Episode #9 - Sandy Huang, VP of Product at GoodRx and Former Head of Product at Amazon

Written By Omar Mousa

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Description

Today on Concept to Care, we welcome Sandy Huang, a seasoned consumer tech product executive, shares insights on joining a health tech company like GoodRx and the skills and insights she brings from her customer-focused product management background. She discusses the challenges of setting the right user experience bar in health tech and the elements of an effective product strategy. Sandy also shares her experiences in identifying target markets, understanding customer needs, and conducting market research. Sandy Huang shares insights on product strategy, execution, and healthcare innovation. She emphasizes the importance of customer obsession, continuous research, and the balance between science and art in product management. Additionally, she highlights the significance of understanding user needs and leveraging core competencies in building product strategies.

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Some takeaways:

  1. Leverage Diverse Experience: Draw from diverse industry experiences to solve problems in new ways. Sandy's background in e-commerce, communities, and collaboration software helped her bring fresh perspectives to HealthTech.

    1. If you’re in HealthTech, consider hiring talent from various industries to bring in new ideas and methodologies.

  2. Focus on Essential User Needs: In healthcare, the user experience bar can differ because it is a must-have. However, raising this bar is crucial to stand out. Sandy highlights the importance of reducing friction, saving costs, and improving overall user experience to make healthcare products more appealing and effective.

    1. Regularly conduct usability tests to identify and eliminate friction points in your product.

    2. Aim for continuous improvement by incorporating user feedback into the development process.

  3. Conduct Cost Benefit Analysis Around the Bar: Determining how much to invest in raising the user experience bar involves evaluating the cost and benefits of each improvement. Sandy emphasizes that it’s crucial to assess whether achieving 100% in one area justifies the resources or if 80% suffices, allowing you to allocate resources to other areas.

    1. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the impact of potential improvements. Determine the optimal level of investment by balancing the benefits of enhanced user experience against the associated costs. Prioritize investments that provide the highest return in user satisfaction and retention.

  4. What Product Strategy Means to Sandy: An effective product strategy includes a clear vision, measurable goals, understanding customers and the market, leveraging company strengths, and a detailed execution plan.

    1. Vision: Create a North Star vision for your product.

    2. Goals: Set clear, measurable goals (both quantitative and qualitative).

    3. Market Research: Understand your customers and market thoroughly.

    4. Strengths: Identify and leverage your company’s core competencies.

    5. Plan: Develop a detailed roadmap with prioritization, timelines, and milestones.

  5. Avoid Bad Strategies: Sandy highlighted key pitfalls to avoid in product strategy. A bad strategy often includes solutions in search of problems, where a technical solution is developed without a clear understanding of the user need it addresses. Other examples include tackling problems that aren't significant or setting the wrong goals, which can misalign efforts and drive unintended behaviors.

    1. To ensure your strategy is sound, start by deeply understanding the user problem, ensure it’s a significant issue, and set clear, aligned goals that drive the right outcomes.

  6. Balance the North Star Metric with Supporting Metrics: Sandy emphasizes the importance of having a clear North Star metric to guide your product’s direction, but it should not be used in isolation. While the North Star provides a singular focus, it’s crucial to have supporting metrics that offer a comprehensive view of your product’s performance and ensure balanced decision-making.

    1. Define a North Star metric that captures the primary goal of your product, such as user engagement or retention. Complement this with guardrail metrics to monitor other important aspects, like customer satisfaction, revenue, or feature usage, to prevent any unintended consequences from focusing solely on the North Star.

    2. Consider how metrics can be “gamed”. Sandy suggests thinking about how a metric might be gamed to identify potential weaknesses and ensure balanced measurement. When setting your metrics, consider how they might be manipulated. This helps identify where additional supporting metrics are needed to create checks and balances, ensuring that your team’s actions align with the overall goals and do not lead to unintended behaviors.

  7. Communicate Strategy Effectively: Use structured documents like Amazon’s six-pagers to communicate product strategy. Sandy adapted this approach for GoodRx to ensure alignment.

    1. Develop a concise, structured document that outlines your product strategy, vision, goals, and anticipated challenges. Use this document to align your team and stakeholders.

    2. Right size the process for communicating strategy and getting alignment based on the stage of the company and maturity of the product. The six-pager is likely heavy for a start-up

  8. Addressing Disagreement around Product Strategy: Sandy addressed internal disagreements about focusing on a mobile-only product by positioning it as a pilot project and demonstrating its potential with early results. She emphasized speed and delivered a beta launch in three to four months, which helped gain early buy-in from key stakeholders. For those who are looking to communicate similarly controversial strategies:

    1. Position new, potentially controversial projects as pilots to mitigate resistance. Work quickly to deliver early results, using initial successes to build broader support and alignment within the organization.

  9. Navigating Matrixed Organizations in Healthcare: In a matrixed organization, where multiple stakeholders such as clinical owners and product teams need to collaborate, Sandy stresses the importance of aligning on the desired outcomes first. By focusing on shared goals and outcomes, and having open debates to balance different perspectives, you can set effective KPIs and drive forward. Ensure alignment on the overall vision and outcomes. Facilitate open discussions to balance various perspectives and agree on KPIs that reflect both business and product needs. Use these KPIs to create a cohesive roadmap that supports the collective goals of the organization.

  10. Identifying Target Markets and Understanding Customer Needs: Sandy emphasizes the importance of tailoring market research methods to the stage of your product and your available resources. She highlights various approaches, from cost-effective to more comprehensive strategies, to identify target markets and understand customer needs.

    1. Free or Low-Cost Methods:

      1. Guerrilla Usability Testing: Conduct usability tests in public places, such as cafes, where you can interact with potential users and gather feedback.

      2. Surveys: Use free or low-cost online survey tools to collect data on user needs and preferences.

      3. Interviews: Conduct phone or in-person interviews with potential users to gain qualitative insights.

    2. Moderate-Cost Methods:

      1. Focus Groups: Organize focus groups where you can engage with users in a controlled environment to understand their needs and pain points.

