Episode #1 - Ben Foster, Co-founder of Prodify and Former CPO of Whoop

Written By Omar Mousa

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Description

Ben Foster, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Prodify and Co-author of Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management. Prodify is a product advisory firm that help early-stage companies find product-market(-pricing) fit, or growth-stage companies scale their product team and processes efficiently, or established companies maintain a comfortable lead through vision-led product management principles.

Ben is also the Former Chief Product Officer of WHOOP. A health tech wearable company that has raised over $400M to date and has a post money valuation of $3.6B. WHOOP is a fitness and health technology company known for its wearable fitness tracker and accompanying mobile app subscription. The WHOOP Strap is a wrist-worn device designed to monitor various aspects of an individual's health and fitness. These wearables are used by millions (including celebrity athletes, including swimmer Michael Phelps, basketball player LeBron James, and golfer Tiger Woods.

In our conversation, we discuss:

  • How to leverage data generated from wearables in a way to drive consumer engagement

  • Whoops pivot from a B2B product to a B2C product

  • How did Whoop cross the chasm from early adopters to more mainstream consumers

  • Experiences from being a product manager at Ebay and how to build a marketplace product

  • What was it like working with Marty Cagen

  • What is Prodify and how does Prodify help it’s clients

  • Top 3 areas in which product management organizations struggle

  • Conducting internal audits of of product management organizations

  • Advice for product leaders in healthtech or product managers thinking about entering healthtech?

www.concepttocare.com

Show Notes

Where to find Ben Foster:

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Where to find Angela and Omar:

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Referenced:

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Omar Mousa: Today, we are talking to Ben Foster, co founder and executive chairman of Prodify, Prodify is a product advisory firm that helps early stage companies find product market fit, grow stage companies, scale their product team and process these efficiently established companies, maintain a comfortable lead over competitive products, or help them decide when to sunset a product and innovate to create a replacement through vision led product management.

[00:00:24] Omar Mousa: Ben is also the former chief product officer, a health tech wearable company that has raised over 400Million to date and has a post money valuation of 3. 6Billion loop is a fitness and health technology company known for its wearable fitness tracker and accompanying mobile app subscription. The strap is a risk worn device designed to monitor various aspects of an individual's health and fitness.

[00:00:45] Omar Mousa: These wearables are used by millions, including celebrity athletes, swimmer, Michael Phelps, basketball player, LeBron James, and golfer Tiger Woods. Ben, welcome to concept to care.

[00:00:56] Ben Foster: All right. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:00] Omar Mousa: So how did you become chief product officer at whoop?

[00:01:02] Ben Foster: Yeah. Kind of an interesting story. You know, I was initially an advisor to the company and this dates all the way back to 2014 when the company was really small, just a few different people and what kind of like felt like a garage, you know, and so it was just that early stage of building out the product, thinking about what the.

[00:01:18] Ben Foster: Early conceptual designs were going to be, et cetera. And then when the company really needed to focus on growth and really kind of like scaling the organization, especially post COVID, we reconnected and the company said, Hey, we'd love to have you join as a chief product officer for us and really help us to kind of like scale the organization and the rest is history.

[00:01:38] Omar Mousa: That's incredible. Can you tell us a little bit about whoop and the product organization in general? Like what was the high level product vision and strategy? How'd that evolve over time?

[00:01:49] Ben Foster: Yeah, sure. You know, I think that the product. Organization obviously evolved quite a bit along with the company itself, you know, as the markets changing or as the company scaling the way that the team is going to work together and the kinds of people that you're going to need is just going to change over time as well.

[00:02:05] Ben Foster: Right? So, you know, as, as the market evolved and, and, you know, especially with COVID, it really had a pretty significant influence on the company as well. It was amazing. How far the company got in those early years with a really, really small and excellent product team. I was just really impressed by the work that they did.

[00:02:22] Ben Foster: You know, when I joined the company was in the hundreds of millions of valuation and the product team was five people, you know, and that was including product management, design, you know, data sciences, like you name it. It was kind of like an amazing what they were able to achieve with that team. When I joined the company was in this explosive.

[00:02:40] Ben Foster: Area of growth and we grew the team just to put it in context from five people in product to 50 in 15 months. So, you know, 10 X growth of the organization. You got people who we just interviewed, who just joined, who are now interviewing the next group of people to join as well. Right? So it's just kind of like an interesting hyper growth stage to be in.

[00:03:00] Ben Foster: And it was kind of like an exciting time, but through that, the, the organization, you know, obviously needed to evolve. You have that middle layer of management and, you know, you sort of like. Define what the goals are going to be for these teams so that they can work a little bit more autonomously, et cetera.

[00:03:13] Ben Foster: So, you know, there was that, and then you yourself just mentioned the product vision and strategy and how that kind of like changed as, you know, as you make progress towards whatever you've laid out initially, the reality is before you arrive. At that goal that you set for yourself by that time, you've already moved the goalposts on yourself, right?

[00:03:30] Ben Foster: It's kind of like you're chasing the rainbow. And so that vision and that strategy evolved along with the company as well. And in the very beginning, I think, you know, it was really more summarized by being like the go to. Coaching platform for optimizing performance. I think that's really, you know, what it was about, but what's interesting is what performance meant or for whom we were doing that.

[00:03:51] Ben Foster: That's the part that really kind of like changed over those years. So in the beginning it was, you know, working with professional athletes or, you know, professional sports teams or NCAA teams and things like that. And it was really kind of like. Mostly focused on athletics, but as you start to really nail that market and you do a really good job, you know, with those folks, you start to go down market and now suddenly instead of professional athletes, you're talking about people who are just really into fitness and as you go from people who are really into fitness to those people that are really into health or really into accountability.

[00:04:21] Ben Foster: It just sort of like, you know, grows the market by these factors of 10 or so, you know, every single time. And so you get these quarters of magnitude changes in the size of the market, in the size of the team. And that, of course, involves what your overall strategy is going to be and how the team's going to be organized to go make that happen.

[00:04:37] Angela Suthrave: Thanks for sharing that. I wanted to double click on the five people, very special team to 50 people in 15 months. So Omar and I have both been fortunate to be part of high growth organizations where we've experienced similar. And I think that the challenge with that sort of growth. is how do you maintain the culture and how do you make sure that the 6th, 7th, 8th, 49th person that you hire are just as good as the first five?

[00:05:06] Angela Suthrave: And so were there any lessons that you learned there or any tips that you can share on how you were able to hire so quickly when you need someone? To start yesterday, while still making sure that they were the right person with the right skill set, what the right culture fit

[00:05:23] Ben Foster: Yeah, you know, it's a great question and it's a difficult one for a lot of companies that are experiencing that same level of hyper growth. You know, I've been through this multiple times, whether it was at eBay or Opower. I'm sure we'll talk about those other companies, you know, throughout this podcast as well.

[00:05:37] Ben Foster: But the, the thing that you, you have to do is you have to make compromises in some ways, but you never want to compromise on certain elements, right? So you don't want to compromise on the. Uh, the level of interest that the person has, you know, you don't want to hire somebody who doesn't care about what it is that you're trying to solve or what you're trying to do for your customers.

[00:06:00] Ben Foster: Uh, you don't want to compromise on integrity. You don't want to compromise on intelligence or ability to communicate. So you kind of look at those core skills that really, you know, make somebody great. Um, and you say, look, we want to hire these amazing, excellent people who are going to be not only. Not pulling the bar down, but are in fact actually elevating it because each person is bringing something to the table that the rest of the team doesn't already have.

[00:06:26] Ben Foster: Right. So, you know, what it means when I think about hiring for values, for example, it's not that they're conforming. So the rest of the team, the way that it is, I mean, that's how bro cultures and things like that develop, right? What you want is, is to say, what are the ways in which we're maybe not.

[00:06:41] Ben Foster: Hitting the goals that we have or the aspirations that we have when it comes to values and how does this next person that we're going to bring in create that team of N plus one that's even better than the team of N that we have right now, you know, how, how can other people learn from this next person who's going to be hired?

[00:06:58] Ben Foster: And so you ask those types of questions to say, what is this person going to bring that the rest of the team doesn't have, how are we going to win together with a larger team when we have greater diversity of experiences and things like that? So. You know, on the one hand, as you're trying to grow really quickly, you don't have the time to go through a hundred candidates just to choose one, right?

[00:07:17] Ben Foster: But as you're growing, you can also say, I can hire people who have maybe even more specialized experience because that's going to have the multiplicative effect of the rest of the people. As long as I've built a culture in which one person can learn from another.

[00:07:29] Angela Suthrave: going back to, you know, the strategy that you were talking about, we know that data that whoop was collecting is a big part of that strategy from the device. And so can you talk a little bit about, you know, using the healthcare data, how you were able to apply it, what you used it for and how that fueled the growth.

[00:07:47] Ben Foster: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting, you know, whoop captures this amazing volume of data, and that's been the case since the very beginning, you know, every time that. Somebody has this device on their wrist. It's capturing all these different signals and it's capturing a hundred different data points per second, per signal per person, right?

[00:08:04] Ben Foster: So there's this, this wealth of data that's getting sort of, you know, pulled together. And what's great about that is you can do all kinds of analytics, either in real time or post hoc, et cetera. So there's a lot of really interesting kind of like insights and things like that that can be pulled out of it.

[00:08:17] Ben Foster: But. You also, you have this mountain of data that's so large that you actually need to have really good teams available for being able to process that and thinking through what does it mean? You know, if I get light signals from a PPG signal, you know, 100 times a second, like, what does that translate to in terms of things that are of real meaning?

[00:08:36] Ben Foster: Heart rate, heart rate, variability, you know, stress, et cetera. So how do we kind of like convert that raw signal into something that's actually meaningful and ideally even actionable. So there's a lot of work that kind of goes into that. And I think that you don't want to just collect a bunch of data on the one side.

[00:08:50] Ben Foster: I see a lot of companies that do this. Stockpile data, basically, but then they're not doing that middle part of converting it into something that's really meaningful for people. But as you have this mountain of data, you can build an R and D kind of capability layered on top. And it's really interesting because you often don't know.

[00:09:07] Ben Foster: What the value of that data is going to be until you capture it, you start to analyze and you say, Oh, wow, you know, I'm really so happy that we got that. Right. So if you look at the data that was being captured, you know, from, from whoop, you know, initially it was all fitness oriented people who were, who were wearing the device.

