AMA Product with Randhir Vieira, SVP Product & Design at Omada Health

And we are interviewing product leaders in the product management health space or the product management space. Today we have a product leader from the health tech area. Health healthcare area. I'm very excited to have Randir Viera who is currently senior vice president of Product and design at Ometa Health. He has worked for companies like Yahoo, Mind Flash and Headspace in the past. Randir has over 25 years of experience in product management, marketing, sales, business development and human resources. Thank you Randir for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. Hand.

Perfect. Let's just get started. We are currently live and I just want to remind people, whoever is live and wants to ask any questions to Rendir, please type in the chat and then we'll get to your questions. Randir, tell us your journey into product management.

I think like with many product managers, it was accidental. I started as with my career as a professional in human resource management and was an HR manager at a technology company. And I was pretty appalled at the state of the HR tools that we were using even though we were a technology company. And my manager I guess got fed up of me complaining about the state of the tools and challenged me to do something about it. And so I became the subject matter expert for the HR tools. And so that was my first foray into product management and I loved it. And then eventually that became my career.

Very nice. And what is your definition of product management?

I think the product management is the overlap of three things. One is solving a real customer problem in a delightful way. The second is doing it in a way that utilizes the technology or resources that that company uniquely has. And the third is doing it in a way that makes money for the business. And being able to do all three of those simultaneously is excelling at product management.

And you have a business background and you have a background in human resources. So people management, how have you combined all of those skills in product management?

I think there are two parts of product management. One is making sure that you have the execution, you understand the technology, you understand user behavior, those kind of things. But at the end of the day, product management is a lot about influence and influencing your stakeholders, your teams. It's influence without authority. And so you not only have to manage your own team and help them to stay motivated and engaged, but bring along a lot of other people that you don't directly manage, but you have to influence to come along the journey that you are sketching out. So I think both of those are really important. You have to make it work for the business and have people enjoy that journey, otherwise it doesn't work. You need both of those for it to be effective in the long term, otherwise it only works in the short term.

And what this is a two part question. What qualities or skills do you look for in product management and how do you influence all the stakeholders in that you are dealing with?

The skills I look for in product managers and who tend to be exceptional product managers are typically these. The first one is user insights. These people have a very keen eye or nose for both the qualitative and the quantitative parts of data. At the macro level, at the micro level, looking at industry trends, looking at their own user behavior. So they have that very keen sense of what challenges is the user facing. And like Jeff Bezos said, one of the advantages we have is, is consumers are constantly dissatisfied, so it shouldn't be too hard to find things that people are unhappy about and that we can make better. The second part of it is the product strategy, which is how do we see this unfolding over time in a way that plays to that company's strengths and direction as well as makes money for the company. So being able to layer on, we're going to do this first and then we're going to do that, and here's how the sequence works and why it works in that order. So that's the product strategy piece of it. The third is product execution. The best laid plans are useless if they can't be executed. So attention to detail, monitoring metrics, cajoling the teams, managing roadblocks. So product execution is absolutely paramount. And then finally it's influencing peer group or influencing others. Because just like you said, there's a huge amount of that in a product manager's job, whether it's the engineering team or the business team, etc. You are influencing people to come on this journey with you, but each of them has different concerns, has different goals. And as the pm, it's your responsibility to understand the different motivations and concerns of each of these different stakeholders. The legal or security person might have very different goals and concerns than the commercial person or the clinical person, et cetera. So being able to talk to each audience in the way that makes sense to them, both their goals and their concerns, is one of the ways that I know that PMs will be effective and successful in their role.

Yeah, thank you. And then you talked about like the different product development. Any strategies or any stories that you have where you can give examples of time, where execution you executed on a product or like the strategies that you've implemented.

Yeah, I Think every time you have an insight, especially if it's counterintuitive, it can be challenging to bring the team along. So a recent example was at Mind Flash, which was a learning management system, very crowded space, there are hundreds of equivalent alternatives in that area. And the traditional use of a learning management system is to train employees of the company. And when I was looking at the data of who are our biggest customers, who use the product the most, who are our happiest customers, I found that the people who were using our product the most were using us not to train their employees, but to train people outside of their company. So these were people like Dyson using us to train employees of the retailers, or ride sharing companies using us to train drivers. And so this was very counterintuitive because we had started the company on this premise that it would be an easy to use solution to train internal employees. And so especially for people who had been there for a while, it seemed counterintuitive and a scary change in direction. But being able to show the data, show the lifetime value, show the comments from these people, invite them to conversations with this new profile or ideal customer profile that we were talking to, helped to bring them along on why this made sense. Because we were such an easy to use product for the line managers, not necessarily somebody in the learning and development function. That's why we were excelling in that segment. It was also a segment that didn't have as much competition as the segment that was within the employees. So the obviously took a while, but the more that I could bring people along on that journey and help them come to that same conclusion, looking at the data being in these customer conversations, that built commitment around this new direction. And then we had buy in, not just agreement, not just asset agreement, but really buy in and conviction for why this is the right direction to go for our company.