      2. Usability Testing: Offer small incentives, such as gift cards, to participants who provide feedback on your product.

    3. Higher-Cost Methods:

      1. In-Home Studies: Conduct in-home studies to observe users in their natural environment and gather in-depth insights into their behaviors and needs.

      2. Professional Services: Invest in professional market research services to obtain data.

    4. Tailor your market research approach based on your budget and the stage of your product. Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to gather comprehensive insights into your target market and customer needs.

  11. Refreshing Product and Market Research: Sandy emphasizes the importance of periodically refreshing product and market research to ensure that the insights remain relevant and accurate. This is particularly crucial in fast-changing industries like healthcare and technology. Schedule regular reviews of your market research and product strategy. Continuously gather new data and feedback to stay updated on market trends and evolving customer needs. This approach helps ensure that your product remains aligned with current market conditions and user expectations, allowing for timely adjustments and improvements.

  12. Executing the Product Strategy: Sandy provides actionable insights on how to effectively execute a product strategy, emphasizing the importance of a structured approach and continuous alignment with the core vision and goals.

    1. Build from the Core Outwards:

      • Focus on the core needs of users first. Ensure the foundational aspects of your product are solid before adding additional features.

      • Example: For Amazon Visual Shopping, Sandy focused on improving the quality of the image search results before introducing additional features.

    2. Leverage Existing Ecosystems:

      • Integrate your product with existing ecosystems to enhance its value and usability.

      • Example: Sandy integrated Amazon’s visual shopping feature with the broader Amazon ecosystem through features like "More Like This" and "Find on Amazon," making it more accessible to users.

    3. Pilot Projects and Early Wins:

      • Position new initiatives as pilot projects to mitigate resistance and quickly demonstrate value.

      • Work quickly to deliver early results and use initial successes to build broader support within the organization.

    4. Prioritize and Sequence:

      • Use a prioritization framework to evaluate features on potential impact, alignment with the product strategy, and level of effort. 

      • Develop a detailed roadmap with clear prioritization, timelines, and milestones to ensure strategic execution.

    5. Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation:

      • Include success metrics in your initial requirements and iterate based on the results.

      • Regularly track key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjust the strategy as needed based on insights gathered.

    6. Focus on building a strong core product, leverage existing ecosystems, and prioritize effectively. Use pilot projects to gain early wins and continuously monitor and adapt your strategy based on performance metrics and market feedback.

Show Notes

Where to find Sandy Huang:

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Where to find Angela and Omar:

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Referenced:

Check out our website: https://www.concepttocare.com

Subscribe to our newsletter: https://concepttocare.substack.com/p/episode-9-sandy-huang

Transcript

[00:00:00] Angela Suthrave: Hi, Sandy, welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to chat with you both. We're so excited to talk to you. I am a huge fan of good Rx and you have tons of experience. We were wondering if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself. Absolutely. So I've 

[00:00:18] Sandy Huang: been in consumer tech product management for over 20 years.

[00:00:22] Sandy Huang: I've been in a lot of different businesses, e commerce and shopping at Amazon and Shutterfly. News and Communities at Flipboard, Collaboration Software at Jive, and now Health Tech at GoodRx. I've been at companies that range from startups as small as 20 people to within several of them got acquired to mid sized companies to a large global corporation.

[00:00:46] Sandy Huang: So I Essentially consider myself a generalist having seen different industries, different types of businesses, and that's been my career. Very exciting. I'm really passionate about using the power of technology to solve for user needs. And what drives me is is really making a meaningful impact to a market or.

[00:01:08] Omar Mousa: So you're incredibly seasoned. You didn't grow up in health tech. Can you just describe to us like what motivated you to join a health tech company like good RX and then. What are the skills and insights you bring from a customer focused product management background from companies like Amazon, Flipboard, Jive, and Shutterfly that help you in this setting?

[00:01:28] Sandy Huang: So in the beginning of my career, I just loved to build great consumer experiences with strong brands. As I moved further along in my career, I just became more and more passionate about it. More selective of what I want to spend all my time on and there are user needs that are really great to have. But there are also user needs that are must haves and health care and health is one of them.

[00:01:51] Sandy Huang: We all know that our health and health care system is broken in the US and there's a lot of innovation and change that's needed there. And GoodRx helps Americans save money on their prescription medications. We all know how expensive that could be, even with insurance. I was a GoodRx Gold subscriber long before I joined the company.

[00:02:10] Sandy Huang: So I was very, I was already a fan. So when the opportunity arose for me to join it just made sense for me to join there. And there are things that are, that I bring. And I've seen in consumer industries that are that are relevant to healthcare and essentially in, in regular consumer businesses, the user needs are very similar.

[00:02:36] Sandy Huang: For example, You want to reduce any friction. You want to save people money. You want to make sure things are convenient for users. Things are effective. So those principles and being very consumer obsessed, especially coming from a company like Amazon, which is a customer obsessed, bringing that to the health tech industry, because in the, in the health tech industry, since it is a must have and, and it's very much like.

[00:03:06] Sandy Huang: Similar to enterprise software when there's something that's a must have and the user really has no choice, but to participate in it, the bar for for friction and the bar for the user experience does not have to be the bar, the same level of bar for a company that it's. It's purely consumer because purely consumer, you're competing with other consumer companies here.

[00:03:33] Sandy Huang: It's a must have. So you have to use it. So it is it is definitely something that I've seen in in terms of the differences. 

[00:03:41] Omar Mousa: Sandy, that bar is an interesting one. How, how do you find the right level then? Like if you're, if you're saying they're different, right. And there's a deviation in between, like where, where's the right balance?

[00:03:51] Omar Mousa: Like how do you find it? 