[00:09:24] Ben Foster: And now you get a lot of people who are interested in health and things like that as well. But what's great is we have all the data from the people who had been using the product for years. Before, and we can see these kind of like longitudinal patterns that emerge, you know, as people use the product for years.

[00:09:38] Ben Foster: So how does aging have an influence on sleep or, you know, what are the kinds of actions that people can take that help them to sleep better? And when you pile it all up, you realize that whoop actually probably has more sleep data. Then any sleep lab that is out there in the country, in fact, probably 100 or 1000 times as you know, as many data points in terms of sleeps, and they're not in the lab environment there in the real world, and you can see what the behaviors are that people had that led to whether they had, you know, good sleep or not.

[00:10:06] Ben Foster: And so the ability to kind of like get these correlations to kind of like learn what what these causal relationships are and then use that to try to coach people towards better outcomes when it comes to their health or fitness, etcetera, is something that's that's uniquely. Um, You know, a, a feature or a capability that whoop can create for customers because it's sort of like stockpiled this data.

[00:10:26] Ben Foster: And I think that's the, that's the basis of everything that's going on right now with AI and machine learning and things like that as well, is you don't know what those patterns are that you're necessarily going to see, but once you have enough data and you can sort of like plug the right people onto it or machines onto it, et cetera, you can sort of like extract these really interesting kind of like concepts that lead to new, new innovation and new value that you can deliver for customers.

[00:10:48] Ben Foster: Mm

[00:10:48] Omar Mousa: it's an interesting point. You bring up just like making the data very actionable. It's a very hard and fine line you draw and it's very hard thing to do contextualizing why we collected this data in the first place and why is this information value to you? And it's very specific towards the end user, right?

[00:11:04] Omar Mousa: Like in a clinical setting, doctors are very used to the very data dense information. They are trained to discern what do I do with this information? And I feel like for the consumer, it's like often you're looking at the data in two different ways, how I articulated to the end user or the patient or the, the, the consumer on the direct to consumer side, it's like vastly different than like if someone were analyzing it on the other side for like a more clinical purpose.

[00:11:30] Omar Mousa: And the other thing there is just like. You know, R and D teams. Yeah, that inclination to just, uh, let's just grab it all. Let's do it all. And then let's figure it out. And your point to like, you know, you might not really know until you start to see that data over time with the insights are and how to make drive a lot of value there.

[00:11:49] Omar Mousa: But, you know, it's having the intuition to be like, okay, We've grabbed all this. Let's dial it back because with each, you know, incremental piece of data that I might be passively gathering or like intentionally gathering from the user. It's like it's it's additional friction, right? So we gotta, we gotta make sure that we're very intentional and purposeful.

[00:12:10] Omar Mousa: And I, so super hard thing to do. And you guys clearly did it really well.

[00:12:14] Angela Suthrave: Yeah, and if I, if you don't mind, I'd love to hear a little bit more about, okay, now in the journey You have all this data, you've been able to make it like you've been able to generate insights from it to then ultimately facilitate behavior change, right? And so can you

[00:12:32] Angela Suthrave: talk more about how you show that to consumers and how you were able to sort of cross that very difficult chasm to get to

[00:12:42] Angela Suthrave: behavior change? 

[00:12:42] Ben Foster: hmm. Yeah. You know, there's, you mentioned crossing the chasm, which is this whole, you know, world within product of how you reach the, the kind of like broad market versus just the early adopters who have very different orientations. And I think we, you know, we can talk about that as well, but I kind of wanted to double click on this first.

[00:13:00] Ben Foster: Part that you're talking about as well, which is, you know, how do you kind of like empower users to change their behavior? And, you know, it's really interesting because obviously in the, in the arena of sports, you can just say, okay, we'll do this differently, or here's a good technique, you know, et cetera.

[00:13:16] Ben Foster: Now with whoop, it was always sort of like about how you can. Use the other 23 hours of the day when you're not working out, when you're not training, when you're not playing the game, you know, et cetera, to try to make yourself better at what you're doing to optimize your performance and whoop was able to transcend beyond sports and go into this world of health as well.

[00:13:38] Ben Foster: Now, what's really interesting. I think there's a, there's a really important point here, which is that, is it a healthcare device as defined by the FDA? No, it's not, but does it actually still help people with. Managing their health. Absolutely. Right. And there's a huge difference between saying this device is being used to tell you whether you're sick.

[00:13:59] Ben Foster: Like, you know, this is a diagnostic tool, or this is something that that is going to help cure you in the case that you have some ailment, etc. Like, those are very different kinds of things. And the FDA should be the Really rigorous with all that stuff and making sure that there's no sort of like snake oil salesmen that are out there and, you know, things like that as well, right?

[00:14:18] Ben Foster: Like you got to make sure that these things are proven with clinical trials and everything else. But one of the features that we were really proud of when I was at whoop was this, this creation of this health report that could be provided to doctors. Right. And so you could kind of download this PDF that would take all those data points and be something that you could share.

[00:14:36] Ben Foster: With a doctor, right? So not saying that there's any diagnostic element to this. You're not saying that there's any sort of like, you know, treatment that's related to this, but you are saying this is a thing that empowers individuals to take control of their own, you know, health and to have the right kinds of conversations with the right parties who can do those types of things, right?

[00:14:54] Ben Foster: And if it can be helpful in that regard. Or if it can be helpful for you yourself to change your own behaviors, because you start to see the patterns yourself, then you can be empowered as a patient to kind of take control and basically like care for your health, which is sort of different than like this thing that we've defined in the U.

[00:15:13] Ben Foster: S. called health care, which is all about fixing a particular problem with the body, you know, et cetera. And, and it's almost like waiting for the machine to break and then fixing it. Yeah. As opposed to just sort of like the routine maintenance that you should be doing to prevent those things from taking place in, you know, in the first case.

[00:15:27] Ben Foster: So, you know, if you think about the relationship between mental health and sleep, like obviously people who sleep better are able to better sort of like, you know, manage their mental health symptoms and things like that. So if whoop can help people to understand those things that are getting in the way of their sleep, like, hey, when you're having alcohol late at night, your body's responding really, really badly to that.

[00:15:46] Ben Foster: You know, have fewer drinks or have them earlier in the day. It's going to help you to sleep better. Okay. That's going to like actually have this influence on, on your health. It's not to say that it's a treatment tool for anything like that, but it's an empowerment tool for those people. And I think that it's really important to kind of think about data as being a thing that, that can really help to do that.

[00:16:02] Ben Foster: So you get to your point about crossing the chasm. I think that if you, if you take that concept and you sort of like crank it up to 11, right. It's all about how do you empower more people in a broader arena to kind of like. Have more agency for themselves to better kind of like manage their health to better sort of like, you know, perform whatever performance means to them performance as an athlete performance as a dad performance as a spouse, you know, whatever it is, those kinds of, you know, performance just for yourself.

[00:16:31] Ben Foster: Like you want to sleep. Well, you want to lose weight. You want to, you know, be a healthier individual. This is a tool that's going to help you to achieve those kinds of things. And I think that. Yeah. It's okay that data is used to sort of like provide that empowerment to people without necessarily saying it has to be this FDA cleared, you know, thing that's over here that kind of like falls into this category of like quote unquote healthcare.

[00:16:52] Omar Mousa: described a couple applications for wearables and the data. Produced by those wearables, some more clinical focus. You mentioned FDA and then some not. So whoop is most predominantly known for being in the sports tech category. How did that evolve over time to get to that category and then to win in that category?

[00:17:12] Ben Foster: So there's this really interesting dynamic that happens with any kind of like technology startup company, which is you may have ambitions to go really broad. From the very beginning in a market, but you got to ask yourself, what's the best way of actually getting that right? We're going to have to find success in this smaller niche category.

[00:17:30] Ben Foster: And then we're going to have to parlay that success to then broaden what the market is and then go find product market fit there. And as you get closer and closer to product market fit, or you nail it, What does every company do? They say, okay, well, how can I grow beyond the market that I already have?

[00:17:44] Ben Foster: And you redefine the market again, you sort of like keep repeating this process. You know, I think a very clear example that a lot of people might be familiar with, even if you haven't used whoop or heard of it or anything like that would be like Tesla, you know, back in the day, way in the early stages, right?

[00:17:58] Ben Foster: They created the roadster. And it was like this, okay. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, vehicle for the ultra rich to kind of like have this, you know, high performance vehicle that would, you know, have zero to a hundred and, you know, God knows what amount of time it was and they knew that like their market for hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a car was relatively small.

[00:18:18] Ben Foster: Like you're not going to get to like the kind of valuations that Tesla has today by just selling that car. But that's not to say that they made a mistake somehow by starting there. Right. What they did is they had this early adopter group. That didn't care about how much they spent on a car. In fact, probably the more cost, the more interesting it was to them is my guess.

[00:18:37] Ben Foster: Right. And they take that and they have now this test bet to kind of like try different things with battery technology, see what it looks like in the real world, start to, you know, collect some data that helps with self driving and, you know, things like this. Right. So you kind of like, you nailed it. And then you say, okay, how do we take that?

[00:18:52] Ben Foster: And then they created the model S. Right. And this model S is 130, 000 car, you know, et cetera. Right. And so it was more accessible to more people. It kind of like was something you could compare to like an Audi S7 or, you know, something along those lines. And, and that was a bigger market. And then they sort of like find a way to win there.

[00:19:09] Ben Foster: They start to build more of a brand that becomes more recognizable, et cetera. And eventually you get into like, you know, the model three, et cetera. And now you've got like this, you know, car that's competing with a BMW three. And it's, you know, it's sort of. It is, you know, so broadly accessible to so many people, right?

[00:19:26] Ben Foster: And that's how you finally get to this valuation. So there's a lot of companies that sort of need to follow that same model. And whoop certainly did that as well. So the model for whoop was let's go sell to these elite teams. Let's go sell these elite athletes. Right. And the reason that that works in that case was because they are the group that is aspirational for the next group that you want to go after.

[00:19:48] Ben Foster: So who are the people that the real bad ass fitness folks are sort of like, you know, following us, like the, you know, the elite athletes, LeBron James's and, you know, things like that. Right. So now they're really interested in the product because of who was using it. And now the people who are interested in sort of like their health become interested in the people who are more fitness driven and the people who are more just like, Hey, I just want to be accountable.

[00:20:07] Ben Foster: Well, I see all these healthy people around me, you know, using whoop. Those are the kinds of people that I want to be as well. And what that is interesting about that is it also creates this ladder. Of engagement, right? Where you can say somebody could use whoop as purely a tool for accountability. I want to make sure that I go to bed on time.