Yeah. And then did you use qualitative measures to find that data or is it a combination of quantitative and qualitative?

Yeah, I think I am huge fan of having both quantitative and qualitative. To me, the quantitative data will usually provide what's happening and the qualitative data will provide why it's happening. So as an example here you're able to see in the quantitative data that the people who had the lowest companies, who had the lowest churn paying us the most amount of money, we're training, the most number of people, etc. Were this segment. So that came very strongly from that quantitative data, but it didn't explain why that segment was performing so highly. For us. And that's where the qualitative piece came in, where we would have conversations with these people either over zoom or even in person and understand why they were. Who are the alternatives they considered, how did they find us, why did they continue to invest and stay with our solution over any other number of alternatives, et cetera. So that was the qualitative piece that helped explain the why behind what we're seeing in the data. Also, you have different stakeholders, and each of these stakeholders look at data differently. Some are influenced more by the quantitative, some more by the qualitative. So ultimately you need to have both of them to bring along most of your stakeholders.

Yeah, that's great advice. On to why to use both and connect the dots with both. So you transitioned from products that weren't health care related and then you transitioned to Headspace and now Omida Health. How was that transition for you?

Yeah, it was a gradual transition and not necessarily one that I had planned. I was a huge fan of Headspace. I'd been a user of Headspace and an advocate of that product. I just loved that product as a consumer. And I had a meditation practice. So I would recommend that product a lot to other people. But when they started a B2B business unit that was based in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is where I'm based, that was just a match, too good to pass up. So I joined them to work on that B2B product, the Headspace for Work product that sells to HR and benefits buyers at companies that sponsor Headspace for their employees. And so it was. And Headspace was in that health and wellness category, especially for B2B. And then once I had that experience, I was able to use that. And talking about behavior change and habit formation, which is really. Even though Omada Health is a licensed healthcare provider, we're primarily in the business of behavior change and helping people with chronic disease make sustainable and make these small lifestyle changes that are sustainable. So that's again, behavior change. So it was more a focus on those core elements of behavior change, etc. That helped me continue from Headspace to Omada. And I just love what we do. It's certainly the harder path, but I believe the better path.

Yeah. Can you give us any insights that you have learned about behavior change and how to increase that from those experiences? That's something that I'm always interested in.

Yeah. My hiring manager at Omada, after I signed and before I had my first day, gave me a book called Change or Die. And the short summary of the book is that when people are told that if they don't change their lifestyle, what they eat, exercise, etc. That they will die. So hence the title change or die. So when people who have any of these diseases are given that almost an ultimate change or die, 95% of them may make a change initially, but over a period of five years will revert to their earlier behavior, like, oh my gosh, what kind of company am I signing up to join? If these are the odds that we are seeing in the industry that 95% of people will not be able to change? And that was the challenge of what we're doing, is that most people, for a variety of reasons, are unsuccessful over the long term of making these changes. And we have experts, PhDs in behavior change, we have a lot of experts at the company who work and inform the way that we do and build our programs and our product to give us the best chance of success. And the short of it is making sure that we understand the motivation for every one of our members who comes to us. Because most of them are not coming there just to decrease their cholesterol or their blood glucose or their blood pressure. Those are certainly part of it. But their overarching goal for being there is they want to be able to climb up the steps without stopping. They want to play with their kids without feeling exhausted. They want to be around for their kids or their grandkids, they want to avoid an amputation. Whatever their reason is, we call it their motivation statement. Why are they here? And making sure that we are able to connect everything that we are asking them to do back to that motivation statement that we're asking them to make small changes, not drastic changes, because they need to be able to see the results of the changes they're making. And then that leads to the sustainable lifestyle changes. So we find that to be much more impactful and effective than a lot of the other things that people may try on their own.

Yeah. And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the qualitative research, finding the motivation with why people use the product and their pain points. If we tie that back into product management.

Absolutely. In fact, at Omata, one of the product principles that we have is called the real why, why are people here? And the more that we can solve their underlying need, the more successful they will be and the more successful we will be.

Yeah. Thank you for that. In terms of your business background, tying that back into product management, what are some of the strategies keys that people without the business background in product management can it would be helpful for them.