[00:03:52] Sandy Huang: Yeah. That's a great question because. You want to make sure that you hit a certain user experience bar. But the difficult thing is, again, because it is a must have, where does that, where does that bar go? And what, what distinguishes one company in health tech from another is, a lot of times how far you raise that bar.

[00:04:18] Sandy Huang: And in healthcare, it's a, it's a lot about the friction. It's about the saving money and it's about the friction. There's a lot of friction in the system and the companies that can help break down that friction, that is where the focus on, on raising the bar can be, you know, alongside the, the, the, the cost savings.

[00:04:39] Sandy Huang: But it is a, I don't have a, a simple answer for that. because there's so much to solve in the industry. So if you solve one area, do you need to solve one area? A hundred percent? Can you get to 80 percent and move to a different area? Well, we need to evaluate the cost and benefit of making something a hundred percent versus 80%.

[00:05:01] Sandy Huang: And I think that's something you see across various industry, not in healthcare is like how good is good enough where you can move on to something else. It's a, it's a very nuanced 

[00:05:13] Angela Suthrave: Decision based on what you've said so far, we're already starting to talk about product strategy. You hear this term a lot and you know, with your, you know, wealth of experience, this is something that you've, you've done a lot of.

[00:05:28] Angela Suthrave: And so what does product strategy mean to you? And how do you know when a strategy is effective? What does that look like? And then how does it improve the odds of having your product be successful? Product 

[00:05:41] Sandy Huang: strategy to me is a plan that captures the vision and goals to deliver on user needs that meet business goals.

[00:05:49] Sandy Huang: And an effective product strategy includes several things. First and foremost is a well articulated North Star vision that the teams in the company can rally around and stakeholders can align against. And a second part of a great product strategy is having clear goals. Quantitative, qualitative, Simple launch goals, but essentially here you need to be able to measure success.

[00:06:16] Sandy Huang: What does success look like? How do you measure success along the way? And some other things to consider in the product strategy are showing exactly what you're solving for and understanding your customers and target market. This one surprisingly I've seen in, in certain businesses where the articulation of exactly what you're solving for and the prioritization of that.

[00:06:41] Sandy Huang: Is critical and, and if you think about the understanding of the customers, what is the number one priority? Is it saving users money? Is it saving users time? Is it convenience? Is it connection with others? Is it entertainment? Being able to crisply say that is critical. Then there's understanding of the market and the industry.

[00:07:04] Sandy Huang: Obviously where we live in ecosystems and if you're at a large company, it's also the company's internal ecosystem. So understanding the market, the industry, understanding your company's core competence and how to leverage that strength. When I was at Amazon, of course, one of the strengths. With Amazon is Amazon shopping.

[00:07:25] Sandy Huang: So even in different types of business, we're always looking at how do we leverage the ecosystem of, of shopping and Amazon logistics as a company core competency that distinguishes any of our businesses apart from other businesses. And then there are things like the plan itself sequencing, prioritization, timeline, milestones.

[00:07:50] Sandy Huang: You want to present a strategy. But you have to connect the dots and provide that connective glue from the vision, the Northstar vision to how do you actually make this happen? And then of course there's go to market, really understanding like what's the core value prop you're delivering and how you would talk to consumers about it.

[00:08:14] Sandy Huang: So I think those are the main elements of a an effective product strategy. It absolutely improves the odds of product success examples of. Bad strategy just to illustrate is that that I've seen as a solution in search of a problem. Oftentimes, it may be sort of a technical solution that is drummed up, but now you're searching for a problem as opposed to.

[00:08:43] Sandy Huang: Let's understand the problem and let's find a solution that will help best serve that, that problem and that need. Another one is a problem that really isn't a big problem. Again, it's a competitive marketplace. If you're solving a very, very nice to have versus something that is an essential need for users, and then setting the wrong goals for the project.

[00:09:08] Sandy Huang: Setting the wrong goals can drive different behaviors and drive different things in the roadmap that may hit that goal, but may not hit the ultimate vision of that particular project. So for example, when I was at Amazon, we, the, one of the initial goals I was working on Alexa on the Echo show, and For that, for that particular project, we were looking at delivering a content platform to deliver content, visual content on the devices.

[00:09:45] Sandy Huang: And one of the sort of top down goals that was set was number of content pieces. On the, on the device and that kind of goal will drive a behavior of, okay, let's just get a lot of content there without the right guardrails as to the quality and and, and, you know, some other considerations things can go awry and you may not, you may end up, really jeopardizing your, your vision.

[00:10:12] Angela Suthrave: Sandy, when you were at Amazon, you had two different roles. One was with Amazon Alexa, and then one was with Amazon, the visual search. Were there examples? So going back to your comment earlier about how a really good strategy you have. You're connecting the dots between the strategy and your metrics that you're trying to drive.

[00:10:32] Angela Suthrave: In certain cases, is it better to have one very clear North Star when in many situations you could be having multiple metrics that you are measuring? And so is it good to have one metric or multiple metrics? And how do you think about that? Because oftentimes when you're trying to optimize from one metric, it does impact the other metrics.

[00:10:55] Angela Suthrave: And so I was wondering if you had thoughts and if you could share an example. 

[00:10:58] Sandy Huang: It's great to have a North star metric, but it's not in isolation. You need to have guardrail metrics because you need to keep things in check. For example, something like MAU monthly active users that is a metric that is comprised of.

[00:11:16] Sandy Huang: How many people are coming? at the top of the funnel coming in, in terms of acquisition and top of the funnel conversion, and how many people are churning out. And does that, if, if that's the Northstar metric, does that paint the entire picture? No, for a lot of businesses you need to have a, a portfolio of supporting metrics to keep, to do some checks and balances essentially.

[00:11:45] Sandy Huang: And and, and so while you can have a Northstar goal, it's just critical to have supporting ones. So if you think about, I think a good way to think about what metrics. Do you want to have part of of defining the success is, okay, if you have this metric, how would you game it? That's what I like to think about it.

