Episode #17 - Simon Hayhurst, Chief Product Officer at Virta Health

Written By Omar Mousa

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Description

Simon Hayhurst is the Chief Product Officer at Virta Health, a company on a mission to reverse Type 2 diabetes and improve metabolic health for millions. With a deep background in product strategy and a passion for tackling one of healthcare’s most pressing challenges, Simon has played a key role in scaling Virta’s innovative care model. At the intersection of technology, behavior change, and clinical excellence, Virta is reshaping what’s possible in chronic disease management.

In our conversation, Simon shares his insights on:

  • The Virta Mission and Founding Story: How a personal health journey inspired a company to tackle metabolic disease at scale.

  • The Evolution of Virta’s Go-to-Market Strategy: Lessons from clinical validation, early patient success, and building payer relationships.

  • Leveraging Technology for Personalized Care: How Virta combines human coaching and AI to deliver scalable, high-quality care.

  • Frameworks for Product Success: Simon’s “three-legged stool” approach to balancing patient value, payer ROI, and operational efficiency.

  • Doing Unscalable Things First: Why starting small is key to learning, building empathy, and refining workflows.

  • Planning with Now-Next-Later: A simple, flexible framework for focused product strategy in dynamic environments.

  • The Power of Retrospectives: How continuous improvement drives sustainable growth and team empowerment.

  • AI and the Future of Member Experience: The role of AI in scaling personalized, proactive, and efficient healthcare delivery.

In this episode of Concept to Care, Simon provides a fascinating look into how Virta Health is leading the charge against Type 2 diabetes and redefining health tech success. His insights into product strategy, scaling care, and leveraging AI offer actionable lessons for health tech leaders, operators, and entrepreneurs.

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Some takeaways:

  1. The Virta Mission and Founding Story

    1. Mission: Virta aims to reverse Type 2 diabetes and tackle metabolic health challenges, including obesity, for millions of people.

    2. Founder’s Journey: Sami Inkinen, Virta’s founder, was diagnosed with prediabetes despite being a fit, competitive athlete.

    3. The Breakthrough: Sami reversed his diabetes within a month using a well-formulated ketogenic diet after discovering groundbreaking research.

    4. Vision: Inspired by his personal success, Sami founded Virta to bring this life-changing approach to patients worldwide.

  2. How Virta Health Started and Its Go-to-Market Evolution

    1. Clinical Validation: Virta began with rigorous clinical trials, publishing results in the New England Journal of Medicine to establish credibility.

    2. Early Lessons: The team learned that publishing data wasn’t enough—behavior change required direct engagement with patients.

    3. Behavior Change Focus: Virta developed a scalable care model blending human coaching with a digital platform to support lifestyle changes.

    4. GTM Strategy:

      1. Start with patient success to prove the model works.

      2. Build payer relationships by demonstrating cost savings and health improvements.

      3. Align clinical and financial outcomes for long-term sustainability.

  3. What Virta Does Today and the Role of Technology

    1. Personalized Care: Virta provides individualized nutrition plans based on a well-formulated ketogenic diet, supported by coaching to guide patients through lifestyle changes.

    2. Digital Tools: A mobile app allows patients to track their progress, access resources, and stay engaged, while AI-powered tools like “Viv” offer real-time, personalized support.

    3. Clinical Monitoring: Physicians and clinicians monitor patient health metrics to ensure care is both effective and safe.

    4. Blending Human and Digital: Virta integrates technology to enhance human coaching, ensuring scalable, high-quality care while leveraging AI to reduce reliance on human intervention without compromising outcomes.

  4. The Three-Legged Stool for Health Tech Success

    Simon Hayhurst shared a powerful framework for evaluating the viability of a health tech business, which he calls the “three-legged stool.” The success of any health tech company depends on balancing these three critical components:

    1. Value to Patients: A health tech solution must deliver meaningful benefits directly to patients—whether through improved health outcomes, convenience, or a better experience. For Virta, reversing Type 2 diabetes rather than managing it creates a compelling value proposition that drives patient adoption and engagement.

    2. ROI for Payers: Payers, including insurers and employers, need to see measurable cost savings or efficiencies to justify investing. Virta demonstrates ROI by reducing long-term healthcare costs through decreased medication use and improved health outcomes, backed by peer-reviewed studies.

    3. Sustainable Business Model: A scalable health tech business must balance patient outcomes and payer value with operational efficiency. Virta achieves this by leveraging technology to scale care delivery without sacrificing quality. Tools like “Viv” streamline operations while keeping patients supported, helping align clinical success with financial sustainability.

  5. Insights from the Peterson Report: The Cost Crisis in Chronic Care

    The Peterson Report set out to explore the financial toll of chronic diseases in the U.S. healthcare system and evaluate the effectiveness of solutions aimed at addressing these costs. Its findings were both sobering and revealing:

    1. The Findings: Chronic diseases account for 90% of U.S. healthcare spending, with Type 2 diabetes alone consuming hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The report highlighted that traditional care models—and even some digital health solutions—focus on managing symptoms rather than addressing the root causes, perpetuating unsustainable costs.

    2. A Broken Digital Promise: The report specifically examined other digital health players that aimed to reduce costs but fell short due to a lack of measurable impact or failure to integrate meaningfully into the healthcare ecosystem. Many solutions promised innovation but were unable to demonstrate scalable, long-term savings for payers or sustainable clinical outcomes for patients.

    3. Virta’s Relevance: Virta stands apart by tackling the root cause of Type 2 diabetes and achieving results that align clinical outcomes with financial savings. By reducing dependency on medications and preventing expensive complications, Virta addresses the challenges outlined in the report.

    4. Why This Matters: The Peterson Report underscores that not all digital health solutions deliver on their promises. Virta’s success demonstrates how a mission-driven, science-backed approach can disrupt the cycle of chronic disease costs and set a new standard for the industry.

  6. Balancing Human Interaction and Technology: Lessons for Builders

    Simon emphasized the importance of finding the right balance between human-led care and technology in health tech solutions. This balance is crucial to scaling while maintaining patient outcomes and satisfaction. Key takeaways for builders include:

    1. Start with Human-Led Care: Begin with a model that prioritizes meaningful human touchpoints and layer in technology to enhance efficiency and scale.

    2. Leverage Technology to Optimize, Not Replace: Use technology to support clinicians and coaches rather than automate everything. For example, Virta’s app empowers patients with real-time tools, allowing coaches to focus on higher-value interactions.

    3. Test Hypotheses with Lean Principles: Iterate quickly to find the right balance between human interaction and technology, ensuring effectiveness and scalability.

    4. Focus on Personalization: Build technology that adapts to individual patient needs, offering proactive care and reactive support.

    5. Monitor Outcomes Closely: Measure clinical results and patient satisfaction to ensure that technology complements human care delivery.

  7. Planning with Now-Next-Later: A Framework for Focused Product Strategy

    Simon emphasized that effective planning has been key to Virta’s success in navigating the complexities of health tech. By adopting a flexible and pragmatic approach, he has enabled his teams to focus on delivering high-impact work while staying adaptable in a fast-changing landscape. The Now-Next-Later framework exemplifies this philosophy.

    1. What It Is: Now-Next-Later is a simple prioritization framework that organizes work into three categories:

      1. Now: The immediate, fully scoped priorities being actively worked on.

      2. Next: The near-term initiatives that follow the “Now” work, still flexible but aligned with strategic goals.

      3. Later: Long-term ideas or goals that aren’t actionable yet but serve as a guide for future direction.

    2. The Value of Now-Next-Later:

      1. Simplifies Planning: Reduces complexity by focusing on sequencing work rather than committing to rigid deadlines.

      2. Enhances Flexibility: Allows teams to adapt quickly to changing priorities or new opportunities.

      3. Promotes Clarity: Clearly communicates priorities across teams, reducing confusion and misalignment.

      4. Drives Focus: Keeps teams centered on the most impactful work at any given time without overcommitting.

      5. Improves Execution: By working on only a few well-defined “Now” initiatives, teams can deliver higher-quality outcomes faster.

  8. “We Can Do Anything, But We Can’t Do Everything”

    Simon underscored the importance of focus in building impactful health tech solutions. While the opportunities in healthcare innovation are vast, spreading resources too thin can dilute effectiveness.

    1. The Power of Focus: Concentrating on a few high-impact initiatives enables teams to deliver meaningful, well-executed solutions that drive real results.

    2. Aligning with Core Strengths: Virta’s success comes from doubling down on its core mission—reversing Type 2 diabetes—rather than chasing tangential opportunities.

    3. Implication for Builders: Prioritize ruthlessly. Evaluate initiatives based on how they contribute to patient outcomes, payer ROI, and long-term scalability. Saying no to good ideas can be critical to achieving great outcomes.

  9. Do Unscalable Things First

    Simon emphasized the value of starting with unscalable solutions to test ideas, learn quickly, and identify what truly works before investing in automation or building complex systems. This approach ensures resources are focused on impactful initiatives and avoids wasting time on over-engineering early on.

    1. Validate the problem before scaling: Start small to confirm that the problem you’re solving is real and that your solution addresses it effectively. For example, manually onboarding a few patients can reveal insights about user needs and potential friction points that would be hard to discover with a fully automated process.

    2. Focus on learning quickly: Doing unscalable work allows for fast iteration. By interacting directly with patients, providers, or other stakeholders, you can gather real-world feedback to refine your approach.

    3. Build empathy through hands-on experience: Engaging in unscalable activities, such as personally providing support or running pilots, helps founders and teams build empathy for their users. This firsthand experience can inform product decisions and improve user satisfaction.

    4. Delay automation until it’s necessary: Resist the urge to automate too early. Only invest in scalability once you’ve validated that your processes work and are worth optimizing. Premature automation can lock in inefficiencies and make it harder to pivot.

    5. Iterate on processes before scaling them: Use unscalable methods to refine your workflows. For instance, manually tracking user progress or managing referrals might feel inefficient but can highlight bottlenecks and areas for improvement before building technology to support them.

    6. Focus on delivering value, not perfection: Early adopters are often forgiving of manual or imperfect processes if they see value in the solution. Prioritize delivering outcomes over polishing every detail in the early stages.

  10. The Power of Retrospectives

    Simon highlighted how retrospectives are a cornerstone of continuous improvement at Virta, ensuring teams learn from past experiences and evolve their processes for greater efficiency and impact.

