The Health Tech Product Team
The roles that build tech products
After spending the first few months researching and writing about topics at the edge of my knowledge and understanding, I’m going to turn to something that is intimately familiar to me: the product development process in health care tech.
This is going to be a little care-delivery centric, but I’ll definitely try to talk about the differences for other types of products: consumer tech, B2B, etc.
To kick this offer, I’m going to do a little dramatis personae of the people on the product team and what they do.
Non Product Team roles
There are some important people that are not strictly on the product team that I will be referring to a lot. I wanted to get some definitions down here first before I begin
“Users”
These are users of the products that we’re going to build. They could also be customers (ie. they could be paying for the product and then also using it), but they could also just be users (ie. if it’s a person using the app but their employer is paying for it.)
Users are a product’s raison d’etre and so we talk about them in a lot of our descriptions.
“Customers”
Customers are people or entities that pay for the product. As discussed above, this could be the person who uses the product, or it could be someone who is paying for a product for someone else to use.
I sort of gloss over the potential complications of having customers and users who are different but I’ll touch on this here for a second.
If there is a product who has different people as customers and users, you have to fit the needs of both of them and balance their needs against the other. If a product theoretically meets a customer’s needs but users can’t or don’t want to use it, then it might be hard to actually meet the customers goals.
If the users love a product, but it doesn’t meet the goals of the customer, then you are going to have trouble selling it. So, there is a balancing act there.
“Stakeholders”
Stakeholders are people at your company who represent some interests of the user or customers.
Examples of stakeholders are:
The sales & marketing team, who represents the customers they talk to or marketing responses they get, and will tell you what they hear customers asking for based on that.
Clinical team leaders- as a health tech company, you might be building products for doctors, nurses and other clinicians. Their leaders might represent the needs of this group of users to the product team
Operational team leaders- similarly, if you are building either tools for the operational teams or products for users that might affect the workflows of the operations team, you’ll want their input as you build the product.
Executives- their input is important because they have a vision for the company and the best way to serve not only current users, but also future users.
Product Manager
The Product Manager’s job at the highest level is to determine what gets built and delivered to customers and when. They are ultimately responsible for the success of the product that is launched and delivered. Some things they do are:
Develop the product vision - what problems the product will solve for which people, how it will make money.
Prioritizing features - Determining what are the features of the product that will have the most impact on the product’s customers or users and building those first. Developing a roadmap of what product features get delivered when.
Gathering requirements - Getting the set of things that a product needs to do to solve customer or user problems and writing them down so that everyone knows what they have to build. This also includes deciding what the features will NOT do.
Driving design and development - working with design and engineering teams to design a solution and then build it.
Launching - determining when a product is finished, testing it to make sure that it meets the requirements, and partnering with the sales and marketing team to make sure people know that it is available to be used.
Measuring success - setting measurable goals for the impact the product is expected to have on users and the business and measuring those goals after launch.
To do all of these things well, a Product Manager must have a good understanding of all aspects of the business: finance, marketing, engineering, design, sales, and above all the customer. The PM is a generalist role who knows a good amount about all of these things so that they can make decisions about what the product should do.
If the PM is a specialist about anything, its about the customer or user. The PM should know the customer via data, interviews, market analysis, sales numbers, and any other view of the customer and develop a deep intuitive understanding and empathy for the customer and their needs.
A Product Manager is not the same thing as a Project Manager, or a Program Manager, whose primary focus is internal to the team or company. Project and Program managers are responsible for making sure a project, as defined at the outset, gets done on time and in budget. A Product Manager is responsible for solving customer problems.
A Product Manager is also not the same as a Product Owner. Product Owner is an Agile concept and is the person on a product team that is responsible for running engineering meetings and managing the project board that represents different engineering tasks.
Product Designer
Product designers primarily work on the interactions of users/customers and the product. They create intuitive experiences so that its easy for the user to use the product to solve their problem.
Some specific responsibilities include:
Honing the user goals- working with the Product Manager to understand exactly what the user will be trying to accomplish with the product
User discovery - interviewing users about their needs to get insight and inform design decisions. Testing design ideas directly with users to see how they react, and to guauge whether the product is useful and easy to use
Designing the interface - Designers will design the visual and interactive elements of the product, often developing several ideas and testing them with users to determine which direction is best
Determining feasibility - Working with the engineering team to ensure the design is feasible and can be implemented effectively.
Designers will work very closely with PMs during discovery and very close with engineers and PMs during implementation.
Engineers
Typically a product team has one designer, one product manager, and a half dozen or so engineers. With engineers making up the majority of the team, there are a couple layers to engineering roles which we’ll spell out here.
Engineering Manager
The manager of the engineering team will set the technical direction of the team and be the voice of the engineering team to the product manager, designer and other business functions. Some of the specific things they do are:
Team development - hiring, firing and helping team members develop skills
Balancing workloads and tasks - making sure everyone has enough to do, but not too much. Making sure the tasks are being done by the engineers with the right skillsets, or those who want to develop those skillsets
Technical guidance - helping to plan the technical direction of the team, including processes and technologies to be used.
Stakeholder management - working with the PM and design to establish the right level of work, communication rhythm. Making sure that those team members and the organization at large have visibility into the progress and challenges the team faces
Tech Lead
On any individual project, the tech lead is the engineer who works with the PM and designer to architect a technical solution, break up the work into individual tasks and work with other members of the engineering team to complete the tasks and deliver the project. This is usually a skilled and experienced engineer. Some responsibilities include:
Stakeholder management - for the specific project, collaborate with design and product management and broader stakeholders to make sure that product requirements are being met, the designs are feasible, and technical issues are well known and accounted for.
Leading the implementation - writing out the technical design, breaking it into tasks, helping to divide the work among the other engineers, writing and review code. Answering questions and troubleshooting issues that arise with the other engineers
Mentoring - helping to develop the skills of more junior team members.
Engineers
The other engineers on the team will volunteer for or be assigned certain tasks that are necessary for delivering the product. They’ll write the code, test it, and review code written by other team members.
Other roles
Analysts
These are specialists in the data of an organization. They might work with the product team to get exactly the right data to inform decisions.
Program managers
This role usually comes into play for larger organizations and teams. They usually help with processes such as quarterly planning, project estimation, standardized sprint processes and tracking project phases and completion.
User researchers
Also a role for larger organizations, this role specializes in doing user research. Product designers and product managers do this themselves at smaller organizations.
Product Marketing Managers
Product marketing managers work with the product team and sales/marketing teams to communicate product launches and timelines to customers and users. They will help write the language to explain what features do and why they are important as well as signing off on launches and getting the commercial teams ready to support new products and features.
Resources
Product team roles and processes vary quite a bit by organization, but the closest thing to a standard among software companies is probably Inspired by Marty Cagan.
For another view on product development that focuses on testing prototypes with internal users with good taste rather than with users directly, and to understand product development at Apple specifically is Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda.
A recent book that has a lot of great stuff about product development in a hardware/software environment is Build by Tony Fadell. It has a great breakdown of the roles at a software & hardware engineering company.