Castlight Action was on Fox Business News

It is a product manager's dream to have his or her product covered by the Wall Street Journal and Fox Business News in the same month. I am living that dream this month.  Castlight Action sends personalized health care recommendations to employees at the right time so that they get better heath outcomes and better financial outcomes. Leading the team that designed and built Action and launching it for some of the largest employers in the world will rank among the top five highlights of my career building software products.

My colleague Kristin Torres Mowat, explains Action to the Fox Business team. You can see the video here.

Role Of a Clinical Product Manager In a Healthcare Technology Company.

When I joined Castlight Health in 2015 to build data-driven insights and recommendations products, I started managing clinicians who play a critical role in product development. Soon I realized that, while they play a critical role in product strategy and product development, there is no clearly documented definition of roles and responsibilities for a clinician in a healthcare technology company. So, I decided to spend some time researching it by talking with physicians and those who work with them and documenting it for my own understanding. Since this is an important role in a rapidly growing industry, I decided to share the knowledge openly for the benefit of physicians considering a full-time or part-time role in a healthcare technology company.

Motivation of physicians to join a healthcare technology product company: A physician joins a healthcare technology product company because he or she believes in the power of technology, combined with his or her expertise in medicine, to influence healthcare in a profound way compared to working in a hospital and serving a few people a year with their time.

Role of physicians in a technology product company: They play two main roles. Some play the role of a medical expert who endorses the products and services of the healthcare technology company. This role resides in the sales and marketing arm of a company. They may have titles such as Chief Medical Officer or Solutions Consultant. Some play the role of a medical expert inside a product team. Such experts are called Clinical Product Managers.

The assignment of a clinical product manager will vary depending on the company. However, I want to give you an idea of how it might look in a company such as Castlight, which is a good representation of a small healthcare management technology company. I believe that understanding the day to day responsibilities and the time spent on every work area will help set the right expectations and attract the right people to a healthcare technology company.

Main Assignments of a clinical product manager in Castlight: First, they work with data science teams to identify and assess opportunities to influence member behavior and validate concepts against real-world healthcare workflows. For example, they will determine if Diabetes is an area where technology-based interventions can lead to better health and financial outcomes. Second, they work with epidemiologists to segment the population, define their healthcare journey, determine their motivation and define calls to action. Third, they work with product managers to define behavior change goals and interventions to implement the calls to action.  Fourth, they work with content leads to write clinical content and review it for clinical accuracy. They will also work with user testing teams to define criteria for sensitivity testing. Finally, they will represent the product team in customer conversations before and after product sales. They will reach out to a larger community of physicians, contracted by the company, to seek specialized expertise when appropriate.

Skills and Development

Clinical product managers could go through content writing training and pragmatic product management training to fine-tune their product leadership and product operations skills.

Career Path
Clinical product managers will go on to become general managers of products in a healthcare technology product company.

If you are a physician who has practiced medicine for a few years and has experience building software products for the healthcare industry, consider joining us.  Together we can make a difference in the lives of over 6 million people working for over 200 employers served by Castlight. You can see the detailed job description here. You can also contact me via LinkedIn or contact my recruiting colleague. Shawn Brown. sbrown@castlighthealth.com 

Launching a data driven recommendations product is a bit like launching a rocket

At Castlight Health we recently launched our first data-driven recommendations product called Castlight Action. We launched it for our own employees first before launching it for customers. It has four modules. The first one is the identification and prediction engine that segments people, the second is the application for the benefits leaders to turn on campaigns, the third is the delivery of email and web-based recommendation content. The fourth is the module that tracks the engagement of members with recommendations.

These modules start to execute one after the other. Every module depends on the successful execution of the previous module. Every module has a product manager in-charge of it. I was watching the leader of every module take a deep breath and verify things when their modules go live. Nerve wracking, in a good way.

While we are operating in new territory, my plan is to make the process of desining and developing data driven products a lot more predictable than it is today. I hope to learn from others who have done it and learn by doing when I can. 

Beautiful Evidence

I am in the middle of designing a data driven product for the benefits industry. As part of my prep, I went through the book Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tuft to understand the purpose behind every kind of data visualization. As you probably already know, it is a wonderful book. If you are someone who cares about the intersection of data and design, the book is worthy of keeping your library for a long time.

The most important lesson for me from the book is this. Don't let any digital tool dictate your thinking. Break the rules and disrupt the rules of the tool.

I was also fascinated to learn about the rich possibilities of sparklines. 

Data Driven Product Design Enabled By Application Usage Tracking

A couple of years back I read a book about how buildings are reshaped by their occupants after the architects who built them are long gone. It is called How Building Learn. What happens after they are built.   It got me thinking about what happens to software products after the designers who build them move on to other assignments. I wrote my thoughts down in a post titled Landlords Vs Building Architects to document my thought on how product managers of cloud products needs to think about product design.

Six months back I joined Castlight Health to build a product called Castlight Action. Action is a tool that helps benefits leaders get the most out of their benefits strategy by improving benefits utilization, reducing costs, and improving benefits satisfaction.

Right from day one I requested my team to think like a land lord rather than think just like an architect. I asked them to think not only about building a great product, but also learn how it is used after it is built and use that learning to improve the product in the long run. I told them that we are a cloud product and we have the responsibility to not only build the product but also operate it flawlessly, at a reasonable cost and improve it continuously based on what we learn.

David Tischler under the guidance of Alka Tandon, took responsibility for putting the underpinnings in the product that help us track usage, conduct experiments and, based on our findings, prioritize our roadmap to reshape the product. We are using some cutting edge tools, chosen by Anumeha Goel Dhanrajani from our strategic analytics team, to track not only pages but also every action and every user flow in the application. Rather than make tracking and internal reporting an after thought, we are putting the necessary instrumentation in place behind every event to do the following.

1. Help our product managers with real time information about how how their user flows are performing.
2. Help our user experience designers with real time information about how their experience design is performing.
3. Help our content strategy managers and clinicians with real time information about how each and every piece of content is performing.

Since every one of them will have this information, we are laying the foundation for a better chance of success from day one.