic finally forced the wide adoption of virtual care and the good thing is it’ll become a normal part of care post-COVID.
💎 Gems
NFX shares 28 moves to survive and thrive in a downturn. It comes down to, 1. managing loss, 2. gaining ground, and 3. managing psychology. Prioritize cash, take care of the “leave team” during lay-offs, reorient and focus marketing activities, turn fixed costs into variable costs, and more.
A collection of great speeches. These revelations from great people make a worthy retreat from the daily grind. Some favorites: Inventing on principle; what matters more than your talents; make good art.
Jeff Bezos’ latest shareholder letter accompanying 2019’s annual report. While previous years’ letters highlighted the importance of holding high standards, the power of wandering, and customer obsession, this year’s focus has clearly shifted to social efforts including protecting employees from COVID, investing in outbreak testing and solutions, and doubling down on climate change initiatives.
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