[00:20:25] Ben Foster: I want to make sure that I wake up on time. I'm going to follow the advice of the WHOOP coach, and it's going to, you know, tell me what kinds of things I need to do. I'm going to record whether I had alcohol. I'm going to record whether I took this kind of medication. I'm going to record whether I did yoga, etc.

[00:20:38] Ben Foster: And I'm going to see whether those things kind of like improve or sort of like affect these things. That's really what I want to use it for. And there's certain people that fall totally into that category. There are other people, though, who say, that's a means to an end. What I really care about is the health outcomes that come from this.

[00:20:51] Ben Foster: I want to live longer, right? I want to be healthier. I want to manage my immunity, you know, et cetera. So they sort of want empowerment in that regard. And they know that if they're accountable to themselves with these behaviors, that that will lead to better health outcomes. And so that's great. Then other people will say, no, no, no, no, that's, that's, that's cool.

[00:21:08] Ben Foster: I like that, but that's a means to an end. I really care about my fitness and how I perform at the gym. And I care about. My, you know, you know, my strength or I care about my intensity of my workouts, et cetera. Right. So those people will look at everything else in terms of health as a means to an end, to allow them to do better when they're at the gym, when they're riding their bikes around, you know, Arlington or, you know, whatever, where I live.

[00:21:30] Ben Foster: Tons of like, you know, bike dads, you know, going around a hundred miles a day, you know, that kind of thing. And then those people, you know, could move up and say, actually I care about my race times And I want to go faster on my bike and I want to, you know, kick ass at this next race So you now have this kind of ladder of engagement that's built but it's almost like a backwards Way of thinking about broadening the market.

[00:21:51] Ben Foster: So you start with those people that are the elite, you kind of move downstream, downstream, downstream, because each of those is aspirational, but you're showing how you can drive these kinds of outcomes at these higher levels. And you keep kind of like moving further and further down market. And I think the same kind of opportunities exist for a lot of companies within the healthcare space.

[00:22:06] Omar Mousa: You described a really interesting sort of pivot, right? Like you said, you want to get the people using it so that the other people that you want to use it also will be interested in using it. And so it's sort of like a pivot from B2B to B2C, you know, in terms of the actual product, like in the design of the product, like what had to change to drive that change across the organization?

[00:22:29] Omar Mousa: What are some of the key differences in strategy and execution?

[00:22:33] Ben Foster: So it does change as you try to cross the chasm, if you will. Right. And crossing the chasm, which is, you know, for, for anybody who, who doesn't aware of what that really translates to is saying you can be really successful with this early group of people, because there is this set of folks for whom they, they've been desperate for a solution like yours, you go to market with it initially, and you're kind of like initially surprised or like, you're really happy.

[00:22:58] Ben Foster: You're like, Oh, we nailed it. Right. Like. We got people who are buying the product, you know, they're telling their friends about it. They love it, you know, et cetera. And then it's like, it just stalls and you're kind of like, well, what's going on there. And the reason is because those things that are appealing to the early adopter or the kinds of things that they're willing to put up with for a certain kind of product.

[00:23:17] Ben Foster: Are very different than what it is for the mass market, right? So great example of this in today's world that everybody's probably familiar with would be these things that are like, you know, internet of things, IOT devices in your home, right? There's like, you know, these people who are all geeked out with, you know, these like light switches that can be controlled with their iPhone and, you know, all this other kind of stuff.

[00:23:36] Ben Foster: Right. And, and like the initial group. Of those people like they loved that they could tinker with it and the fact that they had to even like know some coding and things like that to even make it happen made it almost like that much more appealing because it was almost like exclusive and sort of exciting and new and and they would deal with all the bugs and all the awkwardness and things like that, but you take those things and you try to apply that to like the mass market and everyone's going to be like.

[00:23:58] Ben Foster: I'm returning this stuff like it doesn't work, you know, I try to just push the button and it doesn't happen, right? Like what they want is convenience. So what is sort of like exciting and interesting over here is sort of like this control and power and capability, you know, et cetera, for the for these like early adopter types.

[00:24:15] Ben Foster: But that gets replaced with this need for convenience, right? One of the things that I think is is really apparent looking back at whoop was that there was. This desire for something novel, you know, the fact that whoop wasn't a Fitbit, the fact that it was different, the fact that it was measuring HRV.

[00:24:33] Ben Foster: And a lot of people weren't, didn't know what HRV was, you know, back at the day, that was actually a positive for whoop for that early market. Cause you're like, Ooh, I'm kind of using the latest and greatest thing. And not only does it measure my heart rate, but it measures the variability between each individual beat.

[00:24:48] Ben Foster: And it tells me all this like additional information and like. That's great for those folks, but then it can stall out unless you can explain to the mass market, what the relevance of that actually is and turn it into something that becomes like very meaningful and easy for them to digest. And so a good example of that would be that you don't just sort of project a bunch of numbers like HRV numbers, you know, over time.

[00:25:11] Ben Foster: People who want to geek out and put that into an Excel spreadsheet and, you know, analyze it and stuff like that, they may love that. But for the mass market, you got to convert that into something that they understand. How well recovered are you when you wake up? Red, yellow, or green? And you got a number attached to it on a scale of 0 to 100, tells you everything you need to know, right?

[00:25:28] Ben Foster: And so it gives you guidance on, well, how hard should you push yourself today? And you kind of turn that into very plain language. And so. What you lose is the sophistication, right? That this other group of people might want, or at least you hide it. You say, okay, that's going to be behind a button that you're going to click.

[00:25:43] Ben Foster: That's going to show you all this data or allow you to export it or, you know, things like that. But you're not going to sort of like put that front and center because if you do, you're going to be alienating this mass market kind of like group. So the product had to kind of evolve. To go from being this early adopter, kind of like, you know, product that was exciting to that particular base into something that was going to be very kind of like digestible and easy for, for folks to use.

[00:26:07] Ben Foster: Then there were other interesting kinds of questions, right? Like, you know, should you put a screen on it? You know, whoop is still one of those devices that doesn't have a screen. And it's very intentional, you know, it would raise, it would drive the cost way up. It would drive the battery life way down.

[00:26:19] Ben Foster: You know, there are these compromises that you had to make. And so there was a lot of pressure from people in those earlier stages saying, well, you have to put a screen on it. You have to put a screen on it, but who sort of like held true to this thing saying, Hey, look, it's all about 24, seven where. We're trying to get the sort of like completed cycle of the, of the circadian rhythm and really seeing what the impact is of sleep on the times that you're awake, the times that you're awake on the times that you're asleep, et cetera.

[00:26:41] Ben Foster: And that can only happen if you have multi day battery life, you know, it was important that you can charge it while it's on your wrist. Well, it's actually really hard to charge something when it has a screen on it, you know, while it's on your wrist. Right. So that was a compromise that would have had to have been made.

[00:26:53] Ben Foster: And ultimately the product is all about changing people's behavior for the betterment of their health and wellness and fitness. Right. And the best way to do that, we kind of realized that the screen real estate that was available on a phone was actually superior to what you might have on like a watch size interface.

[00:27:14] Ben Foster: Right. And so it was good to get people to be accustomed to using their phone and being able to kind of interact with it in a way that wasn't really realistic. If you were just going to show like a number and that was going to be it. So you want to count steps. Sure. Go ahead and have a screen on your, on your wrist.

[00:27:28] Ben Foster: Right. But whoop was never about counting steps. It was about sort of giving you insights about what the impact is of doing this kind of thing on that. And that was just like unreasonable to do within that screen kind of like real estate anyway. So it was like these, these, you have to decide which things you're going to evolve, which kinds of things you're going to change and which things you're going to stay true to.

[00:27:47] Ben Foster: Because they're part of the sort of, you know, the core of really what the product experience is all about,

[00:27:52] Angela Suthrave: I love that sentiment that you had a clearly defined strategy and vision and you stuck to it and you challenged assumptions, which is, I think, you know, the hallmark of what a really good product person does. So that's really cool. And you talk about this experience being very seamless with the hardware as well as the software. And so for those people who are at an organization where there's a hardware and a software component, how do you make sure that the strategy is aligned for both groups and you're sort of in lockstep, even though there's different cadences, different timelines for development, et cetera, to realize this overarching vision?

[00:28:36] Ben Foster: you know, it's really hard is the bottom line. Uh, there's, there's no doubt that it's a lot more difficult when there's a hardware and software component that sort of like, you know, go together because. When you think about the hardware, you're not just thinking about it in isolation. You're having to think about how it's going to influence the software capabilities.

[00:28:53] Ben Foster: And as you think about software development, you may have your your hand tied behind your back because the hardware has some limitation that just simply doesn't power the kind of thing that you're looking to do. So for it. Hardware only plays, you know, they can just think about the hardware experience in its own right.

[00:29:07] Ben Foster: And it's sort of self contained. They don't have to think about innovation within the space of the, of the capabilities that are, that are kind of like locked in and kind of like stuck there for 1, 2, 3 years, you know, etc. For software only companies, they're very used to this method of development, which is, you know, you throw something out there, you know, you see how it works, you tweak it, you know, etc.

[00:29:27] Ben Foster: You take this like agile approach, you know, sometimes you can put something out there that's kind of like. Intentionally half baked. You see how well it works. You decided whether you want to invest in it or not. Try doing that with hardware. Like that's just completely unreasonable, right? Like no, nobody can take that approach.

[00:29:41] Ben Foster: So what you, what you end up doing is you have one cohesive strategy that is spanning both hardware and software. And you think very far in the future about what you want that to be. You know, so you have to be really good at defining what your vision is. You have to be really good at defining what your strategy is going to be.

[00:30:00] Ben Foster: And you have all those hard upfront conversations to get on the same page about those things. And then you back into that and you say, okay, what, how, how do we go make that happen? And there's a hardware. Uh, part of the roadmap and there's a software part of the road map to go make those happen and, and you play to the strengths of each of those kinds of, you know, forms of development.

[00:30:18] Ben Foster: Right? So the great thing about, you know, hardware stuff is you say, okay, well, we're going to be able to lower the cost of delivery over time, you know, lower the, the, you know, the bomb cost, et cetera, software. You can say, okay, we can iterate really quickly. Like, how do we kind of take the advantage of each of these capabilities that we're going to have on each of these fronts to kind of like.

