Ops I did it again by Out of Pocket

Strap in, young product manager or engineer (or vibe coder!). You have been tasked with the provider directory project. You have scoped it with your engineers, and you think you can get this done in a quarter. And so dutifully you make it your OKR. I'm here to tell you that this is going to be your next year. Certainly not your next quarter. And you should probably listen to this episode so that you know all the things that we have learned the hard way and can sidestep it. Provider directory is a bunch of data and feature and product raccoons all in a trench coat. What makes building one so hard is that you get trapped trying to build each raccoon. The way out is to be clear-eyed about all the different components that get lumped under the provider directory umbrella, be specific and choosy about which ones you actually need to serve your members, and be ruthless about not building any of the others.

Emme started as (and still is!) a smart pill case. Beautiful, award-winning, Apple-level-designed, beloved. It was so well-designed that nobody needed to buy a second one and they’ve only had 5 returns in 3 years The CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) was $400 and the case retailed for $100. I think you can see where I’m going with this Erynn Peterson, CEO of Emme, walks through what it took to flip those economics and what every hardware founder learns too late: your margin isn't 80%. It's 5%, if you're lucky, and that's before you've spent a dollar on marketing. Also you should know that it’s really expensive and fraught to market in women’s health, much less women’s reproductive health The conversation covers the full stack of hardware reality: minimum order quantities before any supplier will take your call, ad channels that shadow ban women's reproductive health products, the shift from SEO to GEO that reshuffled the deck just as Emme had figured out content strategy, and the firmware versioning nightmare that AI has (only recently) made tractable.

Your executive just asked your team to build a symptom tracker. It seems straightforward. Ask patients how they feel, collect the data, show a graph. Then in six months, pull the numbers: patients came in at a 9/10 on your Symptom Tracker, and after six months of weekly use, they're at a 3. Company gets a CPT code. You get promoted to Senior Product Manager. Everybody goes home happy. Paul Wicks has spent 25 years watching that plan run into walls. In this episode, neuropsychologist and digital health consultant Paul Wicks walks Alex through everything product teams don't know when they start building Patient Reported Outcomes into their apps – from why researchers should physically walk through hospitals as patients before locking trial protocols, to why your scale might use a crab instead of a number

On this episode of Ops I Did it Again, Rahul Agarwal (COO of Medplum) joins Danielle to share his digital health operations playbook. The “hero’s journey” playbook breaks down pro tips and gotchas throughout every stage of scale: from pre-seed all the way to scaling to 50 states.

Nate Brown joins the Thinksquad, aka Danielle and Nikhil, to share lessons learned from scaling a 90 person care team in 3 years at Thyme Care. We break down their organizational design, recruiting best practices (which includes lots of role play) and how to generally think through building alignment at different levels and stages of a start-ups evolution.

Sandy Varatharajah joins the solo thinksquad, aka just Danielle, to share their 12 gifts of Ops Christmas. Together, they share 12 tactical gifts they’ve learned through growing and scaling operations teams at digital health start-ups. The gifts range from practical tips to manage your day to day, how to work better cross-functionally and hacks for leveling up your own operations skills.

Denali and Mina join the solo thinksquad, aka just Danielle to break down how they built a massive pharmacy management software from the ground up at HouseRx in just a year.

Introducing Ops I did it again, a limited series podcast by Out-of-Pocket, hosted by Danielle Poreh and Nikhil Krishnan. We interview builders in healthcare operators breaking the mold (aka solving problems all ops people are facing). First episode dropping soon!