Yeah, I think we have a lot of people on the team who don't have a formal business background. They don't have an undergrad in business administration or an mba. But what they all need to have is the curiosity of how do we make money? Because ultimately the product has to be in service of those three things we talked about earlier. Solving the users, solving the user's problem delightfully, using the capabilities and technology that the company brings to the table, as well as in a way that makes money for the company. And so you have to be able to understand how we make money, both the revenue, the costs, and ultimately to drive profitability. So that at a minimum, somebody having that curiosity and having that ability to understand how those things work is absolutely essential, less essential, whether you have a business degree or not.

And I would assume that depends on the industry as well and learning about the industry specific business orientation.

Absolutely. And I think especially in regulated industries like healthcare, like financial areas like insurance or banking, etc. That regulation brings a whole new layer of both constraints and opportunities. And so making sure that you have the humility and the curiosity to understand what the constraints are as well as what the opportunities are is absolutely key. And I think that may be true to a lesser extent, but it's true in every industry. You do want to understand how things work there and what's working well and what the opportunities are and not just coming in and breaking stuff without first having an understanding of why things are the way they are.

Good advice on that. And I want to go back to people who, product managers who want to transition into health care or healthcare professionals that want to transition into product management. What advice would you give to those people?

I think for the PMs who want to transition into health care, it's making sure that they have some. I try to find some area of commonality between what they've done in the past and what they're doing here. So in some cases it might be related to behavior change. Was one example. There are some products that we build in health technology that we want to be very consumer friendly. And so we look for people who have outstanding experience in direct to consumer applications or you see applications. In some cases we're building, we have platform pms and so we'd want very solid experience with technology. You're building things at scale, so you want to find that relevant wedge of what the company needs and what you bring to the table, as well as understanding that there are a lot of things that I don't know like the regulations, et cetera. And I want to learn. So you want to have that curiosity and humility to learn some of those constraints that will come with a new industry for people who are healthcare professionals who want to move into product management. I think the big surprise that I see is especially for clinicians who are used to giving a care plan or giving directives and then people just following it. That's not the way that product management works, because we operate with influence without authority. And so you have to really invest and work hard to bring people along, really understand people's different motivations and explain your rationale. You can't just dictate what's going to happen and expect everyone to fall in line. So I think that can be a bit of a surprise or shock to clinicians and then really watching what people actually do, because there's a huge difference between what people will say in a clinician's office and then eventually what they. They go and do in their real life. And so being cognizant of what's happening in their real life and coming up with care plans and approaches that ultimately have to work in their real life, because the time that we see somebody in the clinical clinician's office is probably 0.02% of their working life or their awake life in a year. And so the majority of the time we are blind to what's happening in their life. And so we need to make sure that we are providing them with tools and with plans that enable them to be successful even outside of that doctor's office.

Yeah, you mentioned influence without authority, and I'm assuming that a lot of new product managers have difficulty with that notion as well. So what advice or resources would you say to those that want to work on that?

One of the most powerful things I find on influence without authority is to bring people along for that journey, especially in that first person empathy, meaning these people are with you in the room when you're talking to a customer, they're hearing what you're hearing directly from your customer. So you are not the filter, you are not the layer that summarizes all this feedback. And people have questions on is there bias in just the way that you're presenting the information, et cetera. There's also just a raw human connection that comes from hearing directly from the customers on what they love about your product or other alternatives they may be considering that is hugely valuable. So I think being able to show your work and the quantitative stuff and the qualitative stuff, but really bring people into the tent and see how this is unfolding is powerful. To have them be ambassadors for this project because they believe, not just because they heard you. So you wanted to come from the heart, not just from the head. Both are important.

Yeah. Showing enthusiasm and motivates your stakeholders, I would imagine as well. I just want to take a moment. If anyone has a question from the live audience, please feel free to type in the chat. But meanwhile, I do have another question for you, Randir. You mentioned before building at scale. How do you recommend building at scale for any product, specifically products that are behavior based? Because I would imagine those are more difficult.