[00:12:08] Sandy Huang: How would, how would you game it? Because then that will point you towards, okay, well, what are some of the guardrail metrics that you need to put in place so that you don't game it? And nobody deliberately tries to game, but when these goals are tied. To a team's performance or individual performance or bonuses, it will incent the wrong behavior.

[00:12:31] Omar Mousa: Earlier, you described a situation where companies are effectively displaying a solution as a vision or like a mission. How do you hedge against that? How do you create ambitious product mission and vision at the leadership level to do that really well? 

[00:12:46] Sandy Huang: Well, creating a an ambitious product mission.

[00:12:51] Sandy Huang: The ambitious part is interesting. If everyone thinks that the mission and vision is very doable, it's probably not ambitious enough. If there are rumblings of, We could never do that or that's crazy. Then there's probably something there that's quite ambitious. Now, of course it could be crazy as in just not not a good thing to do, but it could be crazy if you think about really true, big, ambitious visions of CEOs out there.

[00:13:24] Sandy Huang: There are many people that think that that idea is crazy, but the important thing is to connect the dots from that. North Star Vision to say, how do we go about getting there so that you can get people along bring them into the fold and align your various teams and stakeholders. So I one of the companies I worked at Jive, one of the things we wanted to do at Jive.

[00:13:58] Sandy Huang: So Jive. Develops collaboration software. And when I joined, we were the company was had a mobile app. That was very much a website. Stuffed into a mobile app, there were a lot of features and it was, this was my one departure into enterprise software. And this is around the time where the the consumerism of, of enterprise term was, was coined and thrown around a lot.

[00:14:32] Sandy Huang: So I was brought into really consumerize that business. One of the things we did there that was very controversial is because the. The company had been so oriented on web solutions and, and not mobile. We decided to develop for our small and small and medium sized businesses, a mobile only product, which really raised a lot of alarm bells within the company to say, why would you ever develop a mobile only solution?

[00:15:07] Sandy Huang: But we did that deliberately because. We wanted to force that thinking when you make a mobile app, you have to make really strong choices. You have to ruthlessly prioritize. So we wanted to enforce that thinking. So RV1 was mobile only. And by the way, Jive was global. So there were a lot of companies in Asia that really were mobile.

[00:15:37] Sandy Huang: Mobile only or just strongly mobile, much more so than the U. S. So we started with that and people said, that's crazy. But what it forced was the, the ruthless prioritization needed for mobile. And then of course, after that, We did want to extend to desktop, but at least version one had to be that way to get to the change that we needed.

[00:16:02] Omar Mousa: Wow. I could imagine the web application team probably had a cow and was like, all these great things we're building. Like we want. The mobile users to benefit from them. How did you, I mean, like, what was the, it seems like you eventually went there, but what was the timing of that? And like, how did you kind of say, no, we want to be very intentional about this, but you know, there's these four or five things that we need to do first.

[00:16:25] Omar Mousa: Like, how did you kind of defer that, that disagreement or that's a fundamental thing that a lot of engineering teams think about. 

[00:16:33] Sandy Huang: First, it was discussed as a pilot and that we would get beta customers on to test. And the second thing is speed. So we actually worked very quickly here in a matter of three or four months.

[00:16:50] Sandy Huang: We went from requirements to a launch, a beta launch. And that is a extremely fast time. To turn around a mobile app. So we did it quickly and we made sure to get some early beta customers on there. So we had actually a couple of great names one in, one in healthcare, one in retail to pilot this. And we got the feedback and the early feedback was very positive.

[00:17:25] Sandy Huang: So it was important to get early wins here to share out. So that more and more people can get aligned and on board. So that was really key in making this successful. And fast forward a year, two years later, it became the flagship app for the company. And our large enterprise customers really wanted that as well.

[00:17:52] Sandy Huang: So we had to do some work to scale it, do some more work on the authentication to serve large enterprise companies. 

[00:18:00] Angela Suthrave: And so as part of that jive mobile only, what were your goals and what KPIs did you establish? Yeah, 

[00:18:07] Sandy Huang: the 

[00:18:08] Angela Suthrave: KPIs 

[00:18:09] Sandy Huang: really depend on what stage the product is in as well as the, the, the stage of the, the company in, Stage of development.

[00:18:19] Sandy Huang: So in this case, we were launching from scratch, essentially. So the original one was simply a launch goal. In this one, we also did a lot of qualitative research to understand. How our partners, because we had beta partners, it was really a discussion with our key customers to understand that. So that was how the initial success criteria was for other businesses.

[00:18:48] Sandy Huang: It just depends on the stage, a product that is not V1 that is you know, V2, V3 you have, it is much more established. So you can establish more quantitative. metrics. So it really just depends on, on the stage of, of the product. 

[00:19:07] Omar Mousa: Sandy in healthcare, we often I mean, we sometimes we encounter at a certain stage, we encounter organizations that have a Matrixed org structure and in healthcare, there's a GM or clinical owner of a various business line or a business owner of a business line.

[00:19:22] Omar Mousa: And then you have the product organization. How have you structured organizations or manage that as it relates to, like, defining goals? Owning goals and, you know, driving KPIs forward. 

[00:19:33] Sandy Huang: It's a good question because in traditional consumer, usually the, the, the product owner is the one that is setting the goals and KPIs.

[00:19:47] Sandy Huang: In healthcare, it is a collaboration, and ultimately, if you're focused on what is the outcome that you want to drive for that team, for that product, and focus on aligning that outcome, then working backwards to say, what is the right KPI for that? And with any goal setting of, of KPIs, It's great to debate them because there are always different perspectives and in a, in a matrixed environment, that's where you're going to get the different perspectives.

[00:20:25] Sandy Huang: And it is a balance between what you want to deliver for product means what you need to deliver as a business. And coming to an alignment as to what those are together. So it is, it is definitely more of a challenge in healthcare, but it brings forth good debate. And one of the ways to sort of stress test that particular KPI or the KPIs that are being discussed is to say, here's a presentation of.

