Chicago has long been an epicenter of exploration and advancement, from the ancient development of the Chicago Portage to the 19th-century invention of the dishwasher to the towering skyscrapers that continue to transform our skyline.
Responding to the needs of people and business underpins this history of product discovery in Chicago. The Chicago Portage connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system and allowed the development of complex trade routes we still use today. The dishwasher simplified household labor and hygiene. And for tech teams at Avaneer Health and Snapsheet, continuous product discovery means being sensitive to user needs, stakeholder priorities and mission alignment.
“We’re driven to understand our clients’ most fundamental administrative and clinical problems and build a solution that progresses the industry,” David Schramm, senior product manager at Avaneer Health, said.
That focus on client needs continues at Snapsheet. According to director of product Vallen Tousis, their meetings with users, who are able to engage with prototypes and give feedback throughout the build process, allow their product development team to engage directly with stakeholder needs from the discovery phase through deployment.
“Our product managers intimately understand the environment of our customers,” Tousis said. “They get it. They care about it.”
Built In Chicago sat down with Schramm, Tousis and Adams to learn more about their processes of product discovery as they continue Chicago’s long history of innovation.
“Avaneer Health was founded by a consortium of organizations with a vision to create a healthcare network that connects providers, payers and other stakeholders to seamlessly share data,” senior product manager David Schramm said. “With a shared vision, we’re building a network and platform that will bring that vision to life and meet the needs of those founding participants.”
What’s something that makes your team’s product discovery process unique from other teams you’ve been a part of?
Many times, teams fall into the trap of staying surface level, failing to dig deep enough with data and insights. Serving as a feature factory, they build tech that they assume a user wants and fail to deliver measurable impact. In contrast, the Avaneer Health team is focused on delivering tangible business impact by solving for the core challenges our founding participants face every day. As we build the infrastructure and initial solutions, we strive to stay focused on how we’re solving the problem versus becoming enthralled with a single technology or tool that sounds like it’s going to work, even though it may not, or following directions from a high-level leader.
What other teams or stakeholders do you collaborate with throughout the discovery process?
Avaneer Health is a tightly-knit team, working to design a solution that’s going to lower administrative costs, create efficiencies and facilitate a better healthcare experience for everyone. From business leadership to engineering to sales and marketing, everyone is aligned to the same objective so we can be successful. My job is to be the voice of the client, an advocate who is ruthlessly focused on solving their problems. I shy away from personal opinions and instead focus on using client feedback and data to guide critical decisions. By guiding good decisions, I build trust with my team and with my stakeholders, so that we can work more effectively together.
From business leadership to engineering to sales and marketing, everyone is aligned to the same objective so we can be successful.”
What does continuous discovery look like for your team?
Continuous discovery is an inherent part of our process. We’re examining ideas from our clients, experts and internal team input to find and validate the most important problems to solve. Some ideas are adopted, others are discarded and some are modified to work optimally. The goal is that we learn more every day and adapt our plans to manage the biggest risks and prioritize the most impactful wins. At the end of the day, it’s all about solving our customers’ problems.
It’s easy for teams to deep dive into a solution. Technical teams are great at solving technical problems. My job is to make sure teams understand and are focusing on the right problem. We have found success by never taking a request at a face value. We work with our clients to “peel back the onion” and understand the core underlying problem and understand the “why” behind the request. An understanding of the “why” opens the solution possibilities, and allows technical teams to find the best possible “what” that meets the needs of our business, our clients and our users.
Snapsheet is simplifying auto insurance processes for their customers — who they engage in every stage of their product development process. “We have a great process and great customers who love to work with us,” Vallen Tousis, director of product, said.
What’s something that makes your team’s product discovery process unique from other teams you’ve been a part of?
We engage with our users throughout our discovery in focused meetings. Many companies claim to be “user-centric” but most just run surveys or have feature request boards. Don’t get me wrong, we do those things too, but what separates us is our actual one-on-one meetings with customers and the users at those companies. Those customers get to see prototypes and give us their feedback real time, before and even during the building process. We balance that feedback with data on usage and performance and then bring that all before the product development team.
What other teams or stakeholders do you collaborate with throughout the discovery process?
Our product managers work closely with our sales and customer success teams and are on a first name basis with our customers. Product managers meet weekly with these stakeholders and there is a real working partnership between the groups. There is a real difference between having a meeting and really “hearing” your stakeholders. We love our clients and are looking to them to help us grow a sustainable ecosystem to grow our product in. As a product team, we are really grateful to have clients that are so involved and willing to be available to us.
There is a real difference between having a meeting and really “hearing” your stakeholders.”
What does continuous discovery look like for your team?
We stay small with our sprints and make sure that we iteratively deliver value to production every two weeks. Our customers look forward to getting the release notes. We then fold their reactions to what was released into the next set of iterations. This allows us to have a product that really addresses the needs of our customers while maintaining an unparalleled amount of flexibility in how we build.