I think one of the most expensive lessons is to build something and then realize that it doesn't work. And because building in code is one of the slowest ways to learn. And so one of the things that we encourage our teams to do is to learn as much as possible without code. So we do a lot of no code testing with prototypes, with all kinds of things that are very rapid to build and throw away because that helps us get much better conviction on what's working and what's not working. But more importantly, we learn why certain things work or not. Most often the principles behind it are more important in that learning than the specifics of what worked or not worked. And once you have conviction there, then you can decide what you want to build, because otherwise you build these things for massive scale and the demand never materializes, and then that's a giant waste. At the same time, if you build too quickly and too gingerly, things can fall over. So you want to build, be able to test quickly and lightly in a way that is not scalable and deliberately so. Because there you're optimizing for learning and you're optimizing for speed. But once you have conviction, that's where you want to take the time to invest, to build for scale. So you do the instrumentation, do the failover, do the monitoring, do the automated testing. But because you have that conviction that this is much more likely to succeed, you're willing to make that investment. There's also periodically you just have to go back and rebuild. It's impossible to build in year one. For year 10, you might build for year two to three, but by year five, you might need to just completely re architect what you've built because of the scale that you have. I love problems of growth because those are much better than other problems. But. But there are still challenges and one has to invest in them to make sure that they are scalable and that your system continues to work. There's zero fun in having great new functionality if your core system is slow or falls over, et cetera. So you always want to make sure that whatever capability you have works reliably, works fast, works scalably. But before going and adding additional functionality,

do you have any specific examples that you can share with problems of scale that come to mind?

We did see, we did a project at a company called IFI where the premise was that we would have unlimited photos and videos stored. So this is probably about 10 years ago, before Google Photos was as ubiquitous as it is now. And the key question was whether people would be okay with us recompressing their files to be not the original size, but still high quality for a much lower fee. So $50 flat fee for the year. And before we went and did all of that work, we wanted to make sure that people were going to be open to this. So we did focus groups, we did fake door tests, we did all kinds of tests to ensure that that core premise was solid, that people would not find a difference between the original image and our recompressed but high quality images. You could still print large 8 by 10 pictures if you wanted to, and you couldn't tell the difference. And we did a B test to ask people to even spot the difference. And once we had high conviction around that, that's when we went and built the system that did all this work. But till then it was all low tech and just enough for us to be able to run the test that we needed. But then later on, we built it out for scale.

That makes sense. Theoretically. It saves a lot of resources as well. My next question is on leadership. You've had a lot of leadership titles in the past, and currently, what would you recommend for those that are wanting to go into leadership careers from the early start of their professional life?

I think the first question for me is to ask the real why? Why do you want it? Is it the title? Is it the money? Is it the influence? Is it managing a team, growing a team, whatever the underlying reasons might be? Because sometimes people imagine what it might be to be a leader, to be a people manager, etc. And they get that experience and they get both the good and the not good of that role. And sometimes after a few months or maybe after a couple of years, they realize that's actually not what drives them and so they go back to IC path or a different path. So I think making sure that you understand the motivations behind it and being open to different ways to have that to achieve that goal is Great. So as an example, there are people who say I want to be a people manager. Why do you want to be a people manager? Well, because I want to be able to do things beyond writing feature stories or user stories, etc. Well, there might be other ways to do that. If you want to just get out of writing user stories but still be close to a product, there may be other roles that allow you to do that. You don't have to just be a people manager. So I think being clear on the goals and being open to other alternatives to achieve that goal versus just going thinking of a relatively rigid career ladder of PM or associate pm, pm, senior pm, group product manager, et cetera or director can be helpful to really enjoy that journey rather than zigzag around. Oh, that's not what I really thought. The other advantage of PMS is we have the influence without authority, so we have the, the ability to know fairly close to what is it like to lead a project, what is it like to work with all these different cross functional stakeholders. And so you really get a nice taste of different things that hopefully are easier to inform what the next step is in the career.

And you do have that human resources or human development background. Do you have any assessments that you recommend that people can utilize just to get to know themselves a little bit more and their motivators?

Yeah, well there are different ones that peak from different points in time. The current one seems to be enneagram, seems to be very popular right now. And I think our teams have done various tests over the assessments over the last few years. But the key is that the whole team does the same test, whatever that test might be, because what you really want is that self awareness of what are my strengths and development opportunities, but also to be able to see that in the others on the team because that's how you can assemble the best team and have that awareness of why people are behaving, ourselves included, why are we behaving the way we are. So that's the, that would be just from personality perspective, making sure that we have that. The second piece is making sure that you work together really well as a team. And so five Dysfunctions of a Team is a great way to do an assessment of how your team is performing. And then you can go from there to say how is that team performing? And then that team can go through its own stages of forming, norming, storming, etc. And to performing. But a lot of it will come from that team itself defining what does success look like, what are the norms they want to have and then executing against that. So investing in that time for the team to form and get to that performing stage is really key. That takes the individual assessments and helps to transform it into a high performing team. And then we talked about the more specific craft specific things that we talked about earlier of user insights, both qual and quant product strategy, those kind of things which are more craft focused.

Very good advice. We do have one question from an audience member. Are there any PM tests or assessment that can show how good of a product manager you are?