    1. Identify What’s Working: Retrospectives provide a structured way to assess successes, enabling teams to double down on strategies that drive results.

    2. Address Pain Points: By surfacing challenges—whether technical, operational, or interpersonal—teams can proactively resolve issues before they escalate.

    3. Balance Speed and Quality: Virta uses retrospectives to find the right trade-off between delivering features quickly and addressing technical debt, ensuring sustainable growth.

    4. Empower Team Growth: Retrospectives create a culture of openness and accountability, helping teams take ownership of their successes and failures while fostering collaboration.

  11. AI and the Future of Member Experience

    Simon highlighted how AI plays a pivotal role in transforming patient care, making it more personalized, efficient, and scalable. At Virta, AI enhances the member experience by focusing on these key areas:

    1. Personalized and Proactive Support: AI tools like Virta’s food tracking assistant provide real-time, tailored guidance to help patients adhere to their care plans. These tools also predict when patients might need extra support, enabling proactive engagement that improves adherence and outcomes.

    2. Efficient Resource Allocation: By automating repetitive tasks like answering FAQs or dietary advice, AI reduces the workload on human coaches, allowing them to focus on complex and high-value interactions.

    3. Maintaining Trust and Transparency: Virta’s AI supports, rather than replaces, human coaching, ensuring patients trust the recommendations they receive. Transparent design and thoughtful integration of AI maintain the personal connection that patients value.

    4. Scalable, Continuous Learning: Virta’s AI evolves over time, improving recommendations and insights based on patient data and outcomes. This ensures long-term scalability and increasing value.

Show Notes

Where to find Simon Hayhurst

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Where to find Angela and Omar:

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Referenced:

Transcript

[00:00:00] Simon Hayhurst: It's tempting to think what you want is the employer model first, but in reality, the employers aren't going to even give you a shot unless you've got clear evidence that people are going to be excited to have it. So start by thinking about what you're doing for the patient or for the member. And find a set of members.

[00:00:18] Simon Hayhurst: It doesn't, they don't even have to be associated company. You can do it for free, get excited members. And once, once you've got those stories, that's how you're going to hook the employers. So get those first and it doesn't matter where you find them. 

[00:00:31] Angela Suthrave: Welcome to concept to care, where we hear candid stories of success and failure, discuss strategy and dive into the details.

[00:00:38] Angela Suthrave: That offer advice on what to do and what not to do in health tech, 

[00:00:42] Omar Mousa: whether you're a seasoned pro growing your career, or just starting out our aim for this podcast is to be relevant, real world and tactical. We're dedicated to not only entertaining you all, but also empowering you with actionable insights that can be applied beyond the podcast.

[00:00:56] Omar Mousa: One concept at a time. 

[00:00:57] Angela Suthrave: This is Angela. 

[00:00:59] Omar Mousa: And this is Omar. 

[00:01:00] Angela Suthrave: Welcome to Concept2Care. 

[00:01:03] Omar Mousa: Today, we're excited to welcome Simon Hayhurst, Chief Product Officer at Virta Health, a company revolutionizing chronic disease care by reversing type 2 diabetes at scale. Simon, an engineer gone bad, brings a wealth of experience from leading innovative product teams across technology and healthcare.

[00:01:19] Omar Mousa: At Virta, he's at the forefront of integrating technology Human coaching and clinical excellence to tackle one of healthcare's most pressing challenges, metabolic health. In this episode, Simon shares his unique perspective on building scalable health tech solutions, including Berta's mission driven approach, the role of AI in care delivery, and the frameworks that guide his product strategy.

[00:01:41] Omar Mousa: We'll also discuss actionable lessons for health tech operators from doing unscalable things first to leveraging retrospectives and balancing personalization with scalability. Whether you're a founder, product leader, or investor, Simon's insights are invaluable for navigating the complexities of healthcare innovation.

[00:01:59] Omar Mousa: We hope you enjoy the show.

[00:02:05] Omar Mousa: Simon, welcome to the show. 

[00:02:07] Simon Hayhurst: It's so good to be here with you. 

[00:02:08] Omar Mousa: Let's start the podcast off with, how about you just tell us a little bit about yourself, Simon? 

[00:02:12] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, sure thing. So, uh, think of me as an engineer gone bad, I guess. I used to write code. I've been in tech for 30 years. God, it sounds like a long time when you say it that way.

[00:02:22] Simon Hayhurst: Uh, I've had the pleasure of, of leading product in. All sorts of corners of the world and different industries. I've been in healthcare, I've been in car design, I've been in film, I've been in medical imaging and all sorts of things. I've been very lucky with the different ways and I've been able to play.

[00:02:40] Simon Hayhurst: And most lately I've been in a couple of health techs. The first one focused on helping people with chronic pain and musculoskeletal issues. Now for a little over a year, I've been here at Virta helping people with metabolic health, reversing diabetes and treating obesity. And it's pretty magical. 

[00:02:58] Angela Suthrave: Thanks for sharing, Simon.

[00:03:00] Angela Suthrave: You know, I'm a registered dietitian and once upon a time, I was a certified diabetes educator. And so I'm so excited for you to share more with us about Virta Health. 

[00:03:11] Simon Hayhurst: That's a pretty good overlap. I think we're going to have a lot to chat about as we compare notes between the things that we've often been taught are true that turn out not to be true and the things that we now know to be true.

[00:03:21] Simon Hayhurst: That almost invert the, the food pyramid as we all grew up being taught, which is kind of wild. 

[00:03:26] Angela Suthrave: Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. I think that there's still so much that is left to be discovered and you know, Virta has made incredible progress. So tell us a little bit about what Virta Health does. How did it start?

[00:03:40] Angela Suthrave: What, you know, how the mission has evolved over time. 

[00:03:43] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah. It's an interesting and fun story. I love founder stories. I think they're always so interesting. I've worked with a lot of different founders. Uh, Sami, our founder, he's Norwegian. He grew up farming, uh, turned into a physicist and, uh, ended up pretty far from where he started and was the founder of Trulia, which worked out really super well.

[00:04:01] Simon Hayhurst: And that was a journey, took him quite a while and they ended up eventually selling to Zillow. And, you know, it's the founder's dream, changed the world, came out with a fair bit of money on the far side of it, and wondering what to do next. And he's also a very competitive human. He's very unusual in a bunch of ways.

[00:04:18] Simon Hayhurst: He's a competitive mountain biker. Not long ago, earlier this year, he did a seven day mountain biking paired team race in South Africa. He also rode to Hawaii with his wife, and he's like, just a really unusual person. So he's, he's fit and healthy, but, Coming out of Trulia, he also discovered he had diabetes and he goes, that doesn't track.

[00:04:37] Simon Hayhurst: Uh, I'm fit, I'm healthy, I'm an athlete, I think a lot about what I put in my mouth. Uh, how do I have this? Why is this happening? And so, uh, like any good scientist, he researched. And he dug around a lot and, uh, came across this research. And this researcher, Dr. Finney, who was like, well, you know, tell me what you're eating.

[00:04:54] Simon Hayhurst: And he goes, he describes his athletes. And he goes, yeah, of course you have diabetes. He goes, what do you mean? Of course I have diabetes. They said, well, it's pretty straightforward. So I mean, if you, if you just modify your diet a little, and we can get this thing knocked out in no time at all. And he's like, just like that.

[00:05:07] Simon Hayhurst: He goes, yeah. So he described what is now the Berta protocol, which is what we call a well formulated ketogenic diet. He said, if you just teach your body to burn fat as fuel, then you won't get the glucose spikes, and you won't get the repeated glucose spikes, and so you won't get insulin resistance, and everything will reset.

[00:05:23] Simon Hayhurst: And Sami, being an unusual human, said, oh, well, that sounds simple. And so next day he started doing that. And a month later, his diabetes was reversed. And he's like, well, this is magic. Everyone should do this. And so the company started off that simple observation now. It turns out we do know how to reverse diabetes and it's more about how do you help people get the education they need and deal with the behavior change because a lot of the things you grew up eating and that you probably have grown to love are probably part of the problem.

[00:05:52] Simon Hayhurst: And so he started with, let's just do, maybe people don't believe us because there's no trials. So they ran a trial and there's like, hey, now we published the data. It's in the New England Journal of Medicine. Now everyone will change. Of course, no one changed. And he's like, Oh, I guess we're literally gonna have to form a company and go change people one at a time.

[00:06:10] Simon Hayhurst: And, and that's how Vertigo got started nine years ago. And we've been changing people's lives ever since. And it's, it's pretty magical. And as we like to say all the time, it's still day one. We're just getting started. 

[00:06:21] Angela Suthrave: Yeah. Obviously a lot of people in the United States and around the world have diabetes.

[00:06:27] Angela Suthrave: I would love for you to tell us about the clinical product as well as about the technology product to support the population. 

[00:06:35] Simon Hayhurst: It's really interesting because in a lot of companies you have your secret sauce, right? And you're spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a product that works.

[00:06:43] Simon Hayhurst: Um, and, and then that's, that's a lot of the journey in some sense. We already know what works and we published it. It's free for anyone to use. Uh, the hard part though is, is when the behavior change business, and I've often said to founders, you know, there's many kinds of businesses, but the hardest ones to start, and if you get a choice, maybe don't do this would be being in the behavior change business.

[00:07:02] Simon Hayhurst: And as a registered dietitian, you know, firsthand, that's the real hard thing. And so there's sort of three legs to our stool when I think about it. The first is, what is it you need to do? And this we understand really super well. We know that if we can remove the carbohydrates or enough carbohydrates from your diet then you will remove the blood sugar spikes, which in turn removes the hunger cravings and your body will naturally settle into a, an eating habit and a pattern that, that turns out to be healthy.

[00:07:31] Simon Hayhurst: Get you to a healthy weight and a healthy, healthy blood glucose level and diabetes is gone and obesity will largely take care of itself as well. It's amazing. That's the first leg is what? And that's really about food choices. And that bit's the bit that's super well understood. The second bit is the how, and there's two components to that.

[00:07:49] Simon Hayhurst: There's human help. And there's an app. And I think it's a super interesting technical problem to think about. How do you take the best of what humans can do? Which is like what we're doing here, connecting with each other and chatting and, and gaining trust and the understanding of each other. And it's a uniquely human thing.

