Bob London of Chief Listening Officers Interviews Taylor Stein, CEO & Co-founder of EngagedMD
In this interview, Bob London talks with Taylor Stein, co‑founder and CEO of EngagedMD, a leading software platform for fertility clinics that streamlines patient education, consent, and e‑signatures. Stein explains that EngagedMD serves about half of U.S. fertility practices with a 20‑person team and is expanding internationally. The fertility market is growing rapidly, driven by high‑value, self‑pay procedures, but clinics face a critical capacity bottleneck: demand outpaces the ability to scale staff and facilities, leading to limited patient access and staff burnout. Stein describes two strategic initiatives the company undertook: (1) a refresh of its messaging, moving beyond the original “informed‑consent” focus to a broader, capacity‑centric narrative, and (2) a “customer rediscovery” effort where he, as CEO and de‑facto Chief Product Officer, conducted one‑on‑one interviews with existing customers. He emphasizes the importance of talking directly to users rather than relying solely on quantitative data or research reports. The interview dives into the interview methodology: high‑level, open‑ended questions, a clear upfront agenda that the call is not a sales pitch, and a signature “magic‑wand” question (“If you could instantly eliminate one problem, what would it be?”). Stein also used a ranking exercise (rating ten identified problems on a 1‑5 scale) to quantify recurring pain points. Key takeaways from the rediscovery calls reshaped EngagedMD’s product roadmap. Although customers never used the word “capacity,” their answers revealed five inter‑related issues that together formed a capacity constraint theme. This insight led the team to prioritize features that address workflow efficiency and patient throughput. Stein recorded the calls, then distilled them into timestamped video clips and notes to share with the broader team, making the insights actionable without overwhelming colleagues with long recordings. Finally, Stein and London discuss the “tornado of pain points” framework—a hierarchical map that starts with granular product features and climbs to the highest‑order problem (clinic growth/capacity). They agree that a durable, north‑star focus on capacity will guide product decisions for years to come. The conversation ends with advice for other founders: stay in regular, agenda‑less dialogue with customers to surface deep, durable problems rather than chasing short‑term sales goals.
Chapters
Welcome Taylor Stein. It's great to see you. And just for everyone who may be watching this, the trillions of viewers around the world. So we have had a chance to work together over the last however many months on a few things. And you've graciously agreed to spend some time to talk about your perspective on a couple things. Customer discovery is one of them. Messaging is another one. Product roadmap is another one from your vantage point as the CEO of a very cool early stage technology company. So Thanks for joining me. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, it's been, it's been a pleasure working with you and thanks for wanting to chat today. Absolutely.
So tell me a little bit about EngagedMD, which is the company that you are CEO and co-founder of.
Sure. So we are a software platform that primarily helps medical practices make their patient experiences and their operational workflows more efficient and effective. Through patient education and document signing. Work primarily in the fertility space where these issues tend to be pretty acute. We've been around since 2014. For the fertility market, we're, we're a market leader. So we work with almost half of all fertility physicians in the US. And we also work with clients in Canada and the UK.
How many employees roughly do you guys have?
20 full-time. Okay.
And you can do a little ad, a recruitment ad. Are you, are you hiring right now? Growing?
We are hiring for a few roles. We're hiring for a couple of roles in and around the customer success world, actually.
When people hear fertility or that you serve the fertility market, how is that a big thing? Is that a big market? Is it growing? Like what's going on in that market?
Yeah, it's definitely growing. I look at healthcare as like hundreds of different micro markets and you you can split that apart by specialty, by, you know, a bunch of different ways. So if you, if you think of fertility, it's a subspecialty of OB-GYN. It's not the biggest medical specialty, but it's not the smallest either. It tends to be a very technology experience forward market. That's a lot of self-pay, high dollar procedures. And it's, it's very much growing. If you compare fertility to other medical specialties. It is growing faster.
What would you say is the number one challenge that your customers are facing from their perspective? No vendor speak, in their words, like how would you articulate their problem?
If I were to, if I were to say the number one biggest problem that they have right now, It's that demand is through the roof and, um, capacity at clinics is not growing as quickly as demand. Access is being limited to patients, or in other cases, the experience is being diminished, or that, uh, nurses and doctors are getting burned out because they're having to go through so many people. It's typically actually a combination of the three, just trying to basically keep up with demand. Supply is less elastic than demand, I guess I would say, in the fertility market.