[00:30:36] Ben Foster: Collectively have the right kind of level of innovation that we need. It is hard to do that. And on the hardware front, what I think you end up having to do is you sort of break apart two things that in the early days have to be sort of like combined. Which is, you say, there's an R and D track, which is saying, can I build a sensor that does this, or can I measure this to this degree, or can I do this with X amount of battery life, you know, et cetera, and you don't know whether you can actually achieve that or not, but you do have a sort of like R and D pipeline.

[00:31:05] Ben Foster: where you're saying, okay, we're, we're experimenting with these things. We're inventing new ways of doing these, et cetera. And then you have some sort of cadence of delivery and product delivery is kind of like independent from that. And you say, okay, given where we are on these sort of like various parallel threads of R and D effort, at some point, we're going to have to like draw a cut line against that and say, okay, these are the things that are sort of like ready for prime time at this point.

[00:31:29] Ben Foster: That we believe strongly we can fit into that next hardware release and make it work. And it's hard to get that right, right? Because you want to have enough stuff. That's really sort of like exciting for the next, you know, for the next group of customers that you're trying to attract with a new feature set and things like that.

[00:31:42] Ben Foster: But at the same time, you want to make sure that it really is, you know, like ready for prime time as well. Those are more hardware specific issues that you kind of like run into now. It turns out that for whoop, there's actually a huge R and D component to the software side too, because there is a lot of things that are built into data science.

[00:31:56] Ben Foster: I mean, can you help someone who's going through a pregnancy to better learn about something, you know, based on the data that you're capturing? Like, I don't know, let's go check it out. Let's go see if there's something there. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Right. And so you, you kind of do that analysis and you try to see whether that's a new feature or capability that you could build into the product that you could promote, et cetera, but you'd want to make sure that it was ready for prime time.

[00:32:17] Ben Foster: And then there's other features that you can kind of just do that. That don't really depend on a lot of that kind of stuff. Like, you know, just UI improvements and things like that as well. So you kind of have like these parallel structures of R and D and then cut lines of what you're going to sort of like ship in the next, like feature launch.

[00:32:29] Ben Foster: Those feature launches are much longer in length on the hardware side than they are on the software side. And you kind of like play to the relative strengths on each. That's kind of like how we basically put it together. And I think that's kind of like a pretty reasonable 

[00:32:41] Angela Suthrave: Yeah, very helpful.

[00:32:42] Omar Mousa: Hardware is not for the faint of heart, clearly.

[00:32:46] Ben Foster: No, it's not. No, it's not.

[00:32:47] Omar Mousa: Ben, I want to go back in time here a bit. So, in our research, we discovered that you worked at eBay for, you know, which is a marketplace product, as many folks know. In healthcare, marketplaces are starting to become a bit hot. We're seeing a lot of this in the home care space, and then in other Medicare and Medicaid funded services.

[00:33:07] Omar Mousa: What are some of the hard lessons learned that helped you Execute in future product organizations.

[00:33:17] Ben Foster: marketplaces are interesting for a variety of reasons. And I still kind of have this strange attraction to marketplace type products and find them fascinating from a product management perspective. One thing that jumps out with marketplaces is that. When you think about growing them and sort of like growing your business as a marketplace, you don't think about it as running a business.

[00:33:38] Ben Foster: You know, we, we ask questions at eBay that were kind of like the wrong questions to ask. I think back in the day, like who's more important buyers or sellers? Because there were sometimes places where they were asking us for things that were directly at odds with one another. And I'll give you an example, right?

[00:33:50] Ben Foster: I was responsible for merchandising. And, you know, you can think of merchandising as cross sell upsell, you know, stuff like that. From the buyer perspective. They'd buy like a cell phone and they'd be like, okay, well, I want a battery to go along with the cell phone. And so they want a battery case that goes with it.

[00:34:05] Ben Foster: And maybe that seller didn't sell battery cases, right? So the seller from their perspective, it's like, well, I just want to sell other stuff that I'm selling. I don't care about driving business to somebody else. And from the buyer's perspective, they're like, I don't really care who's selling it. I just want to like find the right stuff.

[00:34:19] Ben Foster: And so do you only show cross promoted items from that same seller, or do you show it across all sellers? Right. It depends on who you listen to. And we made this. Kind of mistake of asking this question of like, who is our customer as though there was one answer to that between the two and the reality is like both are so when you think about running a marketplace, think about it as running an economy, you know, how does the US government get involved in trying to drive the economy forward?

[00:34:44] Ben Foster: Well, you ask certain kinds of questions, is this area supply constrained or demand constraint? Are the right incentive structures in place? You know, you think of your revenue as tax revenue, essentially, right? You're kind of like taxing these transactions that are taking place. And so you're trying to drive more kind of like transaction volume.

[00:35:00] Ben Foster: You're trying to kind of like, you know, keep faith in the economy. Like that actually matters, right? You want people to keep coming back for more. And once you realize that. It works a lot more like an economy and you're just trying to grow an economy. You realize that all these parallels and all these like concepts you can get about how you drive growth and things like that actually varies quite a bit.

[00:35:18] Ben Foster: And, and it's not just the same as running a business. So I'd encourage companies always kind of think about things that way. And it will just completely be this game changing orientation that will prevent you from making a lot of mistakes that could actually compromise too much one party's experience versus another.

[00:35:33] Ben Foster: So that's, that's number one. And, and, you know, I think this. It kind of relates to point number two here, which is that when you're doing a marketplace, there is both a supply and a demand side that you have to worry about. Right. And they're interplayed with one another. Right. So, like, if you had every item in the world in your marketplace, it'd be great because then, you know, tons of buyers would come in because there'd be, you know, great items at great prices and great selection and everything else.

[00:35:59] Ben Foster: Right. You're not going to get those until the buyers are there. Cause why are the sellers going to waste their time putting things on there? Right. And so anytime you have this kind of marketplace dynamic, you have this, this kind of chicken and egg problem of like, you know, where do you start? And the key lesson that I learned is you always start by driving demand because supply follows demand naturally.

[00:36:22] Ben Foster: If there are people there with their checkbooks, you know, ready and their credit cards, good to go and everything else, like, guess what they will find a way to go get that money, right? Like it's there. It's there for the taking. They're going to succeed. The invisible hand will do its job, right? However, if on the other hand, you, you are focused on supply.

[00:36:42] Ben Foster: There's no rule out there that states that demand will follow supply. You know, somebody wants to go sell a bunch of garbage that nobody actually wants. That's not going to cause a lot of people to come to your website and go check it out, right? Or to come to your mobile app and go check it out. So, you know, the reality is that because supply follows demand, it's a lot easier to kind of focus your attention on just drive demand, drive demand, drive demand.

[00:37:04] Ben Foster: Great example is when I was at eBay. Is that we had sellers who were saying, you know, Oh, if you could just give me these tools to make me more efficient at listing more items, I would list more things, you know, et cetera. And like, that's all true. They would. So we ended up building a lot of those kinds of things and more sellers listed more things more efficiently, et cetera, but nothing happened on the demand side.

[00:37:24] Ben Foster: And in fact, the more items that got listed. In a lot of ways, the worse the experience became for buyers because you run a search. Now you have all these commodity items that are all identical to one another, but they're all showing up as individual listings. And he hadn't sort of like adapted the interface for buyers to have an improved experience.

[00:37:42] Ben Foster: Right. And so. Now, every time you click on an item, this is the very top of the list. It expires in five seconds, like, okay. I can't even make a decision about whether I want to buy this before the items expired. And every time I click on the next item, now it's just about to be expired. So like I have this, it's like frantic, it's urgent.

[00:37:58] Ben Foster: And I'm like, I just want to make a decision about what to buy, you know, like help me out here. This is another way in which they were at odds. And I think that it came from asking sellers more directly. What do you want from eBay? And they're, they're always going to talk about the things that are a pain in the butt for them and stuff like that.

[00:38:12] Ben Foster: And, and, you know, the things that are front and center, but in reality, what sellers really wanted was for people to keep typing ebay. com into their browser when they were looking for the things that they sold and that meant. Sometimes compromising the kinds of things that, you know, sellers would gripe about, et cetera.

[00:38:30] Ben Foster: So in the case, going back to merchandising, what we should have done is not listen to the sellers and say, okay, we're only going to cross promote your stuff because it's your buyer or whatever. We should have said, I don't care what you're saying. We're going to give a great experience to buyers. They're going to keep coming back for more.

[00:38:43] Ben Foster: And every time they need the next thing, they'll come and come into eBay. They're going to tell their friends about eBay, et cetera, and everyone's going to keep coming back. That's what's going to make you have a great experience. And sometimes, yeah, you're going to lose traffic to somebody else. But sometimes you're going to be the one to get that traffic.

[00:38:55] Ben Foster: Like, why is that necessarily bad? Let us be responsible for bringing buyers in. You concentrate on making a business within that environment. And that would have been a much better kind of like solution than I think the approach that we'd taken for those kind of years between 01 and 05, the company really reeled from a lot of that kind of stuff from 05 to 08.

[00:39:14] Ben Foster: And it wasn't until 08 that the company really realized that, Hey, we got to change our dynamic here. We really got to focus on this buyer experience. Unfortunately, by that time, Amazon had eaten so much market share by doing the exact opposite that it was kind of an irrecoverable situation, you know, in a lot of ways for eBay, but they've done a good job since I think they're kind of like building a business back based on, on some real kind of unique strengths of the business.

[00:39:35] Ben Foster: And, you know, they're kind of doubling down on the things that, that eBay does best. Which is great.

[00:39:40] Angela Suthrave: Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying about building the, making sure the demand is there and then having the supply to follow. In product management, if there is a Bible, it's probably inspired by Marty Kagan, right? And so you worked with Marty at eBay. And so we'd love

[00:39:56] Angela Suthrave: to, uh, you know, hear.

[00:39:58] Angela Suthrave: What that was like, and, you know, what were your biggest takeaways from that?

[00:40:04] Ben Foster: Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, Marty Kagan, for those who don't know is a guy that I really respect. I think he's kind of like the founder in a lot of ways of modern day product management. And I was very fortunate early in my career to get to work on his team when, when he was sort of like having that same 10 X growth within his product organization, the same way that I was later at whoop, you know, and, and so he kind of taught the ropes, if you will.

[00:40:24] Ben Foster: Like I really learned how to write great requirements. I really learned how to prioritize based on business value. I really, you know, learned. Kind of like the foundational elements of measuring, you know, performance and things like that. Unfortunately, I think he was actually in a tough place at eBay when he was there as well, because the business itself wasn't actually like kind of run in a way that he talks about in, in inspired or, or empowered, or, you know, these loved, you know, these other kinds of like books that he's written because there was just so much of an emphasis on.