[00:08:05] Simon Hayhurst: And we've gotten really good at that. We started out of clinical trial, which was humans helping humans. And so we've now gotten, I would say, pretty good too. How do you have humans help other humans make behavior change? That's already a hard thing. And now the next question, this is the bit that we're still really a lot of long way to get better at is okay.

[00:08:23] Simon Hayhurst: But how do you best use an app to help for some of that? So you can have the help in the moment you need. It's freely available. It's easy. It's in your pocket. It's right there with you all the time. And which things should the app do for you? Which things do you really need the human to do for you? And I think this second leg of Verda's growth is A lot of it about that interplay of when should we have a coach, or an endocrinologist, or a doctor, an NP, right, a lot of different kinds of titles and kinds of people, when should they do things and what should they do, and when is it better to have an app in your pocket, you know, providing the information or the answer, and how do we make that as optimal for you as a member as possible.

[00:08:59] Omar Mousa: You, you talk about an interesting balance of like mobile app experience engagement with, you know, clinical staff and I'm curious what the balance is there and kind of how do you find that right balance. So, for example, like. You're exposing probably information and data about someone's, I mean, care in, in that application.

[00:09:19] Omar Mousa: And sometimes that can be a little bit overwhelming. Like, how are you contextualizing that in a way that's helpful and drives like behavior changes? 

[00:09:26] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, it's a super good question. And I wish we had the perfect answer here. I don't think we do, hence it's still day one, but I think there's, there's a lot you can do with lean startup principles here to sort of put on the beginner's mindset and say, pretend for a minute, we really don't know the answer and what sort of loops should you follow as a product leader to get better at the answer.

[00:09:47] Simon Hayhurst: And I think, I think that's maybe the thing that's maybe the more important and interesting question, which is there's some tips and tricks, right? Make the content engaging, make it short. Don't give people too many things to do at once. Think about which information should you disclose first so we can.

[00:10:00] Simon Hayhurst: Put pull at each of these and there's some best practices, but I also think there's a certain magic to taking whatever you've got in the app and saying, let's imagine for a minute. We really don't know the answer. And so when we ship things, and when we have ideas, start with hypotheses and then think about how do we get accelerated learning.

[00:10:19] Simon Hayhurst: And what does that look like so that we know when to double down and then pull and pull and pull and pull at that thread until it stops giving and when to be like, Oh, turns out we're beginners and we didn't really know anything. And this idea was not a great idea. And I think that's that's maybe the most important fly.

[00:10:36] Simon Hayhurst: Well, if you get that right, everything else will uncover itself because I've always found in any company, there's a lot of good ideas. And so I worry less about creating the magic idea. And more about how to create these loops that allow us to be really efficient at which ideas. 

[00:10:51] Omar Mousa: Simon, out there there's a perspective that diabetes is something that just is, you know, managed, right?

[00:10:58] Omar Mousa: But not often reversed, or could not be reversed. Is that a misconception, or? Can you share like Virta's perspective on this matter? 

[00:11:06] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah. Absolutely. Let's focus specifically on type 2 diabetes. Type 1 is its own beast, uh, but type 2 diabetes, you're exactly right. We come across all the time, you know, it's a progressive disease.

[00:11:18] Simon Hayhurst: It can be managed. Uh, it turns out to be incorrect. They can make cause damage that can't be reversed, right? If you've lost your eyesight, you've lost your eyesight, and that's tragic, but it's entirely preventable. And it's entirely reversible. We see this over and over and over again that the body is an amazing thing, and it learns how to deal with all these repeated glucose spikes, and it defends itself as best it can.

[00:11:41] Simon Hayhurst: And so if you put foods in your body that cause the glucose spikes, it will do its best, and it will eventually get diabetes. But if you prevent those spikes, Your A1C will come down and we can consistently get people off all their medications and return them to a healthy A1C and, uh, it's, it's magical and wonderful and, and that's less about us and more about how magical a person's body is.

[00:12:02] Simon Hayhurst: It knows how to get itself well again if you give it the chance. 

[00:12:05] Omar Mousa: There is a report that came out and made major waves in the digital health world. It's called the Peterson Report. I'm sure you're familiar, but a very cool spotlight in there. Can you tell us a little bit in detail, like a high level summary around the study and its findings and any like opinions you may have about the study?

[00:12:25] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah. Peterson Institute, it's a, it's an interesting body, right? So they were founded, Uh, in 2023, if I remember rightly, with a 50 million grant, and the goal was to shine a light on all these different kinds of treatments out there and just figure out objectively what works and what doesn't. And it's a, it's a super interesting process.

[00:12:42] Simon Hayhurst: Nothing's perfect, but it's a really interesting and noble goal. And so they studied a whole bunch of providers in and around this space. And their conclusion was, was. Interesting, but for us at Virta, unexpected. What it sort of highlighted was that Virta works, that it does have measurable, clinical, statistical, you can prove it, benefit, it absolutely reduces, and that there's a financial benefit.

[00:13:08] Simon Hayhurst: And we'll get to this I think as well, it's a super interesting thing, but we'll circle back on the magical flywheel. But sadly, it also showed that most of what's out there isn't any better than normal standard of care. A normal standard of care suggests that if you have diabetes over time, your A1c will creep up, and your obesity will worsen, and you will get sicker, and you will need more meds, and costs go up, and a lot of care out there doesn't seem to bend that trajectory at all.

[00:13:33] Simon Hayhurst: Which I think is, is no indictment on them, so much as an observation of the fact that diabetes is hard in traditional care. However you deliver it digitally or in person doesn't, doesn't help much. And just because you did delivering it digitally doesn't deliver enough benefit for the costs because a lot of these solutions, they lay on a fair bit of extra costs.

[00:13:51] Simon Hayhurst: And so, yeah, it turns out to be hard to make it actually work for the insurance companies and the payers, as well as for the patients. And right now we're, we're in a lone spot of the one company that does, which has been good for us. I will not lie. That has been quite helpful. 

[00:14:07] Angela Suthrave: Yeah, it's really remarkable that Virta was the only health tech provider to render these types of positive outcomes.

[00:14:14] Angela Suthrave: And so a lot of our listeners work in. Health tech care delivery. If I'm listening, what would you say to me so that I can also try to replicate what has worked for Virta? 

[00:14:26] Simon Hayhurst: Here's a hard thing about healthcare in the U S and health tech in the U S it's, it's a business I think is incredibly hard to start.

[00:14:33] Simon Hayhurst: And so as you, as you're going on this journey, several things need to be true and getting all three to be true is the hard work for product leaders in this space. So the first is you need something that adds value to patients or members, right? They've got to want to do this, uh, when you're starting, no one's going to force everybody to do it, right?

[00:14:52] Simon Hayhurst: You're not going to have something where I want to be like, yeah, I will tell every patient to do this and all doctors will change behavior or something. So, so you need some reason why, why members or patients will find this attractive, right? So if you're a Teladoc, for example, that's like, it's more convenient and that's great, right?

[00:15:06] Simon Hayhurst: So, so patients are going to want to do it. Necessary, but not sufficient to be a business. This is now a product, but it's not yet a business. And that's really important. So the second thing is you have to be able to do it in a way which reduces costs for insurance companies, the payers, and when you're selling directly first to companies, that's usually where you have to start to get traction or whether you're going to, you get lucky and get straight in the front door on a health plan.

[00:15:29] Simon Hayhurst: You're largely going to be selling to companies. But they need an economic benefit. And when you get to the real high end of the payers, an insurance company of any sort is not in the business of healthcare specifically. For example, they're in the business of collecting premiums and paying out on the far side.

[00:15:47] Simon Hayhurst: And those two things have to balance the way that's profitable. And so for them to be excited. You need to come in with more than members like us. And so for them to be excited, it has to make sense to an actor, which means there has to be a positive ROI that can be provable at scale. So that's the second leg of the flywheel.

[00:16:03] Simon Hayhurst: This still makes you a product and not a business, unfortunately. And with some examples out there where it could be arguably good for members and arguably good for payers, but not actually a business. Cause the third bit is you have to be able to turn a profit. And so there has to be an economic model that allows you to create enough value that you can capture enough to recover your costs.

[00:16:21] Simon Hayhurst: And the hard thing is in almost every instance I've seen, you get this additional problem of we have to go recruit the patients even after you've got the payers on board. We're not in the part of the healthcare system where doctors funnel people to us directly in a nice, clean, easy way. So you have to have enough for the CAC, which is going to be substantial and for your cost of providing the service.

[00:16:39] Simon Hayhurst: Cracking all three is super important. Now, when you're starting, you won't have all three. No startup has all three in place from the get go. But I think it's really interesting and important to be very thoughtful about can you get to all three? What would need to be true? And once you know that you all three can be true, then the rest is just product work.

[00:16:56] Simon Hayhurst: Uh, but if you don't have a clear path to how all three are going to be true, caveat MTOR, because you may just be burning investor money, uh, on a journey to a thing that's a product, but not a business. And I think a lot of health tech companies still sit in that space of, I know how to solve one or two of the three, but I can't solve all three.

[00:17:12] Simon Hayhurst: That's hard. Cause if you can't, then you're probably not actually a business at the end of the day. 

[00:17:17] Angela Suthrave: I'd like to pull on one of those threads that you talked about. So you talked about startups burning money and getting the payers on board. Typically, we know that the payer contracts take a long time, right?

[00:17:30] Angela Suthrave: Eight months, nine months, a year to sign. And so, you know, could you share your thoughts on the go to market? If you are a startup and you're trying to land these whales, but at the same time, you got to show that, you know, there's product market fit and you got to start bringing in some revenues with a low CAC.

[00:17:50] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, yeah, uh, super good questions and really important part of the equation, especially now that venture capital is back to what I call normal, right? The days of easy money and scale first ask questions later seem to be behind us for a period of time, right? And these cycles come and go. We've been through a couple of these.

[00:18:07] Simon Hayhurst: So I think a couple of things here. One, if you can, Find patient capital, people who are used to a standard SAS businesses is tempting to pitch yourself as a SAS business, like a standard SAS business, um, or even worse a B2C business and investors in those businesses expect a flywheel that shows really quick results.

[00:18:27] Simon Hayhurst: And so they expect to be able to just dump more money in and see a pretty quick return to acceleration revenue. Once you've got an initial product market fit, your business won't do that. And so it's really helpful to be thoughtful about which kind of investors you bring in. So you're not setting yourself up for an impossible equation.