And, and so there's a disconnect right now coming out of COVID You're doing something incredibly important because, uh, people who have fertility challenges, it's very serious and it's very personal and it's very stressful. And by, by helping fertility clinics work more efficiently and increasing patient capacity, then you're, you're really performing almost a public service. You're making care more accessible to more people.
Absolutely. I think practices that are not using EngagedMD right now are having a much more difficult time transitioning to this new paradigm than practices who are. It's kind of like death by a thousand cuts with all these operational inefficiencies. And so sure, we haven't solved it completely, but certainly we have made a pretty important impact for our customers.
You had established not long ago, two big priorities. One was more of a project around updating the company's messaging. And I find this happens from time to time with especially technology companies in my orbit, that you kind of outgrow the messaging that you started with. And, but that was related to your company's aspirations. Roadmap related. So to the point of making, making it even easier for clinics to serve patients, you've got this sort of the roadmap and then this sort of messaging update. And why were those two things important at this particular— why can't you just be happy with 50% of the market?
Yeah, that's a really good question. It kind of goes along with some of the challenges that— this is probably common among all or many startups. When you're just starting out, it's really important, maybe even more so in healthcare where the barriers to entry are, are a little bit higher than in some other areas, to be really focused on a specific problem, a specific niche problem, and articulating that and showing how you can solve that. And having that focus is super, super important. And at least it was important for us. And so all of our messaging was around this like very specific problem of informed consent. For IVF treatment. That word was used a lot in all of our messaging. Over the years, people started using our platform for more and more things, and we were saying, "Oh yeah, we can do that. We can help you with that. We can help you with that." So we were actually doing a lot more in the market, but all of our messaging was still around informed consent. So now we're looking to actually take those things that we've kind of been adding the capabilities iteratively over time, or helping specific customers with issues, and we're trying to build a new next generation version of our product that has all that stuff in there from the get-go. When we want to go and start talking to customers about that, we don't want to say we are informed consent, but we can do all these other things. We want to have a much more cohesive messaging platform about really what we're doing now. So it's, it's more general. It's more, it's a little broader and it's a little bit more, I don't know.
I don't know the right word to say here, but like, yeah, it could be aspirational. It could be— aspirational. That's great. I talk about this a lot, but you guys brought it to the table as well, which is we don't want to talk about just what we do. We need to be clear about what we do, but we need to talk about how we help the clinics with their big problem, which is, as we discussed, capacity. So tying it to, tying, if you will, the company's brand promise to the fact that ultimately, yeah, we do these things, but it all adds up to you guys being able to do your jobs easier and having more patient capacity. What would you say is the number one challenge that your customers are facing from their perspective? No vendor speak, in their words, like how would you articulate their problem?
If I were to, if I were to say the number one biggest problem that they have right now, it's that demand is through the roof and capacity at clinics is not growing as quickly as demand, access is being limited to patients, or in other cases, the experience is being diminished, or that nurses and doctors are getting burned out because they're having to go through so many people. It's typically actually a combination of the three, just trying to basically keep up with demand. Supply is less elastic than demand, I guess I would say, in the fertility market.
And so there's a disconnect right now coming out of COVID In order to work on the messaging, in order to work on the roadmap, you personally as co-CEO, co-founder did a lot of customer calls one-on-one. Let's call it customer rediscovery. That's what I call it.
Mm-hmm.
Because it wasn't customer discovery in the classic sense. You have to go talk to a bunch of, uh, companies, uh, or prospects before you build the product. You guys are already in market, you have a bunch of customers. So you, you did these one-on-one calls. You didn't just look at data, quantitative data. You didn't just look at research reports. You wanted to have the calls yourself personally. Why was that so important to you?
Working backwards from the customer is proven time and time again to be the right way to build something. So you gotta start there. You gotta start with the customer problems. And I'm a big data person. If the data is available, I want to use it, but I'm also aware of the limitations of data. And it's not always available. And even if you have some data, it doesn't mean that that's going to give you all the answers because it might not be a comprehensive data set. And then research reports, you know, if you, if you know something about an industry and then you go read a research report that some researcher wrote about it, you very quickly realize that, uh, It's almost useless.
Strong statement that I don't disagree with.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you gotta do your own research and then you get to ask your own questions and you're engaging with the customer. And then as you start building the product or making the changes, you can go back to those same people and say, okay, we talked about this, what do you think of this idea? And so just starting that process, it was important for us to start with the—
Very good. I should have pointed out, you also didn't delegate it to someone in the organization. The other thing we should point out is that you're Chief Product Officer in the company.