Yeah, there aren't any standardized assessments that I'm aware of, like similar to the MVTI or any of the standardized instruments that one might have for personality tests. But there are a lot of assessments that various people have published. So Reforge has their assessment for PM competencies. There are a lot of articles From Google and PMs at other places that have the 8 or 12 traits that people look for. But in all the ones I've seen they follow the same, largely the same four quadrants that we talked about here of user insights, product strategy, product execution and influencer managing influencers or your peer groups. So it's usually some combination of those. And usually what I'll do is I'll write out what are the behavior characteristics within each of those four buckets and then ask the PM themselves to do a self review on how they think they're doing and then also do a parallel 360 review. So what the people that work for them, what their peers, and then the manager think of them as well. So then that becomes a great exercise both for self awareness and to get additional inputs into what are the areas that are strengths and almost superpowers and what are areas that are development opportunities. It's very rare to find any 1pm Excelling across all four of those areas. What we do want to find is that you have at least one or two areas where you are excelling and then you are hitting at least the minimum competencies in the other areas.

Those are great strategies. Wonderful advice there. Do we have time for one more question? I know we're a little bit over. Thank you. Where do you see the future of product management? Especially now? It's a little bit scary with how things are right now with layoffs and higher freezes. What's your take on the future?

I think the PM function is a very high leverage function, meaning 1pm can have a significant impact on the business, especially when they have those four elements. And the reason that I say that is because they should be able to identify opportunities that are not just cost cutting for the business, but more importantly our revenue generating, our margin generating for the business. They should be able to prioritize those opportunities, not just say, is this one ROI positive or not? But what is the relative size of the opportunity and therefore which opportunities should we go after, in what order, and are able to use technology and the assets that the company already has or can have access to by renting software, et cetera, to get that benefit as quickly as possible. So I would encourage PMs to really lean into the opportunities or the challenges that the business may be dealing with and be able to pick pivot to saying, rather than saying, oh, I can't execute on the roadmap that I had a year ago, you look at the new reality and say, great, this is the challenge that my business is facing. How can I bring my skills to bear and help the business navigate this time of transition that we're certainly going to be in for a few months?

Yeah, it seems like a great way to utilize your skill set for the company. And I guess we'll end on any advice that you have for people that want to transition into product managers, management and already experienced product managers.

So for people who are trying to get into product management, I would suggest trying to keep one of the two levers the same, which is if you are in a particular industry and, and you're in a different function, let's say you might be in marketing or sales, try and stay within that industry and move your function. Trying to change both the industry and the function at the same time can be a challenge. The ideal is to be able to do that transition within your existing company. That may not always be possible. Those are great for companies that are growing rapidly, et cetera, where they have a lot of internal opportunities and you may be able to change, but if you are at company like that, being able to transition within that company is certainly much better, much lower risk for you and the company. The next best alternative is keep the domain of the industry the same if you can, and then just change your function. And the least good option is to change both function and industry at the same time. Just because you're going to have a lot of learning to do and very little of the old context that you can just transition over. For people who are already in product management and looking for their next move, I would start with what, what are you trying to look for in that in the next role? And then be open to having conversations with people within the company. To see if you can craft a role or apply for a role that meets those goals. And if that's not possible within your company, then making sure that you're finding something that looks for these that hits those goals outside. The key is to make sure that you are getting you're getting drawn to something exciting rather than you're running away from something that you don't like. You may not like your manager, you may not like the current role, whatever it is that there's always some combination of and push. But you ideally want the draw of that new role to be much greater than the push of your existing role. And there's obviously a lot of emotion with both positive and negative with finding a new role. So the more objective you can be with Here are the things that I'm looking for and almost like the interviewer has a scorecard for assessing the candidates you want to have as the candidate. A scorecard for assessing the different opportunities that you have to make sure that you give yourself the best chance of success at every new role.

Wonderful advice. I love that advice with making sure that you highlight the motivation to go to the next career or next position. It's very important to keep that behavior or to keep it to keep yourself motivated to and finally, I just want to end There is a Slack channel for product managers in healthcare. If there is any way you can share that for us, that's a wonderful way to connect with other product managers in the healthcare realm and then we'll share that in the posting today. But thank you so much Randir for your time. Wonderful answers and I've learned so much from you just in this short time.

All right, thanks for having me hen the Slack channel is healthcareproduct in the PMHQ workspace. So look forward to seeing people who are on the call as well as many others who might see it later. But look forward to seeing more people in healthcareproduct Slack Channel.

Thank you so much and thank you for your time.

Have a great day. Thanks and bye.

Thank you. Bye everyone.