[00:18:43] Simon Hayhurst: Now, in reality, somebody is better than no money. So you may not get that luxury or just acknowledge that upfront that you may have capital that's not patient, but to the extent you can get people who've done health tech before, at least they're willing to be educated on it. That's super helpful. Second thing is when you think of the three legs of the stool, it's okay to figure out your economic model a bit more slowly if you can get the other two pieces.

[00:19:06] Simon Hayhurst: So the other two are necessary to get anything going. And so I think having that initial hook around what gets a company to be willing to invest in you and try you out is probably the quickest leg. And that's why you see, I think most of the health techs that have made it have started by finding payers that look a lot like companies, self insuring landing benefits.

[00:19:25] Simon Hayhurst: And two things happen with those companies that often at low enough scale, they can't measure ROI in a stat seg way. So their hurdle for value is going to be a little bit easier. Their propensity to measure it really carefully before investing is going to be lower. They're willing to invest and then check that they feel good and feel good could just be the members were happy.

[00:19:44] Simon Hayhurst: That could be enough to get a bunch of deals in the door. So early on, look for companies that either have a reason to want to do it enough. Even if they're large, that they will sign the check right, happily, just if this makes my employees happier, I'm good to go. And you can think of someone like a Google where employee happiness is really a good motivator.

[00:20:03] Simon Hayhurst: They'd be fine if you just get good utilization. So that kind of a company, even though it's large, could move relatively quickly. Or others where they're really concerned about standing out from the pack, right? There's a lot of companies out there that can move quickly. That's your initial source of funding and the health plans will come later because once you get enough of them, the health plans will be measuring it on the back end and they'll be open to engaging once they've got, you know, 30, 40, 50 companies of decent size in under their umbrella that are using it.

[00:20:31] Simon Hayhurst: So don't even worry about the health plans initially. Uh, you can waste a lot of time banging on that door with nowhere to go because you haven't got the scale yet. 

[00:20:37] Omar Mousa: That three legged stool metaphor reminds me about getting a New York apartment. You know, in an environment where you're resource constrained, you can either get location, a good price, or a space.

[00:20:50] Omar Mousa: And you can't have all three. I'm curious, it seems like economic model would be number three, but if there was an order, For a startup, do you, is there, like, would, do you have an opinion on like what the order on the three legged stool would be? 

[00:21:03] Simon Hayhurst: It's tempting to think what you want is the employer model first, but in reality, the employers aren't going to even give you a shot unless you've got clear evidence that people are going to be excited to have it.

[00:21:14] Simon Hayhurst: So start by thinking about what you're doing for the patient or for the member. And find a set of members. It doesn't, they don't even have to be associated company. You can do it for free, get excited members. And once, once you've got those stories, that's how you're going to hook the employers. And then just be thoughtful that the employer may only be, if you can't find employers who are only excited for members, that's when you're going to need more of the economic model for them, at least in place first.

[00:21:40] Simon Hayhurst: So I think it's really important to have an early sense that all three are possible, right? What would need to be true. But in terms of where you focus, delighted members goes a really long way. So get those first. And it doesn't matter where you find them. Then you can get the employers. And gradually you start to get employers with economic proof points for them.

[00:22:00] Simon Hayhurst: And then you can start to fine tune the other pieces. So I would, I would do it in that order every time. And we even see this today at Verda. We've got hundreds of member testimonials on our website, and that's amazing. And it's, it's beautiful. And it helps us really underscore. This is not like the cherry picking of here's our best result ever.

[00:22:17] Simon Hayhurst: It's like, just go to our website and you'll see hundreds of people, but, and that helps get deals started, but you know what makes employers really feel good. Is when you bring their members in and you know, we start our all hands every week with a member, uh, talking about their journey and what it's meant to them and how their lives changed.

[00:22:35] Simon Hayhurst: And it's super important to how we keep the company mission focused. But every time the member is there, but also we bring along the payer and the payer gets to hear one of their employees or one of their members. If it's a health plan talking about how much this has meant to them and how much it's changed their life and their family's life and their friends lives.

[00:22:54] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah. And that visual reminder, it's really visceral. And then when you come in with the stats and the numbers, they've got the face to put to the stats and the numbers. And I think just to the stats and the numbers, it's not the same. So, delighted people for whom, whose lives you've really changed. Uh, that's a super powerful fiber.

[00:23:14] Simon Hayhurst: Always start that 

[00:23:16] Omar Mousa: very end user focused. I love it. Um, I want to switch gears a little bit. You have a very incredible career. You have a lot of experience and in our conversation, our discovery call, what really came to light is you have a very, Strong opinion, practice, discipline around product planning.

[00:23:34] Omar Mousa: And I'd like to go into that a little bit more. So how do most product development teams do planning today? 

[00:23:39] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, it's super interesting, right? Because, uh, I think maybe it grows up out of the fact that a lot of these practices set by larger companies who run on a quarterly rhythm, because that's what finance does.

[00:23:50] Simon Hayhurst: And so almost everywhere I've ever been has had quarterly planning and annual planning. And I think both those are interesting and important. But when we sit down, and I saw this at Virta when I joined, and you sit down, and it was January, and they're doing the quarter plan, and everyone takes two days off to go and huddle and refine their plans and hone their plans and make their commits.

[00:24:14] Simon Hayhurst: And the thing that I observe every time is, That's great, but how do we really know enough to know with precision what we're going to get done in a quarter? Are we that accurate at forecasting our velocity and is our scope that well understood? And the answer is always no. So I'm like, so why are we committing?

[00:24:31] Simon Hayhurst: Because once you've committed, you know, they always say, right, you can change scope or quality or time, right? And so if we lock time at the outset of planning, then the only levels left are going to be scope or quality. And. Removing that ability to say, you know, actually time might be the right needle to move and making that flexible, make that a really hard needle to move because we've already committed, I think makes product teams worse.

[00:24:55] Simon Hayhurst: Every time it makes you worse because we've got three things we can play with when we think about trade offs we want to make, and we are in the business of trade offs all the time. And so why would we automatically remove one of the three and say, well, this is the one that we can't change? Or, if, you know, oh, you can change it, oh, you need to delay, well, you know, we've got to roll that up, and the CEO is going to be sad because we've already committed and sales has rolled it out, and you've built yourself a set of constraints that you probably didn't have to live with, unless you're in one of those businesses where you have to.

[00:25:22] Simon Hayhurst: Like, I looked at NVIDIA's gaming business, most of the sales are kicked off by what does well for Christmas, and so if you miss the Christmas window, there's a huge financial penalty. And so moving it out a month is actually really expensive, but in most businesses, especially a lot of SAS businesses, moving a release a month defers revenue one month, no more, that's the only implication.

[00:25:43] Simon Hayhurst: And so I've really enjoyed switching from that sort of quarterly planning motion to a sequence motion where we worry a little bit less about, are we perfect at forecasting time? Cause we're not. I've just never seen a team that is. And instead, given the information we have, are we doing things in the right order?

[00:26:01] Simon Hayhurst: And there's always a better sequence and a worse sequence. And if we really get that bit right, if we have high confidence that we're doing the right features in the right order, the time will reveal itself. And, and the only time we will change things is if we say, actually, oh, we just learned this isn't like 50, 30 percent harder than we thought.

[00:26:17] Simon Hayhurst: It's 200 percent harder. Well, now maybe we don't like our order as much. Maybe we'll change the order a bit. But that's what it now next later version of planning has taken so much noise out of the system because we still lift our heads up and we sort of read out the company the now next later on a quarterly basis and we do annual planning we do all these things but the planning is all around the things that I think matter most which is.

[00:26:39] Simon Hayhurst: What are our priorities and what are we focused on and what trade offs are we making and why are we making those trade offs? Because it's always a trade off, right? If I want to do more of something, I'm doing less of something else. Getting alignment to that sequence and the trade offs we're making improves focus and improves focus, improves velocity.

[00:26:56] Simon Hayhurst: All right, when you get into a piece of code, you're really just focusing on that one thing and getting it done and then you're done. And you're not rushing to get it done to meet a deadline and knowing you have to come back and fix it later, or you just shipped. future problems that are going to come back as step ones.

[00:27:08] Simon Hayhurst: It's been really joyful watching teams go through this. Now, next, later and sequence Trump's deadlines and quarters every time 

[00:27:16] Angela Suthrave: I think that you are preaching to the choir and yet in reality, when you are presenting your now, next, later roadmap to people like customer success, account management, business development, ultimately.

[00:27:33] Angela Suthrave: You get the question of, well, that's great that you're working on this now and you're working on that thing later. But what does it mean? How do I make sure that I'm able to coordinate my communications with my stakeholders such that it's in a way that they understand when are they going to see this in production and we have to do training?

[00:27:52] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, well, let's get harder. And yet they don't. So here's the thing that it's interesting that observe, which is, Once you've run NowNextLater for say a year, you sort of get this feel for when it's in Next, how far out is it really? When it's in Later, how far out is it really? And once the system quiesces a bit, uh, it depends how much you stuff into each bucket.

[00:28:14] Simon Hayhurst: These are all choices you get to make as a product org. You make your choices and then stay with them, would be my advice. But I think we'll find in our case, for example, that something in Next will pretty much always happen within the next six months. Thanks. Every time and it's, you know, it's not happening this month or next month, and it'd be weird if it didn't happen in six months.

[00:28:33] Simon Hayhurst: And that's actually good enough for a lot of planning, right? There's not many things, at least in our world. And I think in most companies, there's not many things where the date itself matters, even if you're Salesforce. And you've got a big announcement, you know, stuff's going to take a while to roll out to all the customers anyway.

[00:28:48] Simon Hayhurst: And so whether it's September 1st or October 1st isn't actually going to change too much. And the same thing for later, right? So if next is happening within the next 6 months, they know later is happening more than 6 months out, but less than a year. That also is enough for pretty good planning. And so, uh, my advice when setting it up is hardest because initially you don't really know and the teams aren't used to it.

[00:29:11] Simon Hayhurst: And everything's a little bit funky for a short period of time, but the more you do it, the more stable it actually becomes because you get pretty good at putting about the right amount of things in each bucket and you re sequence less often once you get better at really focusing on optimal sequencing.