We actually have, you know, we have customer success, we have product manager, we have sales. And so we have a lot of people talking to customers about different things, but they have their own kind of mission for what they're doing. And so this was a way to have a separate discussion with customers that was around roadmap stuff that, that our other folks weren't having. You want, as the CEO, co-founder, co-CEO to have direct dialogue with your customers. And I think this is a great way to do it. And then as a product leader, so if you have a lot of products and you have product managers managing those products, I think it's okay for them to go and do this work. But most startups, the one of the founders is, is leading up the product.
How did the interviews go? What technique or approach did you use? And then we'll talk about what you learned.
Yeah, great question. So the interviews went really, really well. They were really helpful. The key, I think, was having very general questions. We're not leading them. They're questions that anybody could have an answer to. Everybody should have an answer to. You helped me come up with a lot of those questions, which was incredibly helpful because my initial list of questions would have been a lot worse. Asking those same questions to all the people you're interviewing. You don't have to ask every question to everybody, but having some consistency with what you ask, I thought was incredibly helpful because you can start to hear the same thing over and over again or start to hear different things. If you ask everybody different questions, it's really hard to kind of draw a line between what people are saying. Key is being really prepared, having a list of questions, but keeping those questions really, really high level and letting the customer do all the talking and not interrupting and that kind of a thing.
Did you start by asking them about your product or about their business?
Yeah, we started by saying, what do you think of this color? No, no, no, we ask them about their business, things that they know about, not about our product at all. I'm sure we did get into a little bit about our product and they wanna know about our product. So another key thing that I think is really important is say the purpose of the meeting upfront and say like, this is gonna be about this, it's not gonna be about our product. Good, excellent. So that people aren't waiting for you to turn around and turn it into a sales pitch at the end. I think if you're just upfront with them and just saying like, we are trying to understand your problems so that we can go back and try to develop solutions, but we don't have 'em here today because we're still trying. It kind of just lets people relax and just have a conversation.
That's such a good way to put it. Did you find that open-ended questions were better or more direct, pinpointed questions?
Open-ended. Okay, good, good. You don't know where they're going to take them. And that's part of it. If you want to get real information from people, then you gotta just see where they go.
In the customer calls, these customer rediscovery calls, did you have sort of a go-to question or two that you felt really worked and got people to open up?
My favorite one that I found was especially a good one to have, like, as your second or third question, was, if you had a magic wand that could instantly get rid of any one problem, what would you use it on? I thought that was a great one to use, first of all, because it's something that most people have never heard before. Actually, I don't think anybody interviewed ever heard it, so they thought— I think it's kind funny and it gets them thinking about not like, what are your top 5 problems? But I could just like erase one problem. What would it be? And also it's a magic wand. So a lot of times people are stuck in the real world and this gets them out of it for a second. So you get some unique answers.
I'm glad you used that example. There's another Taylor on your team, Taylor Gniffen, who is the head of customer success. And she used that question and commented that she thinks that using that question, because it has a little bit of a twinkle to it. It gives the customer an excuse to kind of go out of the box with their answer, which I love because I think we're all so locked into these lanes of business speak, et cetera. And so the magic wand, I'm glad you used that example. I'm glad to hear that this approach worked for you. This is another reason I wanted to kind of get you on record for other people to hear. These are the two pillars of the customer rediscovery approach. It's this sort of asking better questions and about them, because they're, they're not experts in your product. They're experts in the problems they have and the priorities they have. So let them talk about that. And then let them go— this sort of agendaless listening— let them go wherever they want to go and follow them in the conversation.
One type of question that is not so open-ended that we asked that I found to be really helpful, especially going back and rereading the answers that people gave. We asked like 10 different questions and said, of these things, rank them from 1 to 5 on how big of a priority it is for you to address.
Mm-hmm.
And so then we had 10 questions and we had like 10 interviewees and we were able to use that to really quantify. What are the big problems that are consistent across people? Not just problems, but things that they would like to address, because that's really critical. That's a little bit of— it's like sort of open-ended, closed-ended. And actually, what was really interesting is you learn a lot by hearing people think about what they want to score it. So I could be a 4 because of this, but it's really a maybe a 3 because of, you know, this. And you learn a lot through that, right?
Now that's a great point. And I was, I was on some of the early calls, and then I listened to some of the recordings that you did and that were very helpful. I think you're a natural. In fact, I have anoint you Chief— honorary Chief Listening Officer. What did you learn, if you don't mind sharing? What felt insightful to you and actionable?