[00:21:00] Sandy Huang: Different roadmaps that would align to drive towards that KPI. And then you can actually see what the differences would be in the roadmap and tying that roadmap and saying, is this getting to the North star that we want? If we have this KPI, is it driving? Much more immediate conversion. Is it focused on something that's longer term retention LTV?

[00:21:27] Sandy Huang: Because those are different roadmaps. So it's, it's really two things. It's, it's one making sure that there is alignment on that North star vision. So there's not debate on that front, but just taking the KPIs being considered and playing out. This is what it looks like. And then you can really have discussions on aligning on the KPIs.

[00:21:47] Omar Mousa: I want to ask you about how you kind of identified target markets and learn about your customer needs. And then a second part to that is, does that change when applied to health care? 

[00:21:58] Sandy Huang: Identifying the target market also goes back to, in terms of methods and ways to do that, it really goes back to the stage of the product.

[00:22:09] Sandy Huang: And the company resources, there are free ways to learn about your target market. They're near freeways. And then there are of course, paid ways. So anything goes. The important thing is to tailor it to your budget and tailor it to the stage of your product. For example, Shutterfly, we were launching a new one to one greetings card business.

[00:22:36] Sandy Huang: So, it didn't exist and we had focus groups where we rented a room, had a paid moderator and brought in users who were compensated to understand what the problems are in that space or what their needs are in that space. At Amazon, we had the budget to do in home studies. where we went into people's homes and understood what their needs are throughout the day and how might our technology help serve that.

[00:23:10] Sandy Huang: We did phone interviews at Jive, at Flipboard when we launched communities. We talked with one of the first communities we launched. Was a travel community. So we talked with travel bloggers and influencers. So for, for new businesses doing focus groups, doing some in home studies, if there's the budget and for existing businesses, you can do a usability testing surveys for Amazon visual shopping.

[00:23:44] Sandy Huang: We surveyed users who are using image search to shop for inspiration and. We wanted to understand like how they go about searching and what they do in their purchase consideration. One company I was at minted we looked at ways customers customize their holiday cards and the pain that they go through and the time that they spent trying to customize their photo with their, with a holiday card design and how much time that took.

[00:24:14] Sandy Huang: So there are a lot of different ways, but the important thing is to. Gather qualitative and quantitative data. No piece of data tells the whole picture, so it's important to see both to, to really understand the, the full extent of the customer needs. 

[00:24:33] Angela Suthrave: If I am working at a startup and I'm listening to this and I'm thinking to myself, I don't have the funds to pay for some of these studies.

[00:24:41] Angela Suthrave: I don't have the funds for a user researcher to help me conduct, you know, to get to some of these findings. What would you say to them? 

[00:24:48] Sandy Huang: You can use the free method where, and, and, and this has actually happened before in, in my career history is you go to Starbucks and you ask people there if you can ask them some questions.

[00:25:01] Sandy Huang: I mean, depending on the product and the business, they may not be relevant, but if it is a general one, you can do that. You can get people in for usability studies. If you are And compensate through a gift card, which is not high cost, a 25, 50 gift card and ask the user questions. You may not have a moderator, but there are plenty of resources online on just helping you.

[00:25:28] Sandy Huang: Be a good moderator and not introduce some, some bias into your questions. So there are ways to do this cheaply. There are online usability sites to use. There is there are surveys that you can survey for free for users. If you put that in the app and do a survey there. So there are creative ways to get around.

[00:25:53] Sandy Huang: The cost. 

[00:25:54] Angela Suthrave: How did you do market research and understand where the product idea fits into the value chain? 

[00:26:01] Sandy Huang: Well, the, the market research and understanding again, goes back to knowing what the stage of the product is in, whether it's brand new V1, if it's. in middle or very mature and also understanding what is the value addition.

[00:26:19] Sandy Huang: Is it a must have or is it a nice to have? If it's a nice to have, how does it become a must have? Because it's so frictionless or because it's such a great experience. How do you extend that? Is it a unique offering and what's unique about it? And then finally, what's the environment? How is the, what is the industry?

[00:26:40] Sandy Huang: What is it trending towards? What do competitors and other players currently have? And what is your company and your products? unique position in that, in that value chain. And it goes back to just leveraging all the different types of market research available, whether it's usability testing, in home studies, surveys, focus groups, market research, depending on your Depending on your budget, but being able to leverage that and it's good as a product manager to understand which one is best suited for what type of product stage.

[00:27:26] Sandy Huang: And that's really key as well to make sure you're getting the right type of signals. 

[00:27:32] Omar Mousa: Sandy it made me think of I mean, I obviously it depends on the budget. For this one, but I think how often do you refresh that perspective or you do that market research activity? And the reason why I ask is I, I think that we often get stuck in our, like, okay, we did this market research once we learned some things and then we were like, very fixated on that finding.

[00:27:54] Omar Mousa: And we're not we trust that we know it and we, we don't think we need to do it again. And maybe some time passes. Yeah. And it might make sense to do it over again, but it's just like the old knowledge kind of remains into the company and kind of propagates throughout the culture and the build. And then I also think about how, like, we, we say often that we're very iterative at various companies.

[00:28:14] Omar Mousa: It's a cool thing to say, but sometimes it's like, okay, well, I need to do research now to go. build and then we rely on internal data that our products are producing and, and such or, or external data. But I, I, I think that it's, it's a hard balance and I'm wondering, like, what's your perspective on how often you have to refresh this information?

[00:28:31] Sandy Huang: Certainly as often as Is necessary, meaning that if you have a product and you're, you're looking at different features to launch, right? Ideally, you can get some usability tests, but you also want to over index and rely too heavily on that because there is a cost. There could be a monetary cost and a time cost.