[00:29:24] Simon Hayhurst: And so auto emerges out of the back end that you can rely on somewhat well. And, you know, you'll still occasionally be wrong and that's okay. 

[00:29:31] Omar Mousa: I think the now next framework is also really good at navigating, like, just like discussion that isn't really relevant to the now or next, right. Is there, we're talking about something in later or even later, later, it's like, okay, this is more like more than likely, probably an expensive conversation that we're having right now.

[00:29:50] Omar Mousa: We're spending a lot of time talking about something that engineers aren't thinking about right now. She probably shouldn't be thinking about in the near term and, you know, we, we know how product development teams are like, they really want to only talk and focus on the things like there's a level of planning that they want to do.

[00:30:06] Omar Mousa: Yes, but like, they don't want to. But it, it's disruptive to, to talk about other things. So I think that framework's really great for kind of just swatting, okay, you're talking about a next year thing instead of like a tomorrow thing. And a hundred percent. I think it's a great framework. I really do think 

[00:30:20] Simon Hayhurst: it, it has these multiple benefits, right?

[00:30:22] Simon Hayhurst: Because it allows engineers to really put heads down on now and then it allows some other groups to focus a bit further out, right? Where you're doing your UX R and where do you wanna do the initial research? And, and that's all gonna be next and a little bit of later. And it does remove noise. And so that either gives you time back and the gift of time is a magical thing.

[00:30:42] Simon Hayhurst: But I think it also improves focus on what conversations do we need to have, right? And I think too often in the hurry to get a quarterly commit together or an annual commit, there's not enough focus on the order. And so the intellectual, extra intellectual effort and thought and smart thinking from good people on exactly which order is super powerful.

[00:31:05] Simon Hayhurst: And that's a gift that keeps on giving. 

[00:31:06] Angela Suthrave: It does seem kind of loose. And yet at the same time, in order to execute this well, you actually need a lot of discipline, which is counterintuitive. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on, you know, if, if I'm the CEO of the startup and we're building the plane as we're flying it, then everything should be in the now column, right?

[00:31:28] Angela Suthrave: Like what is that thing in the next? Like you've got to move that over to the left. So we'd love to hear tactically, you know, I'm at a startup, like, what do you say to me So that I can get this right, 

[00:31:41] Simon Hayhurst: you know, it's funny, I, I tell people I, my job is a lot easier than a product manager's job, right? Because I get to say the same thing over and over and over and over again.

[00:31:49] Simon Hayhurst: My talk track changes pretty slowly. And so one of the things that I've now said enough that I hear it being repeated back to me, that's a test of how I said it enough times is we can do anything, but we can't do everything. We can do anything, but we can't do everything. And, and so that first starting statement sets the frame for the conversation, which is, look, you can put it all in now if you want, but we're still gonna have to tackle it in an order.

[00:32:15] Simon Hayhurst: So what you're telling me is you don't mind which order, 'cause we can do anything, but we can't do everything. And so that tees up the conversation, which is the important one of, you know, still gonna pick an order in which to do these things. So let's have a conversation about that. And initially, you know, I say it a bunch, a bunch, about a quarter into being in a company, I'll start to hear other people saying, Hey, you know, I know we can do anything, but we can't do everything.

[00:32:37] Simon Hayhurst: And they're sort of chuckling. But what it means is they're starting to internalize that core truth of we are going to have to pick an order and we're not going to do lots of things in parallel. We're just not going to do it. It's not efficient. It's not effective. And so we will pick an order and you know, that's the anything, but not everything.

[00:32:54] Simon Hayhurst: And we are pretty flexible. On having a conversation about we should have very, I think, very low ego. Overthinking we know the right order and that's where the great conversation is is if we can't explain the order, then we probably don't understand why this order and if we can explain it, then once everyone has deep shared context.

[00:33:10] Simon Hayhurst: The other thing I think about a lot is most disagreements. I see across teams or across organizations form from the fact that we have very different contexts and that's actually part of the magic, right? Means that, you know, something deeply that I don't and I know something deeply that you don't.

[00:33:23] Simon Hayhurst: That's why we're going to disagree initially. Because we probably both want the company to be successful. So when we're disagreeing, that's that really good flag that we haven't shared context well. So I need to learn what's in your head, and then maybe you'd be curious what's in mine. When we do that well, we'll pretty much always arrive at the same conclusion.

[00:33:39] Simon Hayhurst: Even between very different teams, like customer success versus finance trade off. They both want something from an internal team. You know, those teams are going to not agree on the order. I need my stuff. And so getting good at explaining that context will get to a good decision. So it's fun. I really enjoy watching teams get better at that.

[00:33:57] Simon Hayhurst: And the noise comes out of the system to start with. One simple face. We can do anything. Can't do everything. 

[00:34:04] Omar Mousa: I'm going to be chanting that weekly, I think. We can do anything, but we can't do everything. With Order, every initiative, every project has scope. How does scope change as you get further away from now to later?

[00:34:18] Omar Mousa: And what is the understanding of the team? And what are some tools to help prove that understanding? 

[00:34:25] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, yeah, um, could do two or three podcasts just on this one topic, probably, right, because there's a couple of things behind this. One is big things can never happen, right? The big thing is a little bit like an everything all by itself.

[00:34:38] Simon Hayhurst: And so you already very early ideas are, hey, we should do more in. Food tools, right? The members are members. It's all about food choices, right? So we can have food choices as a category. And that's like, yeah, okay, we should get better food choices. That's absolutely right. And they can live like that in backlog.

[00:34:56] Simon Hayhurst: Even at the beginning of later, it could be, you know, we know we want to move the needle on retention by focusing on food choices. All right, cool. But before it can really even be considered. Ready to move up the latest stack, you're gonna have to start breaking it down to specifically what kind of thing.

[00:35:12] Simon Hayhurst: So I think in later getting that initial bounding scope down to an epic is a really good first best practice. As it moves into next, that's when you're gonna have to start to form your real tight thinking on what is the MVP. And this is where two things sort of collide, right? One is you want that sort of biggish view of we're going to do a big enough thing that it's going to move the needle and it matters.

[00:35:33] Simon Hayhurst: But we don't want to waste time. And so I spend a lot of time there helping teams think through what is the leanest MVP you can do right now? Even if it's not very scalable. Like we've got one shipping out right now. This is super fun. It's in very early test. And as the team is looking at it, They're like, we can't get the back end done for this time.

[00:35:54] Simon Hayhurst: I'm like, do you need the back end? Like, and they're like, well, we wouldn't have a log and it wouldn't be visible to the coaches. And I'm true. But for 10 members, would that matter? Actually, maybe not. Right. Okay, great. So, you know. A whole chunk of scope. You didn't have enough back end resource to hammer it out.

[00:36:15] Simon Hayhurst: It would have been two or three sprints anyway. Uh, we just cut a bunch of scope off. Let's first check, do members love it? Does it actually matter? And so I think that art of how do you break it down into the smaller bytes? You're going to take off in the now's a super good thing to get really good at because you can save sprints of work chasing down a dead end and get those learnings and the learnings might force you to pivot a bit.

[00:36:38] Simon Hayhurst: It might force you to cancel it all together, or it might confirm you could run as fast as you want. And the team's going to be super excited because they know they're chasing a pot of gold already. So I think that's the work in next is really breaking it into what's the MVP and and how would you know, and then.

[00:36:55] Simon Hayhurst: On the back of that, you have to get good at something else, which is then there's the temptation to let it go out and MVP and stay there, right? And I've seen companies have this particular challenge of this is good enough. Let's move on. And so they ship a thing where it wasn't well architected and it's not very clean and the UX isn't very good.

[00:37:14] Simon Hayhurst: It's a super early MVP. But it was just enough that then the CEO is like, Hey, move on to the next thing, right? We need the next shiny object. We need the next feature. Or surely that's good enough. And I think there's a lot of thought has to go into and a lot of discipline around. Is that actually OK? And the earlier you are, the more OK it probably is.

[00:37:32] Simon Hayhurst: And like at a very, very early stages, just fleshing out the bones in a bunch of places is the thing you have to do. But pretty quickly, I think there's norms to be created and the norms that need to be reset as you grow around what is the bar. And, you know, it's fine to ship it like this and get your results.

[00:37:50] Simon Hayhurst: It's, it's fine to begin to scale it like this, which is a little better than the first one, but before it goes to full deployment, you've really got to get it tightened up. And it's got to be backed up with enough of a bow that you're comfortable not coming back to it for a while. And when you do, it could be someone else.

[00:38:04] Simon Hayhurst: And. You're like, ah, that's fine. I'm confident that the code is good enough. Someone can go in and inspect. It could be a different person. We're not going to get a lot of said ones. It's all going to be fine. The UX is polished, you know, that's, that's done, you know, and the more mature you get as a company, the more you need to get really good at that.

[00:38:20] Simon Hayhurst: So, and there's no, I think solid rubric, but you know, a 50 person company should have a very different set of bars than a 200 person company should have different bars than a thousand person company. 

[00:38:29] Angela Suthrave: When you, because there's no time bounds on the now, next, later, you are doing the nows. Let's say you're a startup.

[00:38:39] Angela Suthrave: So you're doing bare bones, minimally viable product. How often do you revisit the list of the now, next, later? Because it could be that you want to deliver something. You strip it down. And, you know, now you have to put in the other features that you cut out, because maybe you don't need it right now, but you need it in a couple of months.

[00:39:01] Angela Suthrave: And so how often are you revisiting this board of your priorities? 

[00:39:06] Simon Hayhurst: So, one of the rules we have that takes noise out of the system is. You never mess with now now should be two or three sprints and never everyone's there to be broken. Right. But what it does is it sets the basic expectation of what's in now is the work we're executing and what matters most is executing it.

[00:39:24] Simon Hayhurst: And so you only interrupt now and re sequence that. when something really emergent happens. Change healthcare. Good example, right? Suddenly the whole world is upside down. Great time to ask yourself, do I need to keep doing what's in now or do I need to pivot the team for a minute, right? But in general, now is sacrosanct.

[00:39:42] Simon Hayhurst: That's, that's let the team be efficient and let them execute. You should go and look at next. At least every split and ask yourself, do we feel good about which ones we're moving up? Do we have them in the right order? Did the spikes plan pan out as planned? Did something change in our mind, our worldview?

