Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge and Selection  Module 2 was a great session in that it opened up my mind to a different kind of storytelling.  I feel that I’m a really good  storyteller when it comes to presenting product ideas and concepts to external facing clients (the ‘clients and users’ of  the product) but have always struggled with ‘selling’ the idea to internal facing clients (the ‘concept approvers’ of the  product).  I am challenged to bring ‘New and Innovative’ concepts to the market and I consistently deliver what our  clients are asking for but miss the mark on ‘what wows’.  Every single lesson in Module 2 has given me renewed  confidence in being innovative. The story of Geoff and George hit too close to home but in a good way and the lesson on  preparing your mind was perfect.  As I reviewed my product development repertoire across the various businesses and  industries, I should have recognized that I don’t need direct experience with a product but just having exposure to  innovative people, I can leverage that knowledge and place in my repertoire.  I know a lot about a lot but have been  focusing on delivering smaller, incremental ‘comfortable’ product ideas in my subject domain.  The few times I ventured  outside my comfort zone, I was shot down with the reason being the concept was too big, too complex, too hard to  implement or it’s not a needle mover.  Leveraging my new found skills in module 2, I applied my new story telling skills  to my 2016 product roadmap and I’m having huge success already.

Application  This year, 2008, I spent considerable amount of time with my clients in their environment in what we call ‘shadowing’  sessions which I now recognize as ‘Journey Mapping’.  These sessions consisted of just sitting and observing what the  users do all day and how they use various tools to complete their tasks, one of their tools being our application.  I’ve had  so many ideas on how we could transform our application into a streamlined, more efficient, easier user experience but  was tackling it in small incremental changes, a ‘tactical’ approach that fits nicely in an Agile environment.  Timing is  everything, right?  I had just finished the lesson on ‘How Prepared is Your Mind’ when our company brought all the  product managers together for 3 days to ‘brainstorm’ and ‘strategize’ for the upcoming 2016 product roadmap.  As each  product owner walked through their year in review and their 2016 product roadmap initiatives, I took lots of notes.  On  breaks, I had verbal ‘journey map’ discussions with each product owner and I asked them to describe their clients and  then asked them to paint me a verbal picture of the typical day their end-users have.  I listened to good story tellers and  not so good story tellers.  This in itself was a lesson for me.  I also removed a few product owners from the pedestal I  had put them on, hitched up my britches and jumped into their world which was too intimidating for me before this  class.

Insight   As the 3 days progressed, I was amazed that the challenges our clients had were basically the same.  Once I removed my  blinders and bias that my clients were different than anyone else’s in the room and focused on the pain points that the  clients were having, my mind was blown away.  I’m a product owner in a very large (6500 employees) Healthcare IT  company where we have 4 main client sets; Hospitals, Physician practices, Pharmacies and Payers (Insurance  Companies).  Here are a couple insights from my 3 day strategy session where I got to use my new story telling skills and  I changed my 2016 Roadmap presentation from a slide deck with a ‘tactical’ deliverables to a journey map storytelling  session which hands down, was a huge success.

Insight #1: Healthcare is junked up, that’s a fact.  Patients, like us, can’t afford our insurance premiums and if we’re  healthy, we choose the cheapest insurance plan our employer offers which typically comes with a really high annual  deductible.  When we go to the doctor’s office, we typically just pay our co-pay of $20 or $30 and then wait for the

insurance company to pay the bill.  Since we elected a high deductible plan, we typically owe more than the $20 or $30  co-pay after the insurance company has paid.  The doctor’s office now has to collect more from us; the patient, which is  not what the process in their office, is setup to do.  The shift of where the physicians revenue is collected, from the  patient versus from the insurance company has become a huge problem.  When the insurance company doesn’t pay  because the patient has a deductible and the patient can’t pay their bill, the doctor is left holding the bag.  I knew this  but my mind had not even considered that hospitals have the same problem but that it’s even bigger because the  hospital bill could be tens of thousands of dollars.  Listening to the product owner for the hospital client base, they have  already solved this problem by helping patients who can’t pay their bill obtain financial aid, or if the patient can pay their  bill, determine if the patient will pay their bill with a service called ‘propensity to pay’ (think of it as a credit score).   Helping doctors collect money from patients was number one on my product initiatives for 2016 and after applying  What is? And What if?  from this class, the problem statement went from, ‘how to collect’ to ‘how to help the patient  pay’.

Insight #2: I hate insurance companies (payers), which is what almost all doctors say.  This is a direct quote from one of  my physician client visits, “…shift in healthcare where payers used to be helpful but now are shifting back to being  'mean' and 'uncooperative….”.  New federal laws now make payers pay claims in a prompt and timely manner or they  get penalized by the law.  Payers are now paying in a timely manner but they have also uncovered a loophole in the law.   They pay now and then 3, 6 to 9 months from now, they take the money back with no explanation and tell the physician  they only have 15 days to appeal the reversal.  Oh by the way, they send it in a letter by USPS so it’s not actually 15 days.    To my utter disbelief, guess how the payer determines what payments to take back?  You guessed it, that product owner  I had on a pedestal.  We’re actually competing in some respects… and this is my ‘wow’.  Payers run their analytics across  millions of insurance claims, across thousands of physicians to identify patterns where there might be physician fraud or  upcoding (billing for more services than were rendered to the patient).  Once identified, the physician’s billing patterns  are sent to an analyst that determines if the payer has cause to ‘reverse’ payments which I might add, seem to be more  subjective than objective.  Creating a Payer Appeal workflow was my number two product initiative for 2016 and after  applying What is? And What if?  from this class, the problem statement changed from ‘how to appeal a take back’ to  ‘how to predict a take back’ .

To summarize, I’m in the process of putting 4 insights through the 4 Ws, all in various stages of the innovative process.

Approach  What would I change in my approach?  As I move through the What is and What if process, I have to keep telling myself  to not ‘design’ but prototype and continually get feedback.  I don’t think I am at the point to change my approach yet  since I still have the training wheels on but I have learned that I need to keep a separate journal  for all my ‘back of the  napkin’ ideas with the sentence, article or client comment that triggered the thought.  Being ADHD, my attention span is  about 2 minutes and then I’m off to another idea and I spend a lot of time trying to recapture what I was thinking when I  can actually stop and focus on those moments of brilliance.  

