How can a product manager help a data science team be successful

I have been working with data scientists to build data products for over a year now. The first product we build is Castlight Action. Castlight Action is now being used by several large US employers. During this time I learned a lot about the role product managers can play while working with data scientists building a data or data intelligence product. Since the successful release of the Action product, we are taking some of the lessons learned in Action and applying them to other problems and products. These are my observations from both the experiences.

The Pre-requisite
Product managers can prepare themselves by getting some formal education on data science. I did this a couple of years back by getting certified on courses meant for data scientists. However, I believe that may not be necessary and may not be feasible for most product managers.

Last year, John Hopkins University released a certification in data science for executives. This is a good course for product managers to take. I took it this year and found it very valuable. Since then, I tried out some of the concepts in the real world. The concepts taught in this course work in the real world. I highly recommend this course for all product managers planning to or aspiring to work with data scientists.

The Key Responsibilities
I want to outline some of the key responsibilities of a product manager working on a data science product. This may not be a comprehensive list. I am listing the things I have observed so far. I may continue to update this list.

1. Define the purpose of the data science project
The product managers needs to define the capability your company will have once the data science project is complete. I can give you two examples from the work of my teams at Castlight Health. a) We wanted to identify segments of people who are similar and predict their healthcare needs for a certain period in the future. b) We wanted to look at two doctors with the same name in a directory of doctors and determine if the doctors are the same person or not. This is important to create a reliable directory of doctors for our users. Keep the capability description to one page. There is no need to write a long requirements document.

2. Break down the milestones and deliverables for the data scientists
Because any data science project is a research project, it is harder to breakdown work that falls into the cadence of a scrum team. This is an area where a product manager can play a useful role. The product manager need not tell the data scientist what to do. Most product managers will not have the skill to do so. How ever a product manager can specify what needs to be accomplished.  To do this a product manager needs to understand how data scientist works to solve a problem. The course on Data Science for executives from Johns Hopkins can help you with that. Don't just browse through the course. Get the certification.

3. Temper the expectations of your colleagues and business leaders
A product manager needs to explain a data science project and the expected deliverables in simple language to executives, who may or may not be educated about how data scientists work. It is important to explain that the results of a data science project are not always predictable. After a month of work the data science team may come to the conclusion that a particular model does not work as expected and may have to go down  a different path. It is the product managers responsibility to set reasonable expectations and communicate results.

4. Product Managers can perform tasks such as creating test data sets
Data product managers can even perform tasks in a data science project. For example, they can create a test data set to evaluate the efficacy of a machine learning model. Product managers do not need engineering backgrounds or have knowledge of programming to do so. I created a test data set recently for our doctor directory matching project using the tools, my data science colleagues created. They are command line tools. So some familiarity with command line tools and some curiosity about data are pre-requisites. Participating in such tasks will help product managers understand the data and the business problem intimately. It will also help you build credibility with the data scientists.

I plan to write more about the role of product managers in a data or data intelligence product. If you have played the role of a product manager for a product involving data scientists, please share your thoughts. You may have noticed that I use the terms data products and data intelligence products. I believe that data product are different from data intelligence products. More about that later.

Data Science Can Empower Benefits Leaders Communicate Less and Yet Accomplish More

In many companies today, internal communications overload is a big problem. Internal communication teams including human resources teams are wary of sending out more emails or direct mail than necessary. They also know that most employees ignore internal communications because such communications are poorly written, poorly designed and not personalized. For critical communications such as benefits enrollment, many human resource departments use electronic mail, paper mail, and posters to ensure that the message gets across. Most employees have learned to ignore internal communications unless that message is repeated multiple times.

In this scenario, if a benefits leader wants to educate specific segments of people about health benefits that are relevant to them, there were limited tools available to them. My team at Castlight has taken significant steps to address this need among other things. My purpose here is not to promote the products we build. Instead, I want to talk a bit about how we are planning to use the lessons learned while building Castlight Action, our predictive analytics and personalized recommendations product,  to empower benefits leaders in all our customer organizations, make employees aware of their benefits, to enable employees become healthier and even help them save some money in the process.

Since we have data about the behavior of millions of users and billions of claims, we use data mining techniques such as cluster analysis to identify segments of people with similar attributes who behave the same way. We may not understand why certain segments of people with similar attributes behave the same way, but we know that they do. Then we identify the people with such attributes who are not behaving the same way and tell them they might want to consider such behavior.

The above paragraph is very abstract. So, let me share an example. From our data, we know that for some reason people in their twenties care a lot about dental health. In other words, people in their twenties get dental checkups every year. Once they reach their thirties their lives probably get busier with family and children and they do not get as many dental checkups. So, let us say they were a 1000 people in their twenties in a company with 10,000 people. 800 out of those 1000 people get dental checkups every year. So we wonder about why those 200 people in their twenties are not behaving like the others. Maybe they just joined the company. Maybe they don't know any good dentists near their home. Maybe they think it would be very expensive to go get a dental check up. We really  don't know why. However, we know that if we tell them about the dental benefits they have via their employer and enable them to find high quality, reasonably priced dentists near them, there is a very good chance that they will get their dental checkup done. This leads to benefits awareness, benefits satisfaction, better health, better productivity and in many cases some cost savings.

The interesting thing is that we can accomplish this by communicating to just those 200 people rather than communicating to the 800 people who already get their dental checkups and the 9000 people who are not in their twenties and don't care about dental health. I took a fairly simple example to explain how we reduce the need for mass communication about benefits and significantly increase personalized communications that engage employees and slowly but steadily change behavior, improve benefits satisfaction, make employees healthier, and even save some money for the employer and the employee. Most segments are not this simple to build or comprehend.

Building such an infrastructure and assembling a product, data science and communications team that can do this can cost employers tens of millions of dollars, even if they have a clear idea about how to do this.

Today, Castlight has several such segments and serve many employers in the US. Every month, we keep adding more segments that make personalized highly relevant and valuable recommendations to employees. Every piece of communication we send out makes one person a bit more knowledgeable about his or her benefits, has the chance to make him or her a bit healthier, makes him or her a bit more productive and saves him or her and their employer a little bit of money. We do this several million times every year. Knowing this is what motivates me to get up every day morning and go to work. If you are a physician, data scientist, product designer, content strategist, or a product manager and think this is fun to do, give me call. I am on LinkedIn.

The Innovator's Prescription by Clayton Christensen

When I joined Castlight Health about 10 months ago, I looked for a good book that provides a good overview of the problems facing American healthcare. While I heard about many specific problems, I wanted to understand the history of today's problems, the reasons those problems arose, the players who have a vested interest in solving those problems and the possible directions to solve those problems. My wife got me the book, The Innovator's prescription by Clayton Christensen, written in 2009. It gave me the required perspective. It answered questions such as who should we build healthcare solutions for and who has the motivation to change healthcare.

If you are new to healthcare technology and want to get a clear idea, this is a good book to read. I posted a video of Clay Christensen summarizing the book below. He summarizes ten years of research in 60 minutes.

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