[00:39:59] Simon Hayhurst: And one of the things that will change is the stuff that's just graduated out of now, just previously, we're now getting results back in, right? And so there's results after now there's measure, right? Above that. And so stuff that graduates are now is in measure. And what you're learning in measure is probably going to drop some stuff into next.

[00:40:16] Simon Hayhurst: You've got a placeholder in there for it already. Probably. But the size of that placeholder and what's going in it and how important it is, is going to re sequence now for you a bunch. And so that's one of the first things that I think is just a basic practice around this is, you know, if I've got a feature, let's call it Omar 1.

[00:40:33] Simon Hayhurst: 0, right? Omar MVP is in now, there should be in next Omar 1. 1. And maybe if it's, if it's something where we know we're super exploratory, maybe Omar 1. 2 is already in next as well. And this sort of sense of what we're almost certainly going to do is ship Omar 1. 1, move on to Angela 1. 1. But then we're going to learn some stuff, and I've got placeholders in there for the next couple of revs.

[00:40:55] Simon Hayhurst: But if Omar, if what's in now is maybe Omar 3. 0, right? Maybe that's pretty solid and tight, and we don't expect to have to do a lot of iterating off it. And so we might only have one placeholder or no placeholders in next. So that's the first thing to think about is as you're putting things together, moving something into now is committing you to some future work, almost certainly.

[00:41:15] Simon Hayhurst: And I think that's where the good conversation can happen. So if you're an earlier startup, have a really fierce debate on, you know, where is that bar and do we want to plan on one cut turn of the crank, two turns of the crank, knowing the opportunity cost is pretty high for the next thing that's really burning that we want to prove out and maybe deals that are hanging on it.

[00:41:33] Simon Hayhurst: As you get further up in maturity. You should have a lot more confidence of, you know, probably takes a couple of turns to the crank every time and that's okay. Um, and leave the space for it in next. And, and you won't have to put them in later because that's really in later. I've got, we're going to do an Omar thing, right?

[00:41:49] Simon Hayhurst: And so it's going to break up into, in the next, it will have a couple of placeholders for the MVP and a couple of turns of the crank. Might be one way to crack that 

[00:41:57] Omar Mousa: Omar one dot. Oh, hit immediate product market fit.

[00:42:06] Angela Suthrave: He's pretty great, we don't need a one dot to Simon. I would love to ask you about, you know, how you think about the sequence of Goals and roadmaps? Or is it roadmaps and then goals? I think it's goals, it's goals 

[00:42:22] Simon Hayhurst: first, which is what are we trying to get done and how are we gonna get there? There are exceptions.

[00:42:28] Simon Hayhurst: There are exceptions. And, and so I'll get to the exception in a minute, but in the, in the general case, I'll give you a great example. Here's a trade off for a company at, at uh, Verta stage. One thing you can think about is we're scaling pretty fast, right, and we've got to decent size already. But we cover a relatively small portion of the U.

[00:42:47] Simon Hayhurst: S. and we don't cover anything globally. So actually, we're pretty, you know, if you zoom out, if you're looking at the curve right now, it's this nice exponential curve and it's really steep and we're pretty far up it. But if you put a new scale on it, which is, you know, There's probably our mission now is help a billion people with obesity and diabetes.

[00:43:04] Simon Hayhurst: So we're, if you put us on the scale of zero to a billion with this tiny little flat speck at the bottom, right? So it's pretty early. And, and so you can imagine there being really interesting trade offs on, should it, is it more important to grow faster, activation work? Or is it more important to work on retention?

[00:43:24] Simon Hayhurst: Because you could always be working on having people stay longer or have a graduation product or something like that, right? And so that goal level conversation is a really good top level first conversation to have before you get to the features. Because if we decide activation is more important than retention to the business, or if we decide it's much more important to get better at obesity right now than it is to get even better at type 2 diabetes, that's going to shift the features that are most important.

[00:43:50] Simon Hayhurst: Whereas if I start with features, it's like, hey, I've got a widget. Let's go find the problem for this widget. It could be a great solution, but it could be the optimal solution in the wrong problem space. So I think getting really clear on your goals as a company helps first focus on what sort of solutions you're looking for and the problem spaces you're sitting in.

[00:44:07] Simon Hayhurst: Then you want to get optimal within the problem space. The exception, because I said there's an exception, sometimes you just have this wonderful thing where either a customer comes in with a thing that changes your mind view, or an engineer sees a possibility, right? And then it's super interesting to, to start from that end of the chain and work the other way.

[00:44:28] Simon Hayhurst: Right? And so that could be optimal. United Healthcare comes in and says, if you could just tie this to PHQ 9, changes our world view and everything. Maybe that's the big thing. I don't know. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Suddenly, suddenly there's a feature that's got a business case attached to it, and you want to be open to inspecting that, and being open to what does that mean for the business.

[00:44:47] Simon Hayhurst: So you might be working on retention, but if someone walks in with a large enough deal, maybe you should be thinking about activation. Equally, You know, I've seen some of the best businesses that have ever occurred is when someone, some engineers looking around the corner and has an idea about a thing that's, that's going to open up a world of possibilities and you're not even looking in that direction.

[00:45:05] Simon Hayhurst: And so if you're too focused on, we only care about this one goal, you shut the door to these possibilities and you're going to regret that. So I think the general rubric is start with what you're trying to get done in the business and then work down those problem spaces. Uh, but be open to the fact that, you know, good ideas and opportunities are all around us.

[00:45:23] Simon Hayhurst: And as you see those pick up the gems and polish them. 

[00:45:26] Angela Suthrave: Thanks for sharing that perspective. Yeah. I've always done it. Goals. And then your roadmap is informed by the goals. I think devil's advocate is. You know, sometimes that can be a little bit short sighted. So I appreciate you sharing that helpfully 

[00:45:40] Omar Mousa: as short sighted as your goals I think 

[00:45:42] Angela Suthrave: mm hmm 

[00:45:42] Omar Mousa: Simon you once said do unscalable things.

[00:45:46] Omar Mousa: Can you explain what you meant by that? 

[00:45:48] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, I love this one. It's been said by a lot of smarter people before me I know YC is a big fan of this right or accommodate is a big fan of the do unscalable things You know, to make a really scalable answer nearly always requires a fair bit of code and effort.

[00:46:02] Simon Hayhurst: And so when you get to that, it's the flip side of that question from the lean startup view of the world. Like it was the absolute MVP, right? The absolute MVP is going to say, what's the minimum thing that I can do to get the maximum amount of learnings? And so, you know, user research is a form of that, right?

[00:46:19] Simon Hayhurst: No code to get learnings. That's amazing, right? That's very unscalable though. And, and actually in our business where we have a lot of time with coaches. Right. There's a really interesting opportunity. A coach can say almost anything to a member. And so they can help us try ideas and as very not scalable, right.

[00:46:36] Simon Hayhurst: I would prefer to write code to test this thing out, but we can use a lot of very unscalable things to test ideas and get quick learnings to give us more confidence. The code we're going to write is going to have value. Right. And I think one of the, one of the tests you can put on this is. I love it when we can start with a hypothesis.

[00:46:53] Simon Hayhurst: I'm going to change this thing in the app. Maybe I'm going to change the content order. I'm going to have a new kind of content. Or I'm going to have a new idea of what we put in front of a member on their first day. Whatever the idea is. That hypothesis, if we can articulate the impact we expect, then it means we understand enough about what we think the problem is solving and the impact it's going to have on which members in what way.

[00:47:13] Simon Hayhurst: that we know a lot, and we should be in a fairly high confidence space. But if we struggle to answer that question, it's like, I don't know, I mean, it could do a lot of different things, like many members could like it, or only a few members could like it, or it could change their behavior a lot, or it might only change it a little.

[00:47:27] Simon Hayhurst: That's the more common space you find yourself. That's a really good time to say, okay, what's the least amount of code, or the least amount of work I could do to get a little more confident this is going to have the impact we expect? And so if that's unscalable, I think that's perfectly fine because you get the learning quicker.

[00:47:43] Angela Suthrave: And I think I'm hearing you say, invest in product discovery. Spend the time to do the learning without, with as little code as possible. 

[00:47:52] Simon Hayhurst: Yep. Product discovery. But sometimes, sometimes the most efficient product discovery is to write a very little bit of code. And then write the rest of the code later.

[00:48:01] Simon Hayhurst: And this is a place where I think two things tug at each other, and I've watched teams trip up on this, right? So I might not polish the UX if the polished UX is not required to get the initial learning. But that tugs against the idea that we have design principles and a design bug, right? And a bug in the design is as bad as a bug in the code.

[00:48:20] Simon Hayhurst: And so, so I think it's really important to help teams think through this lens of, It's okay, because we're running the test and then we're either going to finish it or roll it back, but I can watch teams get trapped on the hang on. You said there's a quality bar, even a design quality bar. Now you're saying that we shouldn't care about the quality, the design, if that's not needed for the test.

[00:48:40] Simon Hayhurst: And so I've watched teams have to struggle with that a little bit to see both things are true that we want to do the minimum amount of work. So. If it's less code to write it this way, to get it out the door, that might be okay. And that's what you need is the design itself is the most instrumental thing you're testing.

[00:48:56] Simon Hayhurst: And so that can be fun to watch teams wrestle with. 

[00:48:58] Angela Suthrave: We'd love to talk to you about retros at Virta. What do most product development teams get wrong in terms of retros? 

[00:49:06] Simon Hayhurst: I think it's super interesting, right? So if you first think about now, next, later is your frame. That means looking forward, you're thinking about sequence more than anything else.

[00:49:16] Simon Hayhurst: Right. As opposed to what you can get done in a period of time. Now, you'd like to still be good at estimating, but if looking forward is about the optimal order, then looking backward needs to be about pretty much everything else, right? Which is getting better at estimating, getting better at velocity, getting better at a quality bar, learning as much as possible to do better next time.

[00:49:42] Simon Hayhurst: And so, uh, I know sprint metros. Often much more tactical in a way about what, what do we feel went well? This sprint is a common question, which is one form of learning. But I think there's another form of learning where you look back a little bit longer, be like, you know, we set out to move this metric by, you know, up by 10 percent from where it is.