[00:40:54] Ben Foster: Business units kind of like making decisions about what the priorities were, and you end up with with product management teams that were not really empowered. And I think, in fact, a lot of what he writes about in those books is kind of almost like a counterpoint to how he had been forced by others in the business to have to kind of like operate.

[00:41:13] Ben Foster: In a particular way. And so, you know, I probably at the time, I probably blamed him too much for these kinds of things. And as a product leader myself, I realized sometimes you get caught in the middle of, you know, these like, you know, power dynamics and things like that as well, but, but I think that, you know, there were ways in which we worked that way, there were ways in which we weren't able to work that way, but it was also the very early days of product management.

[00:41:32] Ben Foster: And I think, you know, we were all kind of like learning at the same time, but there were some great things that we did. And, you know, if there's anything that I would say, say, I really learned the sort of like great playbook of how to do. Really, really good product management and a standard kind of like environment.

[00:41:46] Ben Foster: And I think that that's essential. You know, a lot of people who are earlier in their product careers come to me for, for advice or coaching and things like that. And they're like, Hey, I've got the startup job over here. I'm really excited about the startup. And I've got this big company kind of thing over here, you know, et cetera.

[00:41:59] Ben Foster: And I actually say, go work at a big company, go work with a bunch of other product managers and things like that, who know this, who have been around it. You're going to get the training, the tools, the skill sets. You're going to learn all the fundamentals because you then want to take that to a startup and say, okay, now that I know the rule book, I know when to break the rule book, right?

[00:42:19] Ben Foster: I know when to go outside of the bounds of this. And I liken it to the way that, you know, you know, Picasso didn't draw people with like their eyeballs and weird places and things like that because he couldn't draw otherwise. Like he knew exactly how to draw things exactly as they were. Right. It's that he, because he was so good at that, he'd go a step past, right?

[00:42:39] Ben Foster: These great basketball players, you know, they do these like crazy moves and things like that. It's not like they don't know how to dribble. Like, you know, they're great dribblers and it's because they've spent years learning the foundations that allows them to go past that and make these kind of like amazing plays and things like that.

[00:42:54] Ben Foster: And I think the same thing is true when it comes to product management.

[00:42:57] Omar Mousa: That's a really good point. We, you know, Angela and I get fielded some of those same questions and, you know, there are a lot of good habits you could probably learn from a organization that has done product management and has executed, built a business unit, built the orgs within the business unit. And, you know, you can go take that and get an accelerated degree over at a.

[00:43:16] Omar Mousa: A startup, right? So I 

[00:43:18] Ben Foster: Yeah, 

[00:43:18] Omar Mousa: I think that's a very good point and very great for our listeners who are, you know, either starting their careers or were just very early on. So going back in time to present, let's switch gears here and talk about Prodify. So you are the co founder and executive chairman of Prodify.

[00:43:35] Omar Mousa: Can you tell our audience what is Prodify? How does it work? And like, Why did you and your co founder start this company?

[00:43:44] Ben Foster: sure. You know, it kind of goes back. It was, it wasn't intentional. It goes back to a time when I was at a company called Opower and we were driving energy efficiency solutions. We were selling it to utilities, but it was actually a B2B2C product in which we were helping people in their homes to become more energy efficient.

[00:44:01] Ben Foster: We took that company public in 2014. It's actually why I moved from Silicon Valley over to the East coast and in Arlington, Virginia. And, and when we took the company public, I decided to. To leave at that point, because I really wanted to get back into the startup world. I really love that kind of like that, that kind of place in the company's history.

[00:44:18] Ben Foster: And I find it to be really exciting. So I wasn't ready to go back into a full time role. I wanted to just kind of spend a little bit of time, you know, with my family, making up for some lost time and things like that. And so I got into this advisory type work because I thought, okay, well, I'll do a few hours here.

[00:44:33] Ben Foster: If you are seriously involved in tech and maybe I can share some things that I've picked up. And it turns out that there was actually a really big need for learning how to be product driven for these kind of like East coast companies or in, you know, DC area, you know, New York, Boston, et cetera, when that was kind of like a burgeoning scene for, for these kind of like tech startups, but.

[00:44:53] Ben Foster: So there's plenty of tech, but there wasn't like that much product driven tech and I needed to kind of, you know, provide a lot of coaching and guidance for them. And so one thing kind of led to another and through referrals and just, you know, positive word of mouth and things like that, I ended up getting tons of companies that I could work with to kind of share stories and help them think through some of these really difficult decisions that they had changed the way that they were operating, et cetera, to become more product driven.

[00:45:17] Ben Foster: And I just fell in love. With that kind of work, and I started to do enough of it that it started to get bigger than what I was personally able to do myself. And at the exact same time, somebody who was on my team, Rajesh Nirlikar, who's also the co author of Build What Matters With Me, had reached out and he was on my team previously at Opower.

[00:45:35] Ben Foster: And he reached out and said, Hey, I'm, I'm getting into doing a lot more product advisory type work as well. And, you know, I remember being birds of a feather with him and, and, you know, having great discussions with him about the way we thought about product. And it was so sort of like, in a way we were super synced and in a way we also kind of like pushed each other and challenged each other in these interesting ways, and so it was kind of like this nice yin and yang, and I thought that we worked better together than we did apart.

[00:46:00] Ben Foster: So we decided to join forces and we created Prodify and now we do a lot of. Advisory type work, you know, whether it's coaching of individuals or whether it's filling in as, you know, as fractional product leaders, you know, et cetera. And we have kind of like a small team of folks that are involved in prodify now.

[00:46:17] Ben Foster: And really it's all about anything that touches product. We try to help companies become better at one way or another. And that's kind of like what we've done. That's why we founded it. And, and we just kind of got a chance to do the things that we love and to help others. So really kind of like. You know, take that baton and do great things with their own companies.

[00:46:36] Ben Foster: It allowed us to kind of scale, I guess, better what we liked doing beyond just one company that we could work with at a time and try to do that with all the companies that we advise and that we consult with,

[00:46:45] Angela Suthrave: So in your book, you talk about the dysfunctions of product management. And so, you know, for people that work in organizations that are not product led, tactically, what would you advise to get them to be more metrics driven and to lead with product strategy?

[00:47:04] Ben Foster: well, there's two different kinds of. Issues that I see that are out there, and I didn't really cover it exactly this way in the book, but I've sort of seen a few interesting instances, and I think especially in the D. C. region, you find this and what happens in these markets where you have like this one big customer or something like that is that you can take a sales driven approach, and that's totally fine.

[00:47:25] Ben Foster: Like, if that's what you want to be, then go do that. Right. And so what a sales driven approach, what really defines it. Is to say, I'm first going to go try to find the customer that I want to sell to, then I'm going to learn everything about what they need, and then I don't care whether I currently have a solution for that or not.

[00:47:41] Ben Foster: I will build them the solution that they need. And so it'll be like a really perfect match for what it is. So you win. By by saying yes, you win by finding ways of actually delivering on exactly the kinds of things that are asking for, et cetera. Now, this makes sense in D. C. selling to the government, et cetera, because the government has a bunch of one off weird requirements and things like that, that like no.

[00:48:03] Ben Foster: Commercial entity would ever have, right? And that's fine, like they should, right? I mean, you're trying to provide, let's say, a service for the public. It has to work for everybody. It has to work in languages that, you know, certain people don't speak. A commercial entity can say, I don't care, it works for 99 percent of people, that's good enough.

[00:48:19] Ben Foster: Well That doesn't work at the federal government level, right? So there's, there's a lot of stuff that goes into building these kind of capabilities or solutions for these idiosyncratic needs that are specialized for individual customers. Accenture does this types of thing, you know, all the big kind of consulting firms kind of like take a lot of times this approach, et cetera.

[00:48:38] Ben Foster: And it's the right thing because if you're selling it to Customers who have very, you know, idiosyncratic needs. You want to create the bespoke solutions that are going to work for them. The other approach is where you take a product driven approach and that's where you kind of flip the whole thing on its head.

[00:48:51] Ben Foster: And you say, instead of waiting to meet the customer, learning about what they need at that moment, then figuring out how to go build it, you know, et cetera. It's like, I want to have the right solution for them on the shelf before I even meet them. So that when they come to me that they say, Hey, here's my need.

[00:49:06] Ben Foster: And I'm like, okay, I already got this product for you. Like, here it is. Now, what's interesting is there's a trade off, right? Which is. Time to market is a lot better. It's cheaper because you're just, especially with software, right? Cause just replicating the code, you know, it, you know, they're, they're using the same servers as somebody else, et cetera.

[00:49:20] Ben Foster: It's like, it's dirt cheap to provide the same exact thing to the next, to the next party. Right. So that's great. But what the trade off is, is that means that there's going to be these one off weird kind of things that somebody still wants from your product that you're going to say no to. Right, because if you say yes to everybody, you just transform yourself all the way directly into this thing of sales driven kind of like culture again, so you got to choose your path.

[00:49:41] Ben Foster: You know which one is right for you. And so one type of issue that I see is a lot of companies that have been sales driven and they still try to get all the advantages of being sales driven. While trying to get the scale that you get from being product driven, and the reality is the only way to get to this massive kind of like scale is to be product driven, where you can just have this turnkey kind of like solution that you keep selling to the next party, the next party, the next party, like when I get up on a stage and do a talk at a product conference or something like that, one of my my sticks as I say, Okay, everybody like take out your phone, hold it up, you know, in front of you, like who would you know, leave your hand up if you would trade it.

[00:50:15] Ben Foster: You know, higher battery life for smaller screen size, you know, certain, certain people hold it up or down, right? I'm like, Oh, who would trade, you know, you know, you know, better wifi signal, but you'd have less battery, you know, and every different people do different kinds of things. And my point is at the end, like.

[00:50:31] Ben Foster: Guess what? You're all still holding your phone anyway, right? Like you still bought it and it wasn't the ideal, perfect solution for you. You just told me all these trade offs that you would have preferred. And yet, you know, apple comes out with like three versions of a phone or whatever, any given time.

[00:50:44] Ben Foster: And, and one of those three has got to be enough and you're good to go. Right. And I think that sometimes that gets forgotten in, in, you know, the, these companies where a company is transforming from being sales driven to being product driven, and it's okay to tell your customer, Hey, look, this is it. Take it or leave it.

