In this conversation, Bob London and Taylor Stein discuss the creation and application of a "tornado of pain points" framework used to distill the myriad challenges faced by fertility clinics into a single, high‑level, durable North Star – the constraint to growth, or "capacity". They explain how early customer interviews revealed that, despite many product features (e.g., paperless document signing, risk management, time savings), the unanimous top concern among clinics was the ability to grow. By mapping granular problems up through layers of the tornado, they identified capacity constraints as the overarching, long‑lasting challenge that resonates with all stakeholder groups (nurses, operations managers, executives, finance). The framework serves as a durable guide for product decisions, ensuring that new ideas are evaluated against this high‑level problem rather than getting lost in narrow feature debates.
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So I remember having an internal call 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 try to find the highest order a 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 recordings 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 gonna 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.