[00:50:04] Simon Hayhurst: Okay. Well, did we? And looking backwards here, the answer is usually no. You either did more or less. Right, because we typically don't have to be that accurate and that slightly longer looking back and getting good at that, I think is a superpower because the kind of learnings you can get from that are really powerful, but it takes it takes a little bit of practice to do it.

[00:50:25] Simon Hayhurst: I would say, even if we're early. In looking backwards and getting the right learnings and the best learnings. I don't know that I've got any words of wisdom on. Hey, if you just do these two things, you'll suddenly be great at it. It's not that, but I think spending time looking backwards over a longer horizon.

[00:50:43] Simon Hayhurst: And being really good at predicting what you thought your hypothesis. They were okay. Ours is our goals. Here's what we actually expected to happen and being really good at looking back and saying, okay, what happened is always going to be different. That's the first thing. Don't don't beat yourself up for the fact that you are off.

[00:50:58] Simon Hayhurst: Uh, and often times, teams will do better than they said. And like, that's great, we did awesome! And it's like, no, that means you still didn't know what you were gonna do. So, those learnings are often missed entirely, because we crushed the goal, so let's just look forward. It's like, okay, so that means that, you know, you thought you were gonna do X, and you did 2X.

[00:51:15] Simon Hayhurst: That still means you actually didn't know what you were going to do, you're off by a lot. So that's worth looking at, because it means your hypothesis was wrong, and if you're wrong in that magnitude, you might, you know, reject ideas that were really good ideas, because like, oh, this isn't quite good enough.

[00:51:28] Simon Hayhurst: But if you're actually prone to being under a lot, then that idea was good enough. So I think really looking thoughtfully backwards over a medium term, quarter, half year, full year, super interesting learnings to be had there. 

[00:51:39] Omar Mousa: Simon, it. Maybe, maybe you said it there, but it seems like you doing a good job.

[00:51:44] Omar Mousa: You're on a positive trajectory, but maybe the haven't quite nailed down retros. Is there an area of improvement that makes sense for the team? 

[00:51:54] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah. So I think we've gotten pretty good at incident retros. We've got a nice deep process around that. I think we're pretty good at sprint retros and I think we don't yet have enough rigor looking forward.

[00:52:09] Simon Hayhurst: to have really good rigor looking backwards. And so the thing that I think we'll be working on next year is trying to get a lot better at looking back a quarter and looking back a half and looking back a full year and asking what did we want to have done differently and which of those things are things that we could bake into a practice looking forward and which are just regrets.

[00:52:27] Simon Hayhurst: You always have just some regrets of, oh, knowing what I know now, I would have done this differently. That's okay. The interesting question is, could you have known, is there a thing you would do differently so that you would have seen this coming? Was it foreseeable? I think we need to get better at that still.

[00:52:41] Omar Mousa: Is there a framework you think the audience can walk away from to, to help, you know, while you go on that journey, things they can look into and go on the same journey? 

[00:52:50] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah, step one. So the thing you want is hard to do until you've done a thing prior. So step one is, just take the time to carve out time to do that.

[00:52:59] Simon Hayhurst: Write down what happened over the last six months, twelve months. Write down what went well, what didn't went too well, much better than you expected. And for each of those, just ask the question of, is there something that we could have foreseen here that would have allowed us to get accurate? And if not, what would we need to be better at to know?

[00:53:17] Simon Hayhurst: I think that that's a good first step. Better is that's only going to be useful to the extent you really had clarity over what you intended to do. And I think a lot of companies actually don't spend enough time laying out. Here's what we think. And so, you know, okay, I'll help you do this a bit on a KPI perspective.

[00:53:37] Simon Hayhurst: But I think even a layer deep in that behind the KPIs, here's the kinds of investments we want to make. Here's the impact we think each of those will have. Here's how hard we think they will be. And then you can look backwards and be like, okay, how many of the things you thought you were going to do? Did you do?

[00:53:51] Simon Hayhurst: How well did they go relative to what you thought? And how much was the impact relative to what you had? You know, that those set of questions are going to be a lot more powerful to the extent you did the work a year ago to look forward that way. And so that's the second thing I'd ask everyone to think about doing is first do the look back with whatever you've got because any looking back is going to be helpful.

[00:54:09] Simon Hayhurst: Secondly, improve the precision and the thoughtfulness you put into predicting how things are going to go because Otherwise, you spend a lot of time explaining. I think Eric Greaves does this well in The Lean Startup. He talks a lot about the reason for the hypothesis is to stop people just explaining what they saw.

[00:54:26] Simon Hayhurst: And so I think without more rigor on your look forward, the look back is less valuable. So that's one of the things we'll be doing for 25 is trying to tighten up our look forward so that. Uh, look back a year from now, we'll be a little tighter. 

[00:54:38] Angela Suthrave: Can you share a learning that has really impacted the team that came out of a retrospective?

[00:54:44] Simon Hayhurst: Yes. Here's one. We predicted this, but it was counterintuitive. And I think a lot of our engineers kind of nodded and went, okay, that tracks. But it was nice to see we invested more time in slowing down, uh, to fix more tech debt as we went. So we were carrying more tech debt than I'm comfortable with currently.

[00:55:05] Simon Hayhurst: And so we spent more time saying, do it right, rather than right now, uh, be willing to take the extra half sprint if that's what it takes and putting a couple more slightly larger tech debt initiatives into the roadmap for the year. And the prediction was that even within the year, we might start to see speeding up, that we might start to reap the benefits.

[00:55:26] Simon Hayhurst: But if not, we would see them eventually. Uh, what we've seen over the year is actually our feature velocity improved because we focused more and we reduced tech debt on the year. And the learning looking backwards is that you really can slow down to speed up. And I think that's giving the team a lot of confidence to this year, do that more.

[00:55:44] Simon Hayhurst: Like I know this year there were times when like, yeah, okay, I feel good in that. Those times like, I have to do I have to do it right now. And so we didn't do what we said we wanted to do. And we maybe also still had a few too many initiatives on decks. It felt like the right thing. And I think the learning that the teams are carrying away now is.

[00:56:02] Simon Hayhurst: More focus really does help. And that practice of trying to reduce the tech bet as we go is going to pay dividends. And so I'm starting to already see this in the now next latest for the coming year is a little more quiescent. Uh, so that, that's been a super pretty one to see, you know, you, you, you got what you hoped you'd get, which is you look back on the learning and the little experiments we ran paid off.

[00:56:24] Simon Hayhurst: I love those because it's really powerful. 

[00:56:26] Omar Mousa: Simon, when we last spoke, you mentioned an AI investment that Virta is making. And if I may call it, may call it out, you, you referenced to it as Viv. Can you just briefly describe the problem that you're solving and maybe. how it came about, whatever you're comfortable sharing.

[00:56:42] Simon Hayhurst: Yeah. Yeah. I'll talk about a couple of things here. So, so first, if I step back a little, cause I think this will apply to most, most people out there. Uh, I will say, you know, we've got great competitors there. Some of them are a lot larger than us. They, they have brands that are well recognized. They're amazing companies.

[00:56:59] Simon Hayhurst: And as we move into obesity, I mean, shake a stick, you know, you got new weight watchers, everyone in the world does obesity. There's a lot of really large companies out there. I don't spend too much time worrying about those companies because I think they're, they're just playing a very different game.

[00:57:17] Simon Hayhurst: And we see this with the pieces in the port. And I think a lot of companies, you know, a lot of our listeners will feel the same thing of we've got a path. Yes, we have competitors. We feel pretty good. We thought about our strategic positioning. We've placed our bets. You know, we're right or wrong, but we've got a path here.

[00:57:34] Simon Hayhurst: The thing that I think is, there will be. AI native companies coming companies that are just being seeded right now that have never done anything except think about AI at the core of their business that will probably hire people who are very AI savvy. So every employee is coming in much more chat GPT knowledgeable, much more open AI savvy thinking all the time about every corner of the business and how does this work differently given AI if there's a competitor that sideswipes us.

[00:58:03] Simon Hayhurst: Transcribed It is an AI first company, an AI native company, you might say, coming after Verda's business, copying what we know about what works and trying to reinvent it through this lens. And so, one of the first things we talked about at a product strategy level was, yes, a big first on digital first.

[00:58:21] Simon Hayhurst: How do we get much better, much more quickly, having the app do the things the app should do, taking burden off the coaches, so the coaches can do things coaches are uniquely good at. And a key component of that is making sure that we lead in AI and that we don't lag or react to an AI native company coming our way.

[00:58:40] Simon Hayhurst: So there's been a few things there. And the thing that I love, so the second thing I'll say about AI, before you even get into the features themselves, is As you think about AI features, most people think linearly and that works super good for a lot of things. It does not work as well for this particular trend and probably won't for quite a few years.

[00:58:59] Simon Hayhurst: And so I really recommend, you know, first educating yourself in some of the long run books, like you could read the coming wave by Mustafa Suleiman. That's a good one for picking around the corner of it, but do the best you can to anchor yourself in exponential change. By the linear change, and when you do that, then I think two questions emerged that become really important.

[00:59:18] Simon Hayhurst: It's really one question, but two aspects, and that is, is the feature you're thinking of one that is on that curve, in which case you're catching a wave, right? And it's just like surfing. That means look for the right timing and then hop on. Or is it an experience curve? Meaning it's either possible or not, but it's possible enough now, but it's about how this gets presented to members or how this gets wrapped up or the data you need to feed into the model.

[00:59:45] Simon Hayhurst: If it's an experience curve, start even if it's not ready. Because you want to be ahead on the experience curve. But if you're waiting for the wave, a timing question, then first figure out, is it the right timing? And be very comfortable putting it out six months or a year or 18 months if you need to wait.

[00:59:59] Simon Hayhurst: I'll give you an example, right, um, we're doing a bunch of food tools. And one of them is taking a picture of your food, and it gives you all the macronutrient breakdown, and it gives you substitutions and suggestions that are verta friendly. It's amazing. That problem, two years ago, even 18 months ago, was really hard.

[01:00:18] Simon Hayhurst: And you could spend a lot of time with computer vision experts and specialized data tables and all this stuff. And it's almost out of the box today. So that's a great example of the timing effect. You could have burned, you know, a very smart, fairly expensive team for a year to do what now an AI native company is going to do in, you know, two or three sprints.