[00:28:58] Sandy Huang: So it's critical to put on that. product management sense hat to say how much is, is, is enough, right? Because oftentimes you can get a lot from a study to carry you on forward, but without a periodic check in, depending on the industry, things can change very quickly. So if I am in, in a AI company and things are changing quickly all the time.

[00:29:28] Sandy Huang: I better be doing a lot of research continuously. So it's, it's, it is critical to continuously look back and say, okay, are we at this point, if we do another research test, what new things do we think we can learn? Right. But sometimes you're surprised. There are things you may not expect to learn new things, so it really, I don't have a, a simple answer for, for this one, it's really dependent on your business and how the industry is, is quickly changing or perhaps your demographics are changing.

[00:30:04] Angela Suthrave: And Sandy, similar question. How often do you reevaluate your product? strategy, your product vision, the associated goals and KPIs, you know, as product people, we're always looking at the data, right? There's selling cycles. Typically if you're selling to enterprise organizations you know, or if you're selling direct to consumers, I feel like there's always sort of a marketing timeline.

[00:30:29] Angela Suthrave: And so in your practice, what, what works for you? Well, certainly, 

[00:30:35] Sandy Huang: As you are building out a product and executing on the product strategy, there's going to be input from all over the place, input from stakeholders, input from, from customers or from research. And it's important to also be flexible while you have this North star.

[00:30:52] Sandy Huang: It's important to be flexible, to be open, and to have those discussions. If anything, if we say that, okay, by the time we execute this North star vision, the industry will have. Changed. Well, of course you need to adjust. So focusing on the, on the sort of outcome that you want and the means that you're serving and making sure that you do take all the inputs all along the way, all along the way, because.

[00:31:24] Sandy Huang: Obviously it is, it's good to look at the product strategy and product development process as continually iterative. And it's when people stop doing that and they're Fixated on a certain way and without that openness or debate of new things that come in where businesses die. 

[00:31:48] Omar Mousa: I want to shift gears here a little bit.

[00:31:49] Omar Mousa: We've talked a lot about product strategy at a, for consumer centric companies. I want to talk about executing on that product strategy. So broad question, but like, how do you execute and maybe roadmap from it? And how do you prioritize teams and features? 

[00:32:05] Sandy Huang: I'll give an example from my work at Amazon Visual Shopping.

[00:32:11] Sandy Huang: And fundamentally it's identifying, like going back to some of the main principles we talked about earlier on the elements of the product strategy, understanding the true consumer, the core of the consumer need here. And then building out from the core of the, the, the product on out. Oftentimes teams get caught up in.

[00:32:40] Sandy Huang: Shiny new objects and really cool ideas and launches, but are not for focusing first on the core. Let's do your core. Well, how well goes back to our other conversation of like how, how, how much is good enough. Which is a judgment call. But in this case with Amazon Visual Shopping, the core of the technology is the quality.

[00:33:06] Sandy Huang: So I can put bells and whistles and have a fun experience. But if the return results of an image that you put in is not the quality that you want, So you take an image of blue shoes and you get like a purple handbag, obviously you'll stop using the product. So in that case, we really focused on building the quality and doing all the machine learning and training of the different categories for Amazon shopping, starting with apparel because that is the crux of visual shopping and inspiration.

[00:33:47] Sandy Huang: But then looking at the Amazon. ecosystem and being able to leverage that. So the visual shopping experience when I joined the company was through an ingress on the search bar, there was a icon there, and you could go in into that experience, but a lot of the shopping and it was easy to miss. So. A lot of the shopping happens, just you land on Amazon, you're looking at different things.

[00:34:14] Sandy Huang: So how do we tap into that ecosystem? Well, Amazon has a large, massive inventory of a lot of different things. There's a lot of apparel on there. We introduced a feature called more like this, which if you go through Amazon and see a lot of these SKUs on Amazon, there's an icon where you can tap on it and see more like this.

[00:34:38] Sandy Huang: So we really integrated into the system because that takes it away from having to discover it in the search bar to broadening that discoverability within Amazon ecosystem. But then it doesn't address the people who are outside of Amazon. and are looking on the internet and they happen to find something or they're looking at their Instagram feed and happen to see a great outfit or a nice couch that they would like to have in their home and wondering where I can buy that.

[00:35:13] Sandy Huang: And that's where we introduced The the feature called find on Amazon where you're outside of the Amazon ecosystem, but we can bring you in. So this is about meeting users where they are. And then another part of our, our strategy was to just solve the, the search problem of you have text search, which is great when you have this specific text that you want to search on.

[00:35:42] Sandy Huang: And that's easy for things like a cup. Right. Like the simple things, probably not a very, very long query. And then you have images where you, if you put in a, a yellow dress, you want to see similar things like the yellow dress and, and, and be able to, instead of describing it with a bunch of different words, like yellow dress with floral or with polka dots, a line, whatever it is, just show that image.

[00:36:14] Sandy Huang: But then there's the world where. You show the image, but it's interesting because we don't know the intent of the user. The user is saying that I want to see something like this, but what is it about that image that the user cares about? Is it the fact that it's yellow, that it's a line, that it has a certain color or all the above?

[00:36:36] Sandy Huang: We don't know that we can't read their minds and having them Help us with that. So we introduce the multimodal search where you can have an image, but you can qualify it with text. So you can put something in there and you can specify a specific brand in the case of the yellow dress to be, I like this, but I want it in, in, in blue.

[00:37:03] Sandy Huang: Right. I like everything about it. I want it in blue. So just understanding sort of the, the ecosystem that you're playing with, the core needs of our users and how to, how to leverage all that. 

[00:37:13] Angela Suthrave: What you said was so fascinating to me. So you know, I, I use Amazon more than I care to admit. And one of the challenges that I run into often is this idea of attribution.

[00:37:25] Angela Suthrave: So, So when you are building products, you're trying to solve problems and you're trying to understand how your product features can solve that problem. And when you were talking through that, that's immediately where my head went is if you're someone like me who hems and haws over a purchase decision, I could be using the search.

