Take 17. System design principles; Amazon HealthLake; Disney+ bulks up

Welcome to this week’s Double Take on product, health tech, and digital media.

🏦 Stripe announced Stripe Treasury, a banking-as-a-service API that enables platforms to embed financial services on their platforms. This is powerful. It makes Stripe the financial operating system of platforms, or as Ben Thompson calls it, the platform of platforms. Even more brilliant is the partnership with Shopify, the OS for e-commerce. Now customers can start an online shop and set up their banking with Shopify Balance. More on the magic of API first companies.

🎧 If you’re eyeing the AirPods Max as a gift, this is a great honest review.

🤸Apple Fitness+ launched today, might make the Apple One subscription premier subscription a great gift too (especially with the person you’re quarantining with).

✨ Inspiration

“If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it — every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.” - Jerry Seinfeld

Now onto the regular programming 👇

💻 Product

• Why teams make better SaaS customers than individuals. In B2B SaaS, the average value of team subscription is greater; collaboration makes product stickier; and seat expansion leads to negative churn rates. DTC SaaS don’t have these advantages. Successful ones (like Netflix and Peloton) have unique mechanisms to retain customers - high entertainment value and hardware. That said, it might make sense to start with individual plans to test the product experience and use individuals as lead generation.

• The curse of success metrics. It’s often hard to come up with specific metrics, because of many reasons, including lacking certainty, difficulty to measure, fear that those metrics become a basis for prioritization, etc. This piece is a great reminder that uncertainty means opportunity and it’s good to start somewhere. That’s the point of experimentation, we increase our confidence level over time, as long as we know what we’re trying to measure will lead to learning something. 

• Six principles of system design. Before starting a new project, system design is like the map that sets the general design direction that brings everyone into a shared understanding of what’s being built. It should define the elements, interconnections of those elements, and the purpose. These principles are a great guide for PMs and designers to simplify, prioritize, and navigate complexity along the way.

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📠 Health Tech

• Avoiding the pitfalls of Telehealth. Telehealth adoption brought increased convenience and new insights about patients. At the height of the pandemic, between 50% to 80% of visits were done via telehealth. At the same time, it’s important not to miss the potential negative impacts for clinicians’ workload, and get creative operationally to prevent unnecessary work for clinicians.

• CMS’s price transparency final rule. Hospitals and health insurance plans are required to disclose pricing upfront to its members in an online tool by 2022, including in-network, out-of-network rates, and in-network drug pricing (terms that Canadians and Brits are fortunately unfamiliar with). When consumers and referring providers can price shop and make informed decisions, we can at least move towards a more efficient market. Insurers are concerned about the difficulty and cost required to comply. What?! Name another industry that gets away with charging customers whatever they want after service is rendered.

• Amazon HealthLake. Another AWS machine learning service for healthcare companies - HealthLake aggregates unstructured data and structure them in FHIR standard format. It then extracts meaningful health information, provides powerful search capabilities, and help companies identify trends and make predictions.

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📣 Media

• Disney+ massively bulks up. Disney shares soared after analyst day, where it announced ambitions for its content library, now to include 10 Star Wars series spin offs, 10 Marvel series. There will be 100 new titles with 80% to go to Disney+, which has amassed 87 million subscribers in a year. This really raises the stakes of the streaming war competition.

  Matthew Ball @ballmatthew

  1/ Thoughts on Disney's Analyst Day. Obviously a longtime Disney D2C bull; I was astounded, shocked by slate's quality, range, volume. This is Disney going beyond a digital "Vault" plus originals. It is saying all of your favorite stories, more, always

  

  Matthew Ball @ballmatthew

  This feels like the true unveiling of Disney+ versus April 2019, tbh

• Creator’s side hustle stack. Li Jin and others created a library of platform based work opportunities that support the passion economy. Categorized by work categories, these low/no-code, low barrier to entry tools can support creators and micro-entrepreneurs to start their side hustle.

• Facebook gets sued to spin off Instagram. The FTC just woke up and announced an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, calling for it to unwind the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. It claims that the acquisitions should not have been cleared in the first place, as it allowed Facebook to expand its dominance rather than competing. It’s unfortunate that this dominance has already facilitated such wide spread of misinformation in our society.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this edition, hit the 🖤 above, it helps others see it :) And let’s chat more on Twitter.

- Christine