[00:50:58] Ben Foster: And 10 percent of the time, 20 percent of the time, that's actually good if customers tell you, Sorry, that's not going to work for me. Because you're trying to get the 80 percent of this much larger pie than 100 percent of this really, like, small pie. And to do that at a much cheaper price than you could ever do with these kind of, like, one off solutions that require you to do all this development work. And I think sometimes, you know, companies try to think that that development work is somehow R and D like it's not R and D that's cogs when you're building one off things for individual customers, you're gonna have to maintain, you know, going forward and stuff like that. And it just doesn't, you know, work the same way.

[00:51:29] Ben Foster: There's a reason that all the highest value companies in the world are are all product companies, right? That it's because the scale just works a lot better. It's harder to get there. But that's what it's all about. Right. So that's kind of like one type of thing is, is just helping companies like decipher, like, which are you trying to be and what does it mean to actually operate this way and to kind of help them with that transformation.

[00:51:48] Ben Foster: The second thing I see is, is these product companies, they are product companies, they try to be product companies, and yet they still have all these kinds of like dysfunctions that are associated with them. And, you know, one of those might be that the CEO just tries to make all the calls and can't actually empower the teams with anything.

[00:52:01] Ben Foster: Right. Or another one might be that they're like a feature factory. And they just keep shipping feature after feature after feature, thinking that the next one is suddenly going to unlock all this, like capability and the reality is as soon as they do, there's just the next one that's getting requested as well, or that, you know, the, instead of having a vision and a strategy for where they're headed, they're just sort of like responding to these requests that are coming from stakeholders, like marketing and sales and customer support and stuff like that.

[00:52:25] Ben Foster: And they're still having to say no to 80 percent of the stuff that's getting requested because there's never enough engineers to go around. But there's no, there's nothing that's like actually guiding the direction. They kind of like lost their ability to innovate as a result. So in the book, I sort of, in the first chapter, just detail what these 10 dysfunctions are that I've seen like time and time and time again.

[00:52:42] Ben Foster: It's, it's funny because it like resonates with every single person who reads it because they're like, Oh yeah, that's me. That's me. Or, you know, maybe we don't run into this one, but man, we run into these other seven over here. That's kind of like wild and it's amazing how frequently these, these. These things are very resonant.

[00:52:55] Ben Foster: And it's just because I've seen so many data points, you know, stuff like that, that you see these, these common themes emerge. What's interesting though, is that it's, they think that there's these different solutions to each of them. And I think the big realization that went into this book where we kind of introduced this concept called vision led product management.

[00:53:14] Ben Foster: Was really in saying, these are all, they seem like they're very different. These different kinds of dysfunctions that you see, but in reality, they're all just different symptoms of the same root cause. And it's when product management hasn't done a good enough job of defining for the rest of the organization, what the product vision actually is, what the strategy is for how you're going to get there, getting people bought into that, because then suddenly all those sales requests for these one off kinds of things, they go away because the salesperson says, I don't want you to work on this one thing to help me sell this one deal.

[00:53:44] Ben Foster: I want you to go build me that thing over there. Cause I can go sell 10, right? Like that's exactly good. That means that we did our job in product of kind of like showcasing to you what the opportunity actually looks like. Right. And, and, and so on. So you kind of look at all these dysfunctions and realize that if you had a better kind of more clear version of where you're headed and a better kind of articulation of that, then you could get everybody on the company on board with us, and now suddenly everyone's aligned.

[00:54:10] Ben Foster: Everyone's off to the races, you're working on the stuff that really matters most. And so that's kind of the spirit of the book. That's kind of how it gets introduced. And then we, you know, we kind of go from there.

[00:54:18] Angela Suthrave: Yeah, it definitely does resonate, you know, those dysfunctions. My follow up question here is, I think it's more simple to have a product strategy when it's a pure product play. In healthcare, a lot of companies are tech enabled services. Right. And so the technology is one piece and a lot of times we're enabling people like nurses and physicians and pharmacists, et cetera, to be able to deliver a service. And so would you say that your guidance is similar or is there anything, you know, any nuances that you would add, you know, if it is indeed service based?

[00:55:00] Ben Foster: yeah, it is more complex because you have different layers, right? And to me, what you're describing is actually very similar, like a service. That's predicated on technology, like a tech enabled service, right? Is very similar to like a B2B to C play in, in a pure product company, right? You have these different layers of users, so you're providing technology for.

[00:55:24] Ben Foster: Doctors, physicians, you know, et cetera, to then provide better service to then, you know, patients, for example, right? And whether that service layer happens through like an appointment or whether that happens for technology itself as well, the same concept still applies where you're like, you now have instead of two sets of metrics, ones around your own business success and one about your customers success using your product, you now realize that the, that the customer and the user have been decoupled.

[00:55:50] Ben Foster: And that means that now there's three different versions of this. There's going to be the metrics that you're going to look at moving for your own business. There's going to be the metrics that you're looking at moving for the buyer or the, or the, the physician or something like that, who's sitting in the middle.

[00:56:02] Ben Foster: And then there's going to be these kinds of like metrics for the beneficiaries of that. That are being provided through that service. And, you know, so for example, if you empower doctors to have better conversations with their patients, but then they don't have those better conversations with their patients, like who cares, you know, at the end of the day, like it has to result in kind of like better patient outcomes.

[00:56:22] Ben Foster: While I don't have firsthand experience of handling this in the healthcare space, one of the companies that was, that was a very much a B2B2C play. And that was this company, Opower that I described earlier. So in, in Opower, we were selling this technology solution to utilities as a way for them to drive energy efficiency impact across their portfolio of residential homes.

[00:56:42] Ben Foster: And we were doing that instead, but instead of by giving them, you know, more efficient light bulbs to give to people and stuff like that, we were saying, let's change people's behavior. So we're going to deliver these home energy reports to people's households and we'll tell them what kinds of, you know, energy usage they have, we'll encourage them to take the right kinds of actions, and we'll just be really, really effective with it on your behalf.

[00:57:01] Ben Foster: And so it's kind of essentially like a tech enabled service from their perspective. Right? And the reality is you have to now deliver on both. I have to give. The customers that are in the middle, these utilities, the tools and things like that, that they're demanding, you know, whether they're actually helping customers, you know, the consumers at the end of the day, but I have to never forget the part that matters most, which is the outcomes.

[00:57:23] Ben Foster: That's why they bought the product, right? And so all these tools and capabilities and things like that, that are going to be like the bulk of all the kind of like one off requests that we're going to hear from our customer base, all of those are secondary. To the thing that matters the most, which is energy efficiency, impact per household per dollar spent by that utility.

[00:57:41] Ben Foster: That's what they care about. And so it's easy to sometimes get distracted in that environment by focusing on that kind of like middle tier. But if you can actually deliver the kinds of results that they were looking for when they bought it in the 1st place, then you can also, it's kind of like we talked about the marketplace.

[00:57:57] Ben Foster: So you want to. Serve the, the demand and supply will follow. It's kind of like, even if I, as long as I'm delivering the kind of outcomes that you're looking for. You'll find a way of kind of like, you know, getting through the, you know, the muck and stuff like that along the way of whatever it takes in terms of using the product and things like that to make it happen.

[00:58:15] Ben Foster: Now, you can only go so far with that, of course, but you end up with this conundrum of where do you focus your attention? And I always encourage people to focus on the demand side of it.

[00:58:28] Omar Mousa: I want to, you know, talk about just like, cause you're going into a lot of different, you know, we're healthcare podcasts, but I don't think healthcare experiences, things that are just agnostic only healthcare. Um, 

[00:58:42] Ben Foster: Even though, even though a lot of people may think that.

[00:58:44] Omar Mousa: yeah,

[00:58:45] Ben Foster: Yeah.

[00:58:46] Omar Mousa: it's not that different. And so like you've been in, you know, the board rooms, the executive leadership calls, the, the inner workings of many companies through Prodify.

[00:58:59] Omar Mousa: Can you just describe, like, what are the top three areas your organization gets hacked or asked for help?

[00:59:08] Ben Foster: Yeah, sure. Uh, so we. We often get asked for help in the form of, Hey, I've got this problem and I don't know, really know how to solve it. And that problem can take a few different forms. A lot of times it is a CEO saying, I don't think that I'm getting the ROI from product development that I was looking for.

[00:59:29] Ben Foster: We're putting all this money into it. I think it's valuable. I certainly can't kill it. Like we can't, you know, we're a technology company. We, you know, we can't, you know, divest from innovation and R and D and things like that. But at the same time, like, I want to make sure that I'm getting the same kind of results.

[00:59:43] Ben Foster: As I'm getting from other functions. You know, if I give a budget to, to marketing, they tell me how many leads they're going to get. They tell me how many patients they're going to acquire. They tell me how many, you know, you know, what, what's going to happen to our brand. If I, if I give the money to sales, they hire more sales people.

[00:59:56] Ben Foster: I know, you know, it's like a turnkey kind of thing, right? Where I can, I can hire more sales folks and their coin operated. And we'll get this kind of like, you know, outcomes on the other side. And with product, it's like so long term what the impact is going to be. And it's so hard to predict upfront what the impact is going to be.

[01:00:12] Ben Foster: That it's like, everyone's kind of just. Got this big guessing game going on and I think that's like a big problem. So they don't know, you know, is my team not efficient or are they, are they efficient, but they're not effective. Like I just need to understand how to do this as best as possible. So that's kind of like one flavor of it.

[01:00:28] Ben Foster: Another flavor of it is I, as the CEO. I feel like the people that are on my team are really, they're good, they're very capable, but I don't know how product is leading in the organization. I kind of feel like sometimes, you know, marketing is telling them what to do or sales is telling them or customer support or engineering.

[01:00:46] Ben Foster: And like, how does product actually kind of take charge of setting the direction and kind of like getting the rest of the company, you know, aligned to that. So they know that that's. That's the root cause of, of a lot of the dysfunctions, maybe that they're kind of like experiencing, but either they don't have somebody who's in that level of seniority within the product organization to lead that, or they do have somebody, but maybe they're not as experienced or there might be all kinds of processes.

[01:01:10] Ben Foster: It just kind of like the mechanics of how they're doing it isn't really like effective. And so we can help them to kind of, you know, solve those problems as well. These are very common, kind of like things that, you know, we run into. And then, you know, I would say that, that the last one is. Is one around the product itself, they might say, Hey, you know, we have, we don't know that we have the right things on the roadmap or the design of it just isn't kind of like up to snuff or, you know, the metrics that we're looking for, like retention is X percent and we need it to be X plus 10%.