[00:37:44] Angela Suthrave: I could be using the visual tool. I could be searching on Google where then I'm pulled back into the Amazon ecosystem. So if I'm doing all of those things, how how are you attributing what I did to my ultimate purchase? That 

[00:38:02] Sandy Huang: is a very good question because the attribution, I think in this particular business and in many businesses where the conversion is not necessarily immediate.

[00:38:14] Sandy Huang: Is a challenge in, in this particular business, it was important to attribute it despite the fact that there could not be an immediate conversion because they are inspirational shopping use case. And. For example, with a sofa, a couch, it's highly unlikely someone sees it for the first time on Amazon and decides to buy it.

[00:38:45] Sandy Huang: It is probably saved and added to cart and the purchase decision is longer. So these considerations are really critical for all, for the team and the stakeholders to understand. And they're reasonable, right? I just said that you probably wouldn't buy a couch the first time that you looked at it. And, and most people will will agree with that.

[00:39:08] Sandy Huang: So it's important to, A, understand that the, the, the purchase consideration timeframe is longer. It's not equal for every single thing. And then B, it's really figuring out how you go about measuring that? Like what are some of the leading indicators of that? Is it the fact that someone adds it to cart and doesn't do anything about it or they, they save it and they don't do anything about it until much later?

[00:39:38] Sandy Huang: So with these kind of metrics, whereas a little bit more longer tail it's It's important to just capture that in there and, and have a basic understanding with, with the team and with the stakeholders that that is, this is different from other things that you can measure immediately, but it has equal value.

[00:39:58] Sandy Huang: It is serving the needs of a user. Not everything that a user sees on Amazon is for immediate purchase. A lot of things are, but a lot of things aren't. Right. And, and so like just distinguishing what's sort of inspirational shopping versus something that may be more of a commodity that you will purchase right away.

[00:40:21] Angela Suthrave: We've talked about, you know, some of your strategies. Do you have a certain way that you like to communicate the strategy to get alignment? I know that Amazon, you know, they're famous for their six pagers. You know, I understand that you revamped it for good Rx. For I'm sure a number of reasons, including company size.

[00:40:39] Angela Suthrave: Do you find that to be an effective way? 

[00:40:41] Sandy Huang: Yes, so we piloted it and My team has enjoyed the, the, the process it is, I remember when I joined Amazon and this was a very well instilled mechanism, I thought, wow, that's a, it's a lot upfront to think through, but it is quite effective because one of the issues when a team jumps into offense or you want Building without adequate product discovery is that things will come up later in the process, whether it's in design or whether it's in code.

[00:41:20] Sandy Huang: And that's very expensive for the company. Ironically, it is tough when you're going. To environments outside of Amazon at Amazon is a very well instilled mechanism. Everyone knows to do that. And it's worked very well for the company. And that's part of the reason why Amazon can scale and be effective at its scale.

[00:41:46] Sandy Huang: But there's always a fear of like, okay. Time spent in discovery waste time, but there's a balance because. If we think about if there is a pattern at the company where you're rehashing things when you're in code or rethinking about things that could have been aligned up front and hashed out, that upfront investment time actually shortens the time.

[00:42:12] Sandy Huang: And you can measure it. If you're measuring velocity and sprint, you can actually measure this and improve out the value of it. Again, it's, it's, but it does need to be tailored sort of for the company size. You would not expect a small company to do a six page It's just too heavy handed, right? So it does need to be amended, but it is really a great way to get alignment because you are spelling out what the North star vision is.

[00:42:42] Sandy Huang: You're spelling out what user needs are that you're solving for. You're also spelling out what the, what success looks like and then bringing forth any debated, hotly debated topics or could be hotly debated topics because you want to close that out or at least acknowledge them. You don't have to close everything out because it may be hard to do that before you, you get into the thick of it, but at least acknowledge it.

[00:43:10] Sandy Huang: And that way that is that is clear and everyone knows where, what direction. The team is going and, and it's great to also anticipate questions from your stakeholders. I have told my team it is a great place to be when I look at a product alignment document that I don't have any more questions because they've been anticipated and answered.

[00:43:38] Sandy Huang: It doesn't mean that I will necessarily agree with them, but that they've been raised and we can talk about it. So it is in my. been a very great way to help the company move at, at better speed. 

[00:43:54] Omar Mousa: Cindy, it got me to thinking about, you know, there are a lot of great things that you're saying you're taking from Amazon and applying at GoodRx.

[00:44:01] Omar Mousa: I'm wondering, like, what else have you brought to the organization? What, What are some things that GoodRx that you're changing how they do product effectively? 

[00:44:11] Sandy Huang: Well, primarily it's bringing the customer obsession and seeing things from the customer's perspective. That is just critical. And, and, And that goes from using the product and being really aware of what all the friction points are.

[00:44:38] Sandy Huang: And at GoodRx, it's a multi sided marketplace. We have consumers, but we also have the pharmacy benefit managers. We have the pharmacies, manufacturers. So, it's not just one product. Consumer type to consider. It's multiple and understanding their friction points and where those friction points intersect.

[00:45:02] Sandy Huang: Oftentimes is a win win. So when it comes down to prioritization, it's like, okay, this is actually touching. This is a friction point that if we solve, actually solves the needs for multiple user types. So it is, it is, it is really just bringing in that consumer obsession. 

[00:45:19] Angela Suthrave: Sandy, I don't know if you can share this, but if you can share like an example of something that was a win win for multiple sides, I think that would be helpful.

[00:45:28] Sandy Huang: Yeah. So one of the things that we Launched last year was a what's daily medication reminders and medication adherence is a problem. Sometimes it's because side effects. Sometimes it's because someone just forgets or that they can't afford the medication. The medication. So at the crux of our offering is helping Americans afford the medications, but the, the forgetting is also a critical part of it as well as the side effects.

