Product Vision Roadmap Pitch

Situation

My Role: Researcher, owner, presenter

Direct Report: VP of Product

Goals: Pitch a How Might We (HMW) statement to leadership persuading their prioritizations for the following quarter.

Outcomes: Unknown. I was included in the wave of layoffs the week after delivering this pitch. The startup closed about 1 year later.

Action

I led the pitch initiative for expanding user advocacy at Robin Healthcare during the quarterly product vision roadmap pitch process.

Robin uses an in-room device to capture and transcribe medical documentation. The value proposition is to reduce the workload on practicing doctors by automating the documentation and billing tasks, giving doctors back time with their patients. Robin also has a mobile app doctors can use to record any additional transcriptions outside of what is captured from the treatment room.

The VP of Product was what UX affectionately calls a “champion for UX” or an internal advocate for UX values outside of the UX team. He had asked for a pitch that highlighted the problems Product had been facing as a result of being blind to the qualitative experience of doctors in clinic. Robin had unlimited access to internal users- medical scribes- but none of our B round funding was being allocated to understanding our clinical users, doctors, as they interacted with the device or the app.

In my pitch, I pointed out how our most recent customer losses were largely impacted by the dissatisfaction of the clinical users. I collaborated with lead developers, product managers, and sales managers to gather the anecdotal feedback and in-app data points necessary to make strong arguments in support of my pitch. I quantified the percentage of lost revenue and attributed it to our lack of understanding of the qualitative experience of our clinical users. Doctors are powerful external stakeholders, even when they don’t hold purchasing power. I leveraged storytelling using the anecdotal evidence collected from a one-time onsite contextual inquiry with Robin doctors to help drive the following points.

Key Points

  • The tight permissions limitations we put on the mobile app are inhibiting the doctors’ ability to delegate clinical tasks to their medical assistants (MA).

  • When explaining Robin to patients, MAs regularly misrepresent the actual purpose of the Robin devices. We need to invest in discovering the educational gaps that are leading to uncooperative patients.

  • The value of the doctor and MA relationship are vital to the operation of the clinic. Doctors love to explain things to their MAs! Those conversations are vital to maintaining connection and synchronicity between them. If we earn the endorsement of the doctors they can do the educational work on behalf of Robin. It could additionally reduce the number of visits required by a sales rep or onboarding person.

  • We operate under the assumption that doctors are “too busy” for new features. However, anecdotal feedback coming in from our sales reps who text back and forth directly with doctors indicate the opposite. Doctors are incredibly interested in getting more analytic feedback about their own productivity. We sometimes forget that doctors are also scientists. By discovering what data points most interest doctors we may be able to a) increase CSAT scores b) validate doctors’ personal impact (user delight) and c) provide impactful insights for patient care.

  • Doctors are not incentivized to give feedback for free. Doctors will make more money per hour by treating patients over giving feedback to a software service for which they already pay a subscription service. Presently our volunteer roster is only raising 3 participants at best for 15 minute surveys.

How Might We

  • promote more volunteer participation?

  • gain access for more onsite observation?

  • compensate doctors and clinicians for participating in feedback sessions?

  • consolidate what anecdotal feedback we are getting through the sales team to a single source of truth?

  • centralize subject matter expertise from Robin employees who are doctors or have clinical experience?

The HMW statements above are the potential problems we could solve if this pitch was selected for the following quarterly product roadmap. HMW statements set the stage for solutioning. They are not themselves a solution. We may find an array of solutions per HMW statement, which can then be prioritized by feasibility and impact matrices. By increasing the value of the Robin Device and Robin App we make Robin a mission critical tool for doctors and they won’t want to let us go.

Learnings

I did not get to see the results of this pitch as I was affected by company wide layoffs a week after delivering it. In delivering this pitch, I was able to foster stronger relationships between UX and the product team. Even if it wasn’t a win it was a chance to surface UX values and UX thinking styles to c-suite executives and the Product audience that was present. A personal outcome for me was the revelation that UX is only as successful as UX is endorsed, both financially and culturally, within an organization. Moving forward I now know how important it is to assess an organization by how it is funding and culturally endorsing UX work in addition to simply hiring UX practitioners.