One year at PatientPop

In the summer of 2017, I was a human factors research intern at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA. That fall I was to return to Long Beach State to start my second year of graduate school in the Human Factors program. As the summer (and my internship) was coming to an end, I started looking for part-time positions in the Greater Los Angeles Area. I ended up receiving an offer for an internship at a market research agency downtown and another at a rapidly growing healthtech startup in Santa Monica. Both companies’ interview processes required me to complete a project: one had me proofread slide-decks for spelling and data inconsistencies, whereas the other defined a problem and asked me to propose a solution to that problem. After I completed the projects, each company informed me that what I had done for the project was what I would be doing for the rest of the internship. Needless to say, I was not interested in proofreading slide decks.

A couple of weeks later, I started at as a Product Management Intern at PatientPop - the quickly growing startup in Santa Monica positioned right between the renowned Third Street Promenade and the beach. On my first day, I got set up with my hardware and software, and I was asked to write down a word that describes me - I thought I was being clever by writing down dynamic, only to find that I was the second person to have chosen that word.

The next couple of months, I worked closely with my supervisor, who was the first product manager at PatientPop. I admired his curiosity and drive, but more than that, I admired his management style: rather than giving directives, he provided guidance. I soon realized that this was not unique to him, but to the nature of the organization as a whole. PatientPoppers not only want the company to succeed but for their colleagues to succeed in the process as well.

The researchers, Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan, propose that there are three universal needs necessary for human beings to thrive: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. In the last year, I have come to realize that PatientPop, while far from a perfect company, is actively and consistently working to fulfill all three of these needs of its employees.

Autonomy: the need to make things happen

Despite being previously told that my duties would be similar to that of the interview project, I expected to primarily have a support role: data entry and data cleaning, deck preparation, meeting scheduling, etc. I was completely caught off guard when I realized how much autonomy I actually had.

For example, one of the early projects had some open questions about about how the customer success (CS) team would react to some proposed changes. In an attempt to flex my UX research experience, I threw together some wireframes on Axure and set up a series of user interviews with representatives from CS. I explained my reasoning to my supervisor: “It’s better we answer these questions before we dive headfirst into development.” He was on board - only asking that I present my findings to him. These user interviews helped to capture the needs and anxieties of not only our CS team, but, indirectly, of our customer-base. On top of that, it allowed me to practice setting-up, managing, and facilitating user interviews in a real-world setting - this helped to develop better methods of organization, project management, and perhaps more importantly, communication.

Another project I was assigned involved multiple stakeholders from their respective departments within PatientPop. For the first time, I was setting up meetings with, and attempting to delegate work to, people who were far more experienced than me. While the impostor syndrome was definitely real, it helped to have my supervisor to defer to whenever skepticism arose.

To further encourage autonomous decision making for both teams and individuals, the Technology team has moved towards becoming a flat-ish department, wherein hierarchical structures are much more flexible. The idea is based off the concept of Holacracy, wherein decision making is distributed rather than vested in a top-down hierarchy. While I cannot speak for everybody on the team, I find that this structure has been vastly beneficial for me: I have been able to get involved in more projects, have a say in impactful decisions, and work with more people on a greater variety of problems than I would have in a more traditional hierarchy.

From https://www.holacracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/HIW-Tensions-Drive-Everything-web.png

My supervisor, the Tech team, and the company as a whole, not only accommodate autonomy, but encourage it. This autonomy has allowed for me to wear many different hats, converse with various individuals, and understand the company more holistically than I would have otherwise.

Competency: the need for mastery and confidence

Competence is a sense of expertise in a domain, which is generally fueled by timely, positive feedback from others.

I first experienced this as an intern, when my supervisor met with me each week so that we were aligned in what we’ve both been up to and what we plan to do in the next week. During these sessions, my supervisor was deliberate in both giving praise and providing constructive feedback in my planning. Again, this was not through authoritative directives, but rather through well-intentioned counsel.

A specific example that comes to mind was when my supervisor had me learn SQL in order to help test a hypothesis. I signed up for an online class while also playing around with our data warehouse. He presented me with a particularly tricky question which had an answer somewhere deep in the data warehouse’s many tables. Trying to build out the query was proving difficult and I brought this up to my supervisor. I had expected (and, at that point, hoped) that he would just offer to figure it out himself. Instead, he asked me some probing questions about the data I was trying to find which almost immediately shed a light on the proper query. That afternoon, I finally got the necessary dataset and ran over to tell my supervisor. He smiled, said ‘good job!’ and gave me a high five. Needless to say, I left work that day feeling really good about myself.

