🏥 How to advocate your design the most effectively and keep your stakeholders engaged #OTR
Featuring Jess Cogswell, VP of Design at Rume Health
⭐️ Off The Record
I keep chatting with our guests after the end of the recording and share with you exclusive insights from our conversation into their work and the challenges they face!
Learn about design in healthcare, how to advocate your design the most effectively and keep your stakeholders engaged!
Today’s mix ↓
🏥 Has design always been embedded in healthcare?
🙌 Stop banging your head against the wall with people that don’t understand what you do!
🧠 What does it look like to have C-level executives who value design?
🏥 Has design always been embedded in healthcare?
Both! Design has always been a part of the healthcare industry; however, user interface and user experience are poor! Players know that whether they invest in design or not, customers still depend on the service provided.
Nevertheless, the covid-19 crisis helped spark a change in mentalities from both customers and service providers. Customers are looking for flexibility, ease of use, and transparency while service providers leverage digital technologies to match these expectations.
New companies including Rume Health but also Neurax and Lemon Health redefine what healthcare feels like with enhanced user experience! Focused on understanding their target audience and how they could appeal to them, these companies have the potential to break into a huge market estimated in the U.S. at US$ 23.8 billion in 2021 (Nova One, 2021). The US market is expected to hit US$ 309.9 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.1% from 2022 to 2030.
How do you define your target audience? Are older generations also interested in more modern services?
Harder than expected to define. Indeed, there is no rule. Older generations are as interested in changing their relationship to health as younger ones. Indeed, older generations need, if not more than us, a simplified user experience to access healthcare. A poor user experience can be detrimental and take them away from receiving appropriate care. Health is universal, and therefore no target audience, in particular, has been focused on!
💡 Understanding what your interlocutor is driven by is the only way to advocate your design effectively!
Advocating design can take many forms, and not all of them will work. Your utmost priority is to understand your interlocutor. Find what will make your interlocutor tick and what he values. Do your homework!
Tip 1: To strengthen your arguments, partner with other departments to gather the positive externalities that your work created.
If you are a designer, reach out to the sales department and ask if selling has been easier.; reach out to the customer success team and gather user feedback, if the number of reports decreased, etc.
Tip 2: To advocate your design and keep all stakeholders engaged, you must show progress! It is the single most effective metric!
If your project stretches over two months, is it necessary for you to send an update every week? No, not necessarily, but keeping them invested.
Sometimes, it might not work, but being transparent and keeping your enlarged team updated is paramount to nurturing a healthy design relationship in your company.
Tip 3: If they can’t see it, let it go. They are not the right people to work with.
It makes sense for design, but it also applies to any situation! Do your homework!
🙌 Stop banging your head against the wall with people that don’t understand what you do!
Focus on your target audience!
If a category of customer is not yet ready to embrace change, move on. It is better to delight customers that already value your service and invest your time and energy in them. Don’t spend your money trying to reach a wider audience at a premium cost. When they will be ripped, you will acquire these customers at a fraction of the present costs.
Remember the 80/20 ratio, always start by acquiring customers for which you predict the lowest CAC/LTV. Over time, you will optmise your acquisition costs by leveraging the community that you truly delight.
This is the message Jess shared based on her experience at Rume. Rume Health is a platform that connects doctors and patients. Jess puts it simply, work with people that value what you do. Rume hires and works with like-minded individuals. For instance, doctors are the image of their service, hence the importance of having shared values from the start.
Some doctors embrace change, others don’t. An old-school traditional doctor that doesn't want anything to do with telehealth and would prefer to work in a brick-and-mortar office would not be a good fit. Focus on the doctors you delight.
On the patient side, the same logic applies. Focus on one or two target audience and let word of mouth do the rest for non-targeted customers.
🧠 What does it look like to have C-level executives who value design?
Rume Health has five co-founders, two of them have a design background. In consequence, design is part of the DNA of the company and is embedded in the leadership from the top down.
It also means that they made branding a priority. Remember “your brand is the single most useful investment you can make”.
Fyi another co-founder is a doctor. Overall, the best-performing companies always find the striking balance between creativity and efficiency, in other words, exploration and exploitation. We can stretch this concept and talk about organisational ambidexterity (OA) which refers to a firm’s ability to invest in both exploration and exploration whether simultaneously or consecutively.
OA has been positively linked to increased performance, innovation, growth, and survival, and numerous scholars have emphasised the need for firms to be ambidextrous. However, OA can be difficult to achieve and comes with challenges and tensions that stem from the varying, contradictory and fundamentally incompatible demands of exploitation and exploration. OA mandates that firms maintain a level of balance between competing objectives of exploitation and exploration, efficiency and flexibility, alignment, and adaptability.