Daniel Wu of athenahealth: Product Managers Focus On Value, Not Output
Shift your focus from output to value, shared Daniel Wu, Senior Manager, Product Management at athenahealth, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #106
What was your path to healthcare product management?
My path to product management was a little bit more atypical. I was trained in product design and I went through a very nonlinear route to product management. I ran a print advertising business and decided that I wanted to expand my background so went to Rice University to get my M.B.A. I focused on predictive analytics. One of the problems in the advertising business I was having was where do you put your own marketing dollars to improve lift? That led me to work in a variety of different industries. I ran market research at an aviation company in Houston. Then I went to a large funeral services company Dignity Memorial and I led three product teams focusing on floral e-commerce as well as an early SaaS product around end-of-life planning. I then came to Austin to join IBM to work on a strategic product team in the analytics portfolio. It was really good exposure, but I wanted to see where I can make the most impact with my product background. And the reason I had that particular reflection was that through a personal story. One of my friends had stomach cancer and passed away. I went back to Houston and joined as a biodesign fellow at a digital health start up accelerator called Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute (TMC). We come in looking for unmet needs across health care. I wore many hats: entrepreneur, user experience, market research, and more to discover the opportunities to make an impact through healthcare. As part of TMC biodesign fellowship, I was part of a founding team that started a computational biology life sciences startup. Any startup is challenging and more so in a regulated space that requires F.D.A. approval that can easily add 10 years to the timeline.
Since I am more of a software product management person, I came back to Austin and joined athenahealth initially in the population health space. Currently, I am the product lead for patient self-scheduling, and we focus on expanding patient access to care.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
My advice comes from my experience in startups and with established organizations focused on building new products: how can we focus as product leaders on value as opposed to output. This becomes real as an entrepreneur when you are running out of cash. So you cannot just focus on the output and you have to focus on value because your success depends on it.
If folks are earlier in their career making a lateral change into product management from engineering or design or another field, I suggest that you have a side project to develop product skills. It does not have to be a digital product. You could be taking something from a concept, getting customer validation, building an MVP, and taking it to market. These are concepts that you have to learn and know and you can then translate it into the space that you want to get into.
The other advice is that aspiring product leaders need to think beyond managing a backlog. There are a lot of resources online about agile and product ownership — nothing bad about them — these are great frameworks. But these are parts of the toolkit that a product leader needs in order to be successful. You have to think about the whole product as an offering. You have to think about the experience as a customer journey. Your product is not just about the application but about discovery, trial, purchase, use and support of the product. This whole package, the tangible and intangible, really makes up the complete product.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
There is no shortage of great product content online nowadays. When I first started in product management I had to translate my design skills into product management skills.
One of my mentors recommended Marty Cagan’s Inspired. I have been reading Marty’s email newsletter for some time now. Some of the more recent posts about feature-driven vs. empowered teams have stood out. I think the challenging part is thinking about the complexities of applying these best practices within your current organization. I have been in different industries and different types of companies — B2C, B2B — and worked on many different products. Product looks different everywhere and I think what helps is networking and talking to others. It is good to understand why product is a certain way in an organization and how it is specific to that context and what you can learn from it.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
What is exciting at athenahealth is for this product to really help our clients who are the health systems, the doctors and nurses, and by extension helping patients. My product, patient self-scheduling helps us expand patient access to care. The first step in getting care to patients is done by recognizing where do they go to get care. A lot of times we have a product where you assume that the user comes to you, but how about the reverse? How can the product be where the patients and users are? And so the approach for patients’ self-scheduling expands patient access to care. That is our North Star: we want to be in whatever marketing channels, wherever the patient may be in their journey, coming through the web, coming through email, or coming through social or search. I think this is a very unique perspective that health tech companies typically do not have. It is more like how a B2C company looks at it. The easier we make it, the more accessible we make health care. We are then really tackling the problem of getting patients to health care providers. And we can also bring them to the rest of athenahealth’s offerings.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
I think the challenge of being mid-career is unique from being early in your career. I’m not thinking about how to break into product management. I have been in product for many years and there is only so much you can learn via reading. I can learn a lot more by networking with folks in the same career phase. I have been trying to figure out the format for it. For example, how there could be a loose network group to meet over lunch and help one another frame problems. I have been doing it individually by seeking out friends and colleagues to pick each other’s brains. But it would be great to have something more formal.
This does seem hard to scale and so you have to take your own initiative. And product managers are really busy folks with unpredictable schedules sometimes. It is easy not to invest in yourself. That becomes a problem in the long term because you could be doing the same thing over and over. How do you get this learning from others so that you can improve your abilities and skills to be more successful in each organization that you work in.
So I think about whether a group setting is better or is it better to be paired with someone in the same stage of your career or is further along in leadership. I do not have an answer, but it is something that I have been thinking about.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
I bought a twin-lens reflex camera a few months ago. I had some training in photography from undergraduate course and had a SLR camera for product photography. My training was product design, specifically industrial design. I feel like the world we live in has everything as a touch screen and software and digital products dominate. There is something really unique about touching something and feeling something. What this camera allows me to do is — first — it forces me to get in touch with my creative mindset rather than my day to day administrative, task-oriented one. Second, the whole activity of using the knobs and cranking to advance the films, the experience of taking photos when you only have twelve frames is a lesson in product management. When I take pictures on my iPhone, it is essentially free and I can take as many as I want. But when you only have twelve frames, you have to wait for the right moment to take the picture. For your product, you have to think about the story that it tells to their users, not just the moment’s experience for your customers. What are you trying to allow them to accomplish and how do you let them experience your product.
Thank you, Daniel!
Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to inspire the next generation of product leaders.
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