As I started to better understand different processes within the company, I found that a lot of manager-individual contributor relationships were structured similarly. Because things were moving so quickly, people were making major decisions at a faster pace than they otherwise would, which inherently provides more room for risk. Thus it was necessary to solicit quick feedback on proposals, changes, and ideas so that we could ‘move fast and break things’ while also trying to contain any potential risk.

Recently, the executives and the People team (i.e. human resources) have introduced an initiative to fulfill PatientPoppers’ needs of career development. Luke Kervin, the cofounder and co-CEO of PatientPop, in complete support of this initiative, said,

Our ideal learning environment is one in which working for PatientPop for 2 years is a better learning experience than an MBA.

As a means of providing ongoing support towards this initiative, the People team has created a career web to show possible career paths within the company and has started having regular office hours to help guide employees through their career development.

Though my knowledge of MBA programs is minimal, I can confidently say that my one year at PatientPop has provided me with a learning experience like no other.

Relatedness: the need to belong

After years of working in more academic settings, either in research or administrative positions, I had come to the conclusion that work life and personal life should be separated. This “hard rule” may have been fueled by many things, but at the end of the day, I believe it has to do with a lack of relatedness with one’s colleagues.

I came into PatientPop with this mentality. For the first couple months, I found it difficult to make close friends. I thought that this was natural; after all, this was work.

Sometime in the fall, I started connecting more and more with some coworkers. I started preferring to go out to lunch with coworkers rather than merely eating at my desk.

Throughout the time I’ve worked there, there have been several company-wide events meant to encourage socializing, knowledge exchange, and community.

PatientPop has frequent all-hands meetings (major ones every quarter and smaller ones each month) wherein the executive team transparently outlines the state of the company, giving reference to our history and our future. These all-hands bring the company together to celebrate collective and individual accomplishments. By the end, prizes are given out, people are enjoying happy hour and one another’s company, and spoonfuls of hot sauce are downed.

The People Team has been especially instrumental in bringing the company together: with events such as a Red Nose Day bake sale, Beach Day, Bowling Night, and (recently started) coffee club, wherein employees are randomly grouped with the goal of scaffolding more interdepartmental connections that may lead to deeper professional or personal connections (say, to tackle a major project together) or personally (say, to become great pals).

Finally, an ongoing initiative within the company, PatientPop Talks, which started as a series of technical lunch-and-learns, organically exploded into a platform for sharing knowledge, ideas, and updates. Presenters have come from a variety of departments and positions, with QA engineers presenting the benefits of Behavioral Driven Design, accounting associates giving a crash course on personal finance, and data scientists deconstructing what data science is and how it can be utilized.

By garnering a sense of relatedness between individual employees and large departments, PatientPop makes coming to work not a burden, but rather something to look forward to.

At the same time, PatientPop is nowhere near perfect: hyper-growth and experimentation inevitably leads to tumultuous moments. But as with a dynamic organism, as with a dynamic company, it is important to be aware of these imperfections and actively work to identity, address, and mitigate them. With the concerted effort of many, many people, PatientPop is exactly that - an organism that achieves its highs and endures its lows with a constant growth mindset.

As a Product Manager at PatientPop, I am working with a team of smart creatives to make it easier for medical practices to serve their patients. During the past 14 months, I have been able to autonomously make decisions and hone valuable skills, while,, going from calling the people around me ‘my coworkers’ to calling them ‘my friends’.

So far, I’ve been having an amazing time -- standby for more.

*Disclaimer: While I have worked with all departments in the organization (ranging from Customer Success to Sales), my experience is primarily shaped through the lens of the Technology department; which consists of engineering, product, and design.

Also, I refer to a supervisor multiple times throughout this article. I want to be clear that he was more of a mentor than simply a mere supervisor. The examples I provide are times that my initial mentor set me up to be successful as an intern. After being promoted to a full time product manager, I was fortunate enough to gain another mentor whose ongoing counsel and support consistently sets me up for success in this role. All described examples of great mentorship can be found in both of these mentors.