[01:01:42] Ben Foster: Like how do we get that extra thousand basis points in retention? And we're, we're not really sure like where to focus. And so that's where you might share more things. It's more like an advisory capacity of saying, Hey, look. I've built a lot of other products that were all about engagement and trans transitioning from engagement to retention.

[01:01:57] Ben Foster: Here are the things that a lot of companies overlook. This is probably where you have low hanging fruit that you're not really thinking about. And so that's kind of like more instead of like how you do the stuff, it's more about like, what are you actually doing? So those are kind of like the three that I would say we run into the most.

[01:02:16] Angela Suthrave: One of the things that you

[01:02:17] Angela Suthrave: talk about is, you know, when you start a new engagement, you do an internal audit of these companies. And so can you talk about this audit process and what are you looking for to determine? You know, where they can

[01:02:32] Angela Suthrave: get that 

[01:02:32] Ben Foster: know, it is. It is interesting.

[01:02:37] Ben Foster: when we come in, you know, so one of the things that I love to do is, is I, you know, sit down with the CEO and usually we're at a whiteboard or something like that together. I'm like, hey, tell me what this company is all about. Tell me where you're going next.

[01:02:46] Ben Foster: And they're always really excited to talk about it and stuff like that. But I'm always surprised by how often I hear things that are like, you know, we're going to revolutionize X, Y, Z industry, or they'll say things like we're going to become the You know, the eBay of, of, of XYZ, or they'll say things like, we're going to get to 300 million of ARR or something along those lines.

[01:03:07] Ben Foster: Right. And what's fascinating is how often in each of those descriptions, the word customer is completely missing from the equation and like, you know, nobody disrupts an industry directly. What, what does it mean to disrupt an industry? It means you solve a customer problem so well. In a way that's never been solved before that you change customers expectations to have to be like that way.

[01:03:32] Ben Foster: And now all the incumbent solutions are no longer good enough. That's what disrupting an industry looks like. So talk to me about the customer and like, what's their problem and how are you going to solve it in this like unique way? They're so focused on like. Looking at themselves in the mirror that they're not looking at, what does it actually mean to be kind of like customer driven?

[01:03:49] Ben Foster: And so the first thing I look for is does the CEO themselves have an appreciation of the role that they need to play for their customers and what their customer problems are, are they attuned enough to that as opposed to kind of like thinking more kind of like navel gazing to some extent, right? So that's number one.

[01:04:05] Ben Foster: And it's, it's, I learned that in the first half hour, right? What I really like to do is, is, is ask people how things are working. Talk to people, you know, see what they have to say, what their interpretations of things would be, what their, what their evaluation of their own organization is, and then also observe what I'm actually saying, because those two things are often very different from one another.

[01:04:26] Ben Foster: So sometimes people are like, Oh, I think we're too slow. We need to do whatever. And I'm like, actually, I got to tell you, like, you're, you're running so fast right here. Like, you're not like slowness isn't the issue. It's the efficacy of your effort. That's, you know, that's the problem. Right. And so you're, you're, you're actually going too fast.

[01:04:40] Ben Foster: So like. The way you'll have bigger impact is if you slow down a little bit. And so it's interesting to hear what people say. It's interesting to look at what they do. And I try to pay a lot of attention to those things that they're not doing. So I can attend the meeting in which they discuss priorities.

[01:04:57] Ben Foster: Like, you know, I can attend the meeting in which they, you know, estimate the scope of new development work that's going to be going on, you know, et cetera. But what's the meeting that they didn't invite me to because they don't even have it. And, you know, a good example is often engineers are expected to demo the work that they did back to a product manager and say, okay, you asked me to deliver this.

[01:05:16] Ben Foster: Let me show you it working. Here it is. Here's the edge cases, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the product manager says, check, you know, yeah, you, you got the job and you understood what it was and you delivered it. But I think it's fascinating. It's how few companies have. Something that happens in the reverse order, you know, the product manager saying I asked you to build this because I was looking to have this kind of outcome either for our customers or for the business, et cetera.

[01:05:38] Ben Foster: Here's the metric that I was looking to move. You guys delivered what we said. It's now been on the market for three months. Let me show you the impact that it's actually had. That was their obligation back to the engineering team. You know, I asked you to, to, to, you know, burn the midnight oil or whatever to get this thing done because this is so important.

[01:05:54] Ben Foster: Was it actually important? What is the outcome that we got from this? And it, you know, 95 percent of companies don't even do a meeting like that. And so it's not about, it's not about the process of the meeting or whatever. It's about the spirit. It's about the culture of that kind of, you know, that, that kind of thing.

[01:06:06] Ben Foster: being missing. And so maybe the right way to do that is going to vary from company to company. Some companies might get enough data to have that kind of meeting every week. Some companies might need to wait for a year to have it, but one way or another, there's got to be some accountability of product back to the rest of the organization to make sure that they're actually moving the metrics and those kinds of things can be missing.

[01:06:24] Ben Foster: So I look for those things that I know to look for that they don't even see that they're not doing. And that's usually where the hidden gold. Kind of like is, you know, for what it's worth. So I can ask people to assess things. I can, I can listen to what they say, et cetera, but it's what this stuff they don't talk about.

[01:06:37] Ben Foster: So stuff they don't do, that's usually most revealing.

[01:06:40] Angela Suthrave: think that's gold. I think that, you know, oftentimes product is having to justify the value that product brings. And so I think when you close the loop like that, when you say, Hey, these were the metrics that we established, this is what we built. Now we're measuring these metrics. Here's how we're doing against them. You know, that sort of, you know, you're, you're sort of at least focusing on the process of trying to iterate. Even if your metrics, you know, you haven't hit the targets yet, right?

[01:07:11] Ben Foster: Yeah. Yeah, totally. You know, I mean, other things that we see is, is, you know, not enough customer research or product managers being too removed from customers where. They don't have direct access to customers to ask them the right kinds of questions. Or they're like, Oh, no, no, no. Product managers totally have plenty of interactions with customers.

[01:07:26] Ben Foster: And I'm like, okay, show me, like, where, where is it happening? They're like, Oh yeah, we invited them to a sales call. Like, and you gave them probably a bunch of, you know, guidelines about what they were allowed to say, what they weren't allowed to say. They're only 

[01:07:36] Angela Suthrave: We don't do that. 

[01:07:37] Ben Foster: They're not allowed to ask any questions, you know? And it's like, you know, what I want to find out is what are all the things that are missing from our product that I should, like, that's not a conversation that's, that's, that's good to have in a sales, you know, engagement. But it's a great conversation to have as a product because it's not about building that next thing to go try to win this account right now.

[01:07:52] Ben Foster: It's about building that next thing so that again, the next customer that you haven't yet met is going to actually have the right thing waiting on the shelf. But where are you going to get that insight from from these kind of customer conversations? And so they may say that they're doing a good job or think that they're doing a good job, but you observe it.

[01:08:07] Ben Foster: You're like, Ooh, wait, actually, that's a bit different. So it's just, it's just amazing how many of those kinds of things we tend to see.

[01:08:12] Angela Suthrave: This is a product question, not necessarily related to, to health tech, but when you have Uh, diverse sets of customers and they look very different and they're all trying to serve their members, but their members are very different. How do you reconcile that? This can apply to, I think, any industry where. The consumer, the member that you're trying to serve will look very different from one set to another set.

[01:08:38] Ben Foster: Yeah, I see this a lot. We certainly saw this at Opower. It was interesting. Again, not, not health tech, but the same problem. So you had these utilities that are beholden to a public utilities commission who is has the budget for this kind of stuff because it's being paid for at a taxpayer dollars. And so.

[01:08:55] Ben Foster: They had very hard and fast requirements about like, look, this has to work in English and Spanish and Vietnamese. And, you know, and so, you know, sometimes you get that with language. Sometimes you got that with a reading comprehension level. Right. So they'd be like, Hey, I know, I know you'd love to design this for somebody who's got a 12th grade education level, but we got to, you know, we got to dial this down to fifth grade.

[01:09:15] Ben Foster: And so, you know, Apartments, residences, you know, whatever, like, it was extremely varied and we had to meet certain kinds of like needs. I think the first step is to say there's, there's two elements to a solution. One of them is democratization of the solution, meaning that it has to work at least well enough for the largest, widest group of people, right?

[01:09:40] Ben Foster: And. What that meant is, you know, in certain cases, that might mean that you have help instructions that are written in several languages, or it might mean that, that the data is going to be able to be processed in 99. 99 percent of cases, which is a lot harder than 99. 0 percent of cases. Right. And, and so you have to identify what that, what does that define as?

[01:10:00] Ben Foster: What does it mean to work for everyone? What defines everyone? What does it mean to, to, you know, check all the boxes, et cetera. But it's also okay to then. Sort of have a slightly narrower focus where maybe you're saying for 90 percent of people. I want it to still actually, like, be especially effective, right?

[01:10:20] Ben Foster: Like it, you're not, you don't need to have 100 percent effectiveness for 100 percent of people. And in fact, if you try to get 100 percent effectiveness for 100 percent of people, what's going to happen is you're going to end up with 50 percent effectiveness. For a hundred percent of people, and it'd be a lot better.

[01:10:32] Ben Foster: It's a lot better as a, as a product, if you have 90 percent effectiveness for 90 percent of people. So, you know, what, what we did, for example, we had this interesting kind of like, you know, problem at Opower, which is we were measuring the outcomes using randomized controlled trials. Probably sounds familiar in the health tech space, right?

[01:10:50] Ben Foster: And that's, that's how we knew that it was, that was effective. So we would hold these home energy reports back from certain people and they wouldn't get them. And yet they're taxpayers who are paying into the same program. Shouldn't they be getting the same kind of like benefit? So what we did is we had to democratize the solution by saying, we're going to offer the same information to everybody online.

[01:11:08] Ben Foster: If you want to access it online, you're able to access it online. Certain people don't have access to a computer or to the internet, right? And yet taxpayers had to have access to this information. So we had to provide a phone number where they could call to get that information if they wanted to. So we could read it off to them after they verified their credentials.

[01:11:23] Ben Foster: We created these solutions to democratize the solution, but then we were able to say, okay. Now we're going to like actually deliver the outcomes, you know, to 90 percent of people. And we're going to choose the households that we think where we're going to get the greatest efficacy, right? And so we're going to focus our attention there and see what the impact is that we're able to, that we're able to get.