It actually redirected all of our product development, these conversations. So we really zeroed in on a thread of challenges that practices were having. Actually, nobody said our capacity, we have capacity constraints, but they said 5 different things that added up to capacity constraints. People talking about their own problems, and they might not even see the connection between other people in their organization or people in other organizations, but you having talking to all these different people, your job is to kind of put the puzzle pieces together and try to find the trend. And we were definitely able to, to find that. And then once we sort of had that hypothesis, we went out and asked people again more directed questions to confirm whether what we're saying was resonating with people.
I love that. You recorded— I listened to some of the recordings because I was working on the messaging. Did anybody object to being recorded?
Nobody objected. They wanted to know that it's going to be private.
But other than that, of course, how valuable was that to you? Because you're listening in real time to what people are saying, but by recording it, were there others on the team that were interested? Were you able to share what people said more effectively because they were recorded?
Everybody's busy. So if you just send people 5-hour-long recordings, I can guarantee you nobody will watch them. So what I did is I went back through my notes. I was taking notes for every question and I highlighted areas that I thought would be really valuable for people to listen to. And then I put a timestamp in the videos where those things were. So then I could go to people and say, go to this video, this timestamp, and watch this. And it was able to be more digestible. You know, as we're thinking about product ideas, go back and find in the video where someone was talking about it, get their, the words out of their mouth.
So I remember having an internal call before all the— before a lot of the customer interviews really took place, and I created this thing called the tornado of pain points for the fertility practices. And at the bottom, it was very granular, you know, a problem that EngageMD solves today. And then we went up and up and up, and we were trying to sort of line up all the things that we help with and tried to find the highest order of challenge for fertility clinics that engaged MD-SALT. And when I went around and said, what is the fertility clinic's biggest problem? It was kind of unanimous. It was like, they all want to grow. They want to grow. And I think when I started to listen, we all started to listen to the reportings and hear the reality of how they talk about their challenges in the real world. It really did become more about the constraints to growth, which we termed capacity.
I wondered if you could just talk about that a little bit before we were, um, had these customer calls, if you would have said, what do you guys do? How do you help solve problems? Would have said like 20 different things. None of them would have been like addressing capacity constraints. And that tornado you're talking about, they would have been at all various levels of the tornado. With our document signing functionality, we help people go paperless, but we also help them save time. We also help them manage their risk. Those are all things that that product does. And they're at sort of different levels of that, value tornado or whatever, whatever it's called.
And it's the tornado of pain points.
Yeah, the tornado of pain points.
I'll put a visual up.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. And it's very helpful. You can't just say we're going to solve these 5,000 things. We were trying to figure out what is something that's true among all of these things that's really important, that resonates with our customers, that as we're making product decisions, we can say, does this fall under this? Because a lot of times in the product discussion, it's like, oh, but that's not really the problem we're solving. So let's not do it. If you have too narrow of a problem statement, you can fall into that. And maybe you should do that even though you didn't say exactly you were going to do it. And so it's really helpful to have something that's sufficiently high level so that your product discussions, your creativity, you have constraints, but they are broad enough that you can solve real important problems for customers.
Yeah, that's really well said. And I would just add a word, it's durable. It'll last for quite a while. And I think that was one of your goals was let's not be changing this every year. Let's pick some, a north star, if you will, that we're solving for customers that we know it's gonna be a challenge for them for a long time. And we're gonna be helping them with it for a long time.
If you look at a fertility clinic, you've got your nurses, you've got your operations managers, you've got your executives, your finance people. And we needed a prop, something that was going to resonate with all of them.
That's a great point. That's a really great point.
Yeah. So you can't be too narrow or else maybe you'll hit this one, but not that one.
Right. That's a great point. So to wrap it up here, if you were in a room full of your fellow founders and CEOs of other tech companies, what would you say to them about staying in touch with customers, not to sell, but to listen in a way that's very open-ended and agenda-less.
There's no question you need to be talking to your customers all the time and really trying to stay in sync with what they're thinking and also kind of cross-pollinating their ideas. And I think that this kind of interaction is something that's not obvious to do, and it does take a lot of work and time and effort, but it's incredibly valuable in addition to your I'm not saying don't go sell because that's pretty important too, but it's something that you should be doing in addition and it really, really helps everything else that you're doing. So all the things that we were talking about earlier, I think are great techniques that can actually put that into action.
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