[01:00:39] Simon Hayhurst: And so being thoughtful about, am I exploring a timing problem, means that the most important question is when. There's other things where it's like, Hey, the experience of how do you get members to interact with this and what makes it comfortable for them and what data makes it well personalized and what makes it really give the right results absent, you know, the general framework of high understanding and high context that keeps getting better those kind of problems you can start anytime because learning those things is I think your whole team has to get good at and it's going to take you 6, 12, 18 months.

[01:01:14] Simon Hayhurst: And building up the data advantage, you can never start too early. And so then you can let, you know, the tech evolve as it evolves. And you'll just get better, but you'll be further down the experience curve than anyone else who's getting in. Even if they get in, you know, when the tech itself is a little better.

[01:01:29] Simon Hayhurst: So we think about that a fair bit. Uh, and then to the, the final bit you, you asked about. Viv, yeah, so, we're doing a bunch on food tools, and it's super amazing, and it's just beginning to go to full scale for everybody. I've done before, you know, how much can an agent, an AI agent help a member with simple stuff.

[01:01:47] Simon Hayhurst: And it just keeps getting better and it keeps getting easier. And the extent to which you can really help change the value you can give to a member or a patient in the moment is changing so rapidly. There's part of an experience curve here and we're hopping on that. And I got to say, it's kind of fun and pretty exciting.

[01:02:04] Simon Hayhurst: And, you know, when you think about what we're asking people to do, which is make different decisions about what they eat, Messaging a coach, yeah, I'm craving a hamburger right now. And then giving a reply in a mob, hey here's some good substitutions just to help you with the fact that your friends are going to McDonald's and you're craving a hamburger right now.

[01:02:19] Simon Hayhurst: And so I think our opportunity to give really meaningful help to members in the moment with these kind of AI technologies is, is going to be pretty profound. And it's early. We've got nothing that's rolled out to everybody yet, but I don't mind saying I'm pretty excited about it. And I look forward to being able to share a whole bunch of really good results.

[01:02:36] Simon Hayhurst: The internal early stuff has been pretty wild. And I'll say maybe one other thing, which if you're sitting there thinking about how does this play here is a couple of debates. We had internally through this journey over the last six months. So one was what kind of persona and everyone's like, Oh, it should be all these things.

[01:02:53] Simon Hayhurst: And it should be customizable because people have different preferences. And of course, that scope, right? And there's a lot of research out there. And there's a reason why. Siri is female, right, and Alexa is female, and that is, on average, female works better. Just does. Tests really well. So, as your first simplifying assumption, if you just do a female persona, that's a good place to start.

[01:03:13] Simon Hayhurst: It's not everything, it's not where you'll end up. There's an MVP, you can just start there. We had that debate a bunch, because people were like, it's pejorative, and of course engineers would think that, or whatever else, but the research backs it up super well, there's a bunch of good papers out there, so you can simplify your life, just, just do that.

[01:03:27] Simon Hayhurst: And the second one is, there's a lot of debate about, well, should it be a bot, or should it be a this, or should it be a that? And the test there is, how do you interact with it? And, and we've had this debate with a number of people, I won't, I won't call any of them out, but it is pretty funny. We'll be like, just try it for me for a while, and at some point, we'll be talking about it, and you will refer to it as her.

[01:03:48] Simon Hayhurst: It'll just happen. You'll just say it. And we don't even have voice enabled right now, and so, and so, But you will just think of it as a person and since we've given it a female name, Viv, you will just call her, her, and it'll happen sometime in your first 2 or 3 weeks probably. And I've had a number of people like, no, no, no, no, no, it's a bot.

[01:04:06] Simon Hayhurst: And then they'll be sitting there going, yeah, I was chatting with her last night and she said the funniest thing, and What just happened here? And that tells you something really powerful about where the tech is at already, which is on an exponential curve, and so it's going to be, you know, order of magnitude better in a year's time, but it's already good enough that if you set it up in the right way, people can't help but relate to it like a human because it's got that sort of natural cadence to it.

[01:04:30] Simon Hayhurst: Which means when you think about the UX, be really thoughtful about if you were designing it as a person on the far end, what sort of setups and constructs would do that. So there's an example, simple trick, uh, here. It's very tempting to do what ChatGPT does, which is they give you the blank frame and it's like little suggested props.

[01:04:46] Simon Hayhurst: So that's familiar and it's a pattern people are getting familiar with. But if you were introducing yourself, you know, there's a doctor on the far end of the chat, it would be a little bit weird if the doctor had, you know, three questions you can ask me. There you go. As opposed to the first thing you hear from the doctor be like, Hi, I'm Simon.

[01:05:02] Simon Hayhurst: I'm your coach. I'm here to help you. Uh, you know, I can help you with all sorts of different things like food choices or emotional struggles, you know, but just first I want to see how you're doing today. That would be a much more natural way. And if the first thing you saw was that. You can't, you're already being drawn into the idea that this is a human relationship.

[01:05:21] Simon Hayhurst: It's an interaction, and you'll reply very differently than if it's like, oh, copy and paste a prompt. And so I think it's really important as people think about this to test that out and play with, for your use case and your members, are you at that point where it works? And certain things that are really hard, like you, you know, it's really hard right now to go into pure medical areas, right?

[01:05:41] Simon Hayhurst: And there's certain sets of advice you've got to be a lot better at before you can take those risks. But to the extent you can carve off use cases where it could be a human and a human type engagement, then you can leverage the heck out of the fact that we engage with humans all our lives. And little tricks there can help people lean in and get a lot more value a lot more quickly.

[01:05:58] Simon Hayhurst: So fun times. 

[01:05:59] Omar Mousa: That's all really exciting. I references, you know, you're calling it her, I'm thinking about that movie that came up many years ago with the operating system, they call her Netflix just dropped a movie called afraid. With the AI, the letters AI highlighted, I, I just think we're going to be interacting.

[01:06:15] Omar Mousa: Like we may even be starting to solve for loneliness. Like I think people can start, I think Google just did an ad where you'll be sitting in your room, just talking to the AI about your day. So I'm really excited by those food tools, Simon. I, I've been, you know, I, I used my fitness pal, I've used a macros plus.

[01:06:33] Omar Mousa: Frustrating experience. I'm Middle Eastern. And so we use a lot of olive oil in our cuisine. And I just like, I can't measure how much olive oil is in. I'm hoping you guys, yeah, that sounds very exciting. I think that's, that's ambitious and great. 

[01:06:48] Simon Hayhurst: It is super fun early innings, but I think there's. So much value to be offered to members there.

[01:06:54] Simon Hayhurst: And to your point, right? One of the things that is nice with an AI is any given coach, right? You may or may not be super familiar with a particular form of cuisine, but an AI is familiar with every form of cuisine pretty much. And so there's certain things where it's already a streets ahead of what we can expect any human to be able to do well and quickly.

[01:07:14] Simon Hayhurst: So it's pretty fun.

[01:07:25] Angela Suthrave: All right, Simon, we have reached the very exciting concept closing call portion of our podcast. So these are questions that we ask all of our guests. It's meant to be fun and kind of snappy. So the first question is, are there any frameworks, methods, processes that you found to be very useful in your work that you think others might find useful as well?

[01:07:44] Simon Hayhurst: Maybe I'd recommend is the first one who've hit on it a little bit, which is, uh, the lean startup. And now next later. And if you just start with those two, you're probably going to go a long way. 

[01:07:52] Omar Mousa: What is the tool that is highly valuable to you that you think others may not be using? 

[01:07:57] Simon Hayhurst: I mean, I hope you're using it, but if you haven't yet made chat GPT a part of your day to day life or your favorite substitute, but candidly, I think it's still mostly ahead.

[01:08:06] Simon Hayhurst: Start there. There's lots of other things, but I'm sure you're already using them. That's the one I would focus on for the coming years. That's a gift that keeps on giving. 

[01:08:12] Angela Suthrave: Are there any concepts in healthcare that are very exciting for you right now? 

[01:08:18] Simon Hayhurst: Healthcare's hard. healthcare is so hard. I think if there's a concept, I'd ask people to think about this really exciting is it's think about a three legged stool because your business will function materially differently if you get it working for patients payers and for yourself as a business.

[01:08:36] Simon Hayhurst: Do you think 

[01:08:37] Omar Mousa: product management is a science or an art? 

[01:08:40] Simon Hayhurst: I think it's closer to a science and increasingly so because there's a lot of communication. There's a lot of soft skills required to do it. But, you know, an interesting tell to me is, I'm old enough that I think the most common path into product management when I was early in my career was engineer turned PM.

[01:08:59] Simon Hayhurst: And I think that's gradually being replaced with data scientist turns PM. And that that's a tell to us that the quantitative aspects to product. I'm becoming more and more relevant for a lot of companies because of the scale and the measurement and the data so science first, but as we all know, it's also it's about getting people to work together.

[01:09:17] Simon Hayhurst: Well, right. And that's all about communication and understanding and empathy. And so it's always both. Uh, but the trend has been more quant over the last decade and that might continue. 

[01:09:28] Angela Suthrave: And where can people get in touch with you and any shameless plugs? 

[01:09:34] Simon Hayhurst: Yes, yes and yes, uh, so you can always find me on LinkedIn, uh, Simon Hayhurst, you can just catch me there.

[01:09:40] Simon Hayhurst: Don't be afraid to reach out to simon. hayhurst at vertahealth. com. I'm always happy to meet new people. My response times will vary. There are busy times and there are less busy times. So if I'm slow to get back to you, I apologize, but do feel free to reach out. Shameless plug. Learn about Virta. I guarantee that if you aren't struggling with obesity or diabetes, you know someone who is.

[01:10:00] Simon Hayhurst: We've got a lot that we can do to help people and think about if your company, or if you know people at a company that's at the scale where they offer benefits, if they don't offer Virta, then maybe they should think about doing that because it is good for their bottom line and it is good It's definitely good for their employees.

[01:10:18] Angela Suthrave: Simon. Thank you so much for joining us on concept to care. It's great chatting with you. 

[01:10:22] Simon Hayhurst: Thank you guys. This is so much fun. Let's do it again.

[01:10:28] Omar Mousa: Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show. If you liked this episode, don't forget to leave us a rating and a review on your podcast app of choice and make sure to click the follow button so you never miss a new episode. This episode was produced and edited by Marvin Yue with research help from Aditi Atreya or Angela and Omar.

[01:10:47]Omar Mousa: And you've been listening to. Concept to care.

 

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