[00:46:02] Sandy Huang: So as part of that, we have these medication reminders that are right there when you open the, the the app. And and, and that is, you know, that is a win win. Our health care providers also like that because they want their patients to be, to be adherent. And the health care providers are also fans of GoodRx because it's, it's great.

[00:46:29] Sandy Huang: Because the cost savings as well. So that is a win win on on all fronts 

[00:46:35] Omar Mousa: in health care. There's a tendency to ship and forget. And I'm wondering how do you measure the progress or the I guess the impact of the things that you are building at good rx 

[00:46:48] Sandy Huang: as part of the the Requirements, there should always be the metrics of success and it's part of the MVP.

[00:46:56] Sandy Huang: It's easy to not have metrics as part of the MVP, but if you're talking about the product strategy up front. It's great to bake that in so that it is, it is part is not complete without that. And that's the best way to ensure that it is monitored after the fact. And we all want to know the impact of our work.

[00:47:21] Sandy Huang: It is easy to move on to the next thing, but as a business, I'm always thinking about what's our ROI. on this project. And if we're building it, no one's using it or for whatever reason too much friction or any of those reasons, we need to know right away. So baking it into the initial requirements is important.

[00:47:51] Angela Suthrave: All right. So Sandy, we have reached the very exciting portion of our show called concept closing calls. We're going to ask you a couple of questions starting with, are there any frameworks, methods or processes that you've found to be useful in your work that others might find useful as well? 

[00:48:07] Sandy Huang: The frameworks or a method that I use is my.

[00:48:11] Sandy Huang: Experience over the 20 years of various companies in different stages, different sizes stitched together. But I would say the core of the method that I use is number one, understanding the customer, number two, understanding the market and industry number three, what you can leverage from the company's core competency and building, starting from that orientation on outwards.

[00:48:39] Sandy Huang: And then four, what you need gaps. should you fill. So if I were to just distill it down to a few things to consider, it would be those. 

[00:48:50] Omar Mousa: What is a tool that is highly valuable to you that you think others may not be using? 

[00:48:55] Sandy Huang: Not sure if this is a tool per se, but using the product yourself as a product manager.

[00:49:02] Sandy Huang: And it's surprising that I've seen where people on the team are not using that particular product. Now, sometimes you are squarely in the demographic and you have access to it. Other times, not necessarily so, but having a, a setup or simulating that to, to the extent that you can is really, really critical because there's nothing like actually being a user to really, and, and, and not just a light user, try it once in a while.

[00:49:40] Sandy Huang: With GoToRx, I go, I become the designated family, go pick it up at the pharmacy person. So I have experienced all kinds of things that I think if I were not doing that, I would just be. reading about it or, or seeing it in our customer reports. So there's nothing like actually having that firsthand experience.

[00:50:03] Sandy Huang: The other thing is just going back to the basics. Sometimes it's easy to say, Hey, we're going to do this, you know, crazy cool thing. But if you don't have the basics nailed then, then doing that cool thing. It really becomes a, a, a, like a nice to have. It's not the core of what you need to focus on first.

[00:50:24] Sandy Huang: So the, the, those, those two things I think are, are, are highly valuable that I don't see employed all the time. 

[00:50:35] Angela Suthrave: That's good advice. Always good to dog food. Are there any concepts in healthcare that really excite you right now? Absolutely. Women's 

[00:50:42] Sandy Huang: health. I've been very passionate about this for a number of reasons.

[00:50:48] Sandy Huang: It's been underfunded, it's been under research, and it's 50 percent of the population. So it is, I'm very excited that there are a lot of startups now in that space due to female CEOs and founders. female VCs that have been supportive of it. So I'm very excited about that. And particularly in the area of menopause, which again is extremely underfunded.

[00:51:20] Sandy Huang: It's something that all women go through and there is simply a lack of, of research and a lot of misinformation out there. So with menopause, there are what, 30 plus conditions associated with it. And There is, in terms of, in terms of healthcare providers, not enough education there. So a lot of the information is out there via personal experience or talking or having communities of people, but not enough that is, uh that is widespread enough that, that people should know about.

[00:52:02] Sandy Huang: So I'm excited for all the startups in that space. And then there are other conditions like endometriosis, PMDD that affect women exclusively that are hormone related endometriosis affects one in 10 women. And that is a very high percentage. But if you ask. people what that is and you know, how do you treat it?

[00:52:25] Sandy Huang: I mean, the average, average diagnosis of that, I think maybe this is old, but it was like seven years to understand that. So it is, there's a lot there and I'm just really excited about the women's healthcare space. Yeah. Plus one to that. 

[00:52:40] Omar Mousa: Plus two. Do you think product management is a science or an art?

[00:52:46] Sandy Huang: I consider product management to be both and that's why I love it. So you can be scientific about it. For example, when you prioritize, you can look at the level of effort, the resources needed. Do we have the resources? What's the expected impact? But then there's a judgment call to it. And that judgment call can be based on universal truths about user needs or best practices, or just using very strong product sense.

[00:53:16] Sandy Huang: So it's not something that you can just plug in. If, if everyone did that, and just plugged in the numbers and took that ranking and ordering prioritization it would not be the most effective one because there are other considerations. So, and then this is also why you use. both quantitative and qualitative data to get a holistic picture.

[00:53:38] Sandy Huang: And then there's the art where you have to make a strong judgment calls and have a strong product sense to make the right decisions. 

[00:53:47] Angela Suthrave: And Sandy. Where can people get in touch with you and do you have any shameless plugs? 

[00:53:55] Sandy Huang: Well, I'm on LinkedIn, so people can reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I also currently coach for product management and product managers.

[00:54:05] Sandy Huang: So if anyone is listening and interested in talking 

[00:54:07] Angela Suthrave: to me about that I am I am open. Sandy, it's incredibly exciting to talk to you. You know, you have so much expertise and I'm really glad that we have people like you who are coming over to health tech. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on.

[00:54:21] Angela Suthrave: It's been a fun conversation.

 

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