Three types of product team; interoperability for digital health providers; has TikTok lost the hype?
Hello, welcome to this edition of Double Take on product, health tech, and media.
This brilliant read on “how to become insanely well-connected” contains some golden nuggets on creating the most value out of your interactions. For eg, it’s better to get a “quick no” than to string along waiting for a “yes” that’ll never come.
Now onto the regular programming 👇
💻 Product
Three types of product team. A nice categorization of three types of product teams: sprint, story, and backlog-centric; team and mission-centric, engineer-centric with rockstar PMs. Each type has trade offs in terms of impact on customer outcomes, teamwork, productivity and sense of empowerment. It’s possible to be successful in any one of the types when compatible with the environment (eg. size & stage of company, type of problem the team is solving, and team culture).
PLG for complex products. Product led growth has been popular for east-start consumer products, but it can also accelerate growth for complex enterprise products. This case study with QuotaPath uncovers the challenges and opportunities of a PLG motion for a complex product. Having commitment across GTM teams is important as PLG can actually make CAC worse in the short term but reap benefit over time.
The App store is becoming the game store. Using Duolingo’s success as reference, Late Checkout shares a framework for creating game-like experiences in your product. It comes down to delivering content in game mechanics to help your user achieve a difficult goal.
📠 Health Tech
Digital health’s 2023 regulation overview. A go-to resource for digital health builders to understand the latest policy developments, including massive topics such as interoperability (patient access, TEFCA, ONC Cures rule, etc.), price transparency, privacy, ACO reach, and more.
Amazon launches RxPass, $5/month generic drug subscription. $5 a month add-on to your Prime membership to get as much generic drug as you need (covering 80 common conditions). Generic drug itself costs pennies so pharmacies only make money on the dispensing fee (the professional service of providing prescription drugs). But that service can be commoditized with common ailments that usually involve straightforward maintenance drugs for life. Still, only Amazon with its fulfilment scale can make the service with drug and delivery work at this price (although we don’t yet know if this price is subsidized).
Interoperability for digital health providers. Elion hosted a webinar on how digital health orgs can approach their interoperability strategy, covering topics from build vs. buy decisions and evaluating interoperability vendors, featuring Brendan the Health API Guy, Alexandra from Redesign Health, and Samir from Medidata.
📣 Media
Has TikTok lost the hype? MAUs and downloads are plateauing and starting to slide. This is part of the normal life stages of social apps, as novelty wears off and competition intensifies. Here are a few ideas for potential its second act: add long form content, double down on commerce, lean into photos.
Inside look at the last 3 months at Twitter. This story could be turned into a screenplay for the future “Hard core Twitter” movie. These insider accounts paint a picture of the confusion and chaos inside Twitter since Elon’s takeover.