[01:11:39] Ben Foster: And so we, we designed reports to be most effective for the people that we thought would be responsive in the first place, and that's how we maximize the outcomes of what we saw. And I think that same notion. Can be applied a lot of times to health care solutions, you know, you know, a good example would be like, you know, you have some medical device and it has a screen on it and there's some sort of like font readout, certain people can only read a font if it's, you know, like a hundred point font or, or bigger.

[01:12:04] Ben Foster: Right. And like, you could design it that way for everyone, but are you actually making a better product for the, for the large group? You know, again, you want it to be accessible, but you also want it to be effective and those two things kind of sometimes can be at odds with one another. So that, that was really the approach that, that we took there.

[01:12:21] Ben Foster: And I think the same kind of thing can really be true for health tech companies as well.

[01:12:25] Angela Suthrave: love that.

[01:12:31] Omar Mousa: so Ben, I want to ask you one last question and then we can jump to our, our standard curtain call portion of the podcast. You know, again, we're, we're focused on, on health tech and we're, we're interviewing you are like a product leader among product leaders. Like I think you have a very vast industry across many industries, vast knowledge about product and, you know, I've seen it in the early days.

[01:12:55] Omar Mousa: So I'm wondering what advice do you have for product leaders and executors in health tech or thinking about in, you know, contextualizing towards health tech, like, or thinking about entering into health tech.

[01:13:07] Ben Foster: yeah, totally. You know, this one probably comes from whoop, uh, primarily, which is, it's so important to recognize that like. Functionality isn't enough. You need to drive engagement around the functionality as well. And I think that especially as I look at a lot of products in the health tech space, it's always easy as an outsider or whatever to, to, you know, look, look and, and, and, you know, gripe about it or whatever, but I think there's so much emphasis on functionality and not enough on, on sort of like engagement.

[01:13:33] Ben Foster: Like my dad, uh, passed away about two years ago. He was diabetic and he had various complications related to it. Um, his whole life, he was dealing with, you know. It's type one diabetes and he had, you know, over the years, different kinds of solutions, whether it was injections to, you know, eventually, you know, devices that were just going to plug directly into him and stuff like that.

[01:13:52] Ben Foster: And it was like, he just forgot, like he would forget all the time to like take his shot. He would forget all the time to, to program the, you know, the amount of insulin that he needed, et cetera. And I think that a lot of his later in life complications were probably a function of. You know, decades of mismanagement of this disease, the functionality was all there, but like, where was the alert that said, you know, Hey, you didn't do this thing today or the, like back in the, um, we'll go way back in the days of, of manual injections and he would prick his finger and stuff like that.

[01:14:24] Ben Foster: Like what he didn't have was a little calendar that went with it. Where he could like, you know, maybe every time he blotted his finger, it should have been like on a little calendars and like that was like, yes, I did it. Yes, I did it. Yes, I tested. Here's the number that I had, you know, et cetera. And if the number was really high, then I would ask a subsequent question.

[01:14:40] Ben Foster: Well, what did you eat that day? You know? And he's like, Oh yeah, I went to the bakery and had three pastries or, you know, whatever. Right. And it's like, you know, maybe that's, you're, you're seeing the correlation. You're like, and so he could like, the focus was on the functionality of delivering insulin. As opposed to the, to the purpose being engaging the patient around the management of this disease.

[01:15:02] Ben Foster: And, and I think that I see that same kind of thing still holding true to it. It's getting better, you know, and I think, you know, phones and things like that kind of offer a lot of capabilities for this kind of like higher engagement, but like the way to make it more effective is not to get some better protein compound or, you know, whatever it's to get the people to just take the medicine that they're supposed to have.

[01:15:21] Ben Foster: Right. You know, and, and. Keep in mind that there's this, there's these flaws in people that we need to kind of like work around and, and, you know, we play an important role with our solutions in working with their minds as well as with their bodies.

[01:15:34] Angela Suthrave: Okay. So we have entered the very exciting curtain call portion of the podcast. We are going to ask you six questions and hopefully, you know, they're sort of a fun. And so the first one is, is there anything that's happening in healthcare that excites you?

[01:15:51] Ben Foster: Yeah, sure. You know, I think it's less about the next whiz bang sensor and things like that. You know, a lot of those. Plenty of work that's going into that stuff. And it, and it will be really exciting in the future to me, I think what's going on right now, that's a really big deal is AI and, you know, the, the digestion of corrigandum amounts of information, but converting it into something that people can really understand, you know, not only can you direct physicians to go look at the right things, or you can look at protein folding and all those other like crazy stuff that's going on in the medical arena, but I think that even just personalizing stuff.

[01:16:20] Ben Foster: Can be really powerful. Like, Hey, I've seen all this data about you. And here's this one piece of advice that I have for you based on what I'm seeing about your body. To be able to communicate that to somebody without a person having to review all that, what it does, it lowers the cost so much that. Now you can make it available to the masses and these, you know, the, these kinds of things that never would have been viable businesses before are going to get unlocked through this technology.

[01:16:47] Ben Foster: So a lot of people are looking at it as just kind of like, what's the one next thing that's going to happen with these companies or how are they going to serve what they're doing, you know, better, but really the big thing is going to be all these new companies that emerge because of the, the financial side of it, where I can deliver personalized recommendations to you that are totally better than any person would have ever been able to deliver.

[01:17:06] Ben Foster: And it's going to cost me one penny to do it.

[01:17:10] Angela Suthrave: Ben,

[01:17:10] Angela Suthrave: thank you for. 

[01:17:11] Omar Mousa: outcomes are spot on.

[01:17:13] Angela Suthrave: Thank you for validating my, my work and my day job. That's great.

[01:17:19] Ben Foster: Nice.

[01:17:21] Omar Mousa: If you could travel back in time to give yourself one piece of advice, what would that advice be?

[01:17:27] Ben Foster: I'd say be relentless on the core value prop of what you're working on. It's so easy to get, you know, what if we did this and what if we added this feature and what have we done this capability? And it's like. You know, if you were at Google, just keep making search better, you know, just keep like doing it and yes, you build the other things on top, not saying you don't do that, but don't forget about what you got you there, like keep investing in that one thing that you're really like, you know, best at, because eventually you're not going to be best at it unless you continue to invest in it's very easy to kind of like lose track to lose sight of that, but just kind of like stay diligent about that.

[01:17:59] Ben Foster: If you're a founder, head of product, you know, you name it.

[01:18:03] Angela Suthrave: Who is someone in health or health tech that you admire?

[01:18:08] Ben Foster: All right. You know, there's all the names that I'm going to float around that everybody kind of like, you know, knows and stuff like that. I'm going to give two names that people probably don't know. They're both at Whoop. One of them is Emily Capodilupo, who is the sort of head of data science there and is a real genius with the stuff, does a huge amount of research with, you know, new, new discoveries about the human body, you know, really thinking about people caring for their health as opposed to just kind of like healthcare and really.

[01:18:33] Ben Foster: Does a great job of looking at the data, running the studies and things like that, that is advancing. I think that consumer side of things that you were describing Angela and the other one is also a whoop, uh, Kristen Holmes, and she's the head of performance science there and also has kind of developed a really interesting perspective on the actions, the activities that people can do to kind of have that preventative maintenance for their bodies, right?

[01:18:59] Ben Foster: Here's the things to do to be in. Thank you. Great shape to keep your mental health, you know, there to, to ensure that you're sleeping enough, et cetera. And I've never seen someone do such a good job of clearly articulating the steps. The actions, the things like that, that people need to take to become extremely healthy.

[01:19:16] Ben Foster: And she's living evidence of that with the way that she lives her life as well, which was pretty impressive.

[01:19:20] Omar Mousa: Tell, tell our audience something about you that not many people know.

[01:19:26] Ben Foster: Uh, I'll go outside of product on this one. And not a lot of people know that I was once a semi pro poker player. In fact, I was one of a few different people who left eBay in the product management organization. Back in the day, we were all playing these home games and we got better and better and better at it.

[01:19:40] Ben Foster: And, and, and so I decided I wanted to give a shot. So I played. Kind of like pro poker for a year, I made money, but not enough to pay the bills. So back to product management.

[01:19:48] Angela Suthrave: Ben, do you have any shameless plugs you'd like to, you'd like to

[01:19:53] Ben Foster: Uh, all right. I'll just go ahead and be, I mean, what kind of consultant would I be if I didn't have a shameless plug, right? I mean, look, you know, Prodify we're experts in all things related to products that can be, you know, from people to process, from strategy to execution, from concepts of delivery.

[01:20:08] Ben Foster: Customer value, business value, you know, you name it, anything that's in between, chat with us. If you think that there's some sort of opportunity that's there, or you feel like you could be doing better on one of those fronts, like, we're always just open to the conversation. You know, we, we got into doing this business because we love to talk shop with people and almost every single one of our customers was not one that we gave some hard sell to or anything like that.

[01:20:30] Ben Foster: We just started having conversations without any expectation on our end. And as we conversed with founders, heads of product, et cetera, they started to realize that we could be really beneficial for them longterm. And they actually are the ones who approach us and say, you know, how could we formalize some sort of our relationship with you, where you can continue to help us long term.

[01:20:48] Ben Foster: And we know we've had a lot of companies that have been working with us for. Five plus years as a result of taking that approach. So we're always happy to have those conversations. We don't have any expectations and you know, you can reach out to us in a whole variety of ways. So, you know, we love to talk to you.

[01:21:03] Omar Mousa: Speaking of reaching out, if anyone wants to get in contact with you, you know, how do they go about it? Or

[01:21:09] Ben Foster: Sure. Well, yeah, I'll, I'll give two ways. One is go to our website. It's Prodify, prodigy.group and the other one is you can just LinkedIn. Very easy. My handle is Ben Foster. Not too hard to find. You'll see a ton of advisory things that I've done. And a lot of other things that the rest of us. At Protify have done as well.

[01:21:27] Ben Foster: So those are probably the two places for the two best places to reach us.

[01:21:32] Omar Mousa: Ben Foster, product leader among product leaders. Thanks so much for coming on to Concept2Care. Angela and I are very grateful. Thanks so much.

[01:21:40] Angela Suthrave: This is

[01:21:41] Angela Suthrave: wonderful. Thank you, Ben. 

[01:21:42] Ben Foster: I appreciate it. It was a great conversation.

[01:21:45] Omar Mousa: All right.

 

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