 Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining this webinar where we're going to share our top 10 product lessons in health tech and let you learn some lessons the easier way, aka through us learning them over the last year. I'm Philo Hagen, head of product at Holland and Barrett, focused on building some new exciting digital health and wellbeing experiences. I've been in product management since 2014 in various guises, some of them more agile than others, working in retail, financial services, travel and fashion, all sorts of things from colleague tools, platforms, apps, microservices and websites. As you see today, you're going to get a special three for one, as I'm joined by two talented product leaders from Holland and Barrett, Catherine and Sonja, and I'll let them introduce themselves to you. Catherine. Hi, so I am director of customer strategy and product at Holland and Barrett. My background is actually in building new businesses, particularly from a strategy side, and I worked in a large consulting firm before joining Holland and Barrett and finding my passion and home in product. I've worked across many different sort of products and businesses, everything from financial services, telco, but a large majority in healthcare, both in health systems and also in sort of like consumer health tech. Yeah, and I'll hand over to Sonja. Hi, I'm Sonja, I'm the product lead at Holland and Barrett. My background is quite similar to Phil, so I've been doing product for the last 10 years, predominantly B2C and across retail, home improvement, telco. So yeah. Thank you. So as you can see, we've got lots of experience in product, but both Sonja and myself are quite new to health tech. Catherine has had a grounded in that, but we've all been unanimous, the three of us in learning quite a lot over the last year. So we're going to just share a little bit of context and then we'll get into the lessons. So for some of you, you'll probably be wondering, who are Holland and Barrett? So a little bit about us is that we're Europe's largest health and wellbeing retailer. We're offering vitamins and supplements, natural beauty, active nutrition and free from foods with stores across the UK, Benelux and Ireland. And we've got ever ever growing digital channels. We've got significant heritage having opened the doors of our first shop in Bishop Stortford in 1870. And in the last about 18 months at Holland and Barrett, we've been trying some truly innovative and exciting things in the world of health tech as part of a new strategy where we want to be known as a health and wellness ally and not just a retailer. Through this, we've explored a lot of things. So we've built a holistic health app called HMB and me and we've journeys helping customers with their sleep with their gut health with menopause. We've launched a standalone menopause app and website called Thrive and a standalone gut health app called Inner, which Sun is the product lead for. We've got much, much more and we've got more exciting ones on the way, but we don't want to share too much. But hopefully that gives you a flavor of who we are today and takes us on to our first lesson with Catherine. For our moral, the first lesson is science is a product team amigo. So when we think about the typical sort of product team, we think about this as the three amigos. So then the business amigos, the tech amigo and the design amigo and the PM's role in this product squad is to act as sort of the conductor or the orchestra, orchestrator of these, of these three amigos and in fact, these three lenses. So as a product manager, you know, you have to understand what is the business objectives? What is the, what does value and success look like for the business? From a design perspective, you're always asking the question, what does the customer need? What do they want? And from a technology perspective, you're always asking the question, how do I implement this? What's the technical feasibility? And so it's always about market needs, technical feasibility and customer experience. But in the world of health tech, there's actually a fourth amigo who's really, really critical to have within your squad. So this brings the third lens of what is the science based solution? And that will shape my proposition. So the proposition isn't only shaped by the business needs, the cut what the customer needs, all the technical feasibility, it's also shaped by what is the solution from a science perspective that will drive my customer and business outcomes. So an example of that, maybe I'll use your examples on your but for a gut health app, how if if our business goal is to improve the quality of life of people experiencing a gut health issue, and our customers are really interested in products, I'm in programs and tools to impact their daily life. Science will shape okay, therefore, this is the type of intervention we should offer a customer. And the important thing here is that the science lens also adds that element of behavioral science. So how do I drive compliance? What are the behavioral interventions I need to make? Within my app or within my experience, that will actually result in compliance to the intervention or the solution. And also creates that lasting sort of IP or that intellectual property for your app that makes it really defensible in the market. And Sony will take a bit like talk a bit later about Reagan compliance, but that also becomes an important aspect of your of your product and your squad's thinking. Lesson two, so your product not only does your product squad become more complex, but your business models become very complex and health check as well. And there's essentially three different types of business models that you can think of. So the first is what we call B2C, so business to consumer. So here your customer and this is what's different across the three different business models is that your customer, the person who's paying or using your product is different. And they have different needs. So this is really thinking about that customer aspect of the product, the product squad and the customer lens of the product manager. So in a B2C proposition, so where you're selling an app or you have an app that helps individuals, the real question that a lot of individuals have is how can I improve my health and wellness? So this is where you have apps like my fitness pal, Noom, Headspace. There's a lot in it. There is a lot in the space. Headspace also has a B2B offering, but it did start off as B2C. But it's really about that what that individual needs and wants and what the science solution is to improve that individual's goals. The second business model is what we call B2B. So this is where your your customer is actually a business. And there's lots of different types of businesses you can think about and the needs and sort of what you need to solve for the problems you're trying to solve a different for each of the different types of businesses. So for an employer, for example, once they might be interested in how can I reduce absenteeism and boost boost my the productivity of my workforce, how can I feel like how can I market that I'm supporting women, for example, in the menopause, which is something that peppy does. So you really need to shape your product, your customer lens, based on what the employer will pay for and what they're looking for in their workforce. It's not necessarily about the individual employee. You need to shape your proposition around, you know, the employer benefit. For an insurer, the what they need is slightly different again. So an insurer charges a premium based on the risk that they see associated with an individual. So as a health type product, you need to make sure that your marketing and your proposition is all about reducing the risk of a population for that insurer. Headspace is an example here where they sell to employers. So improving the mental health and therefore maybe absenteeism of an employee base and peppy is the menopause solution and broader women's health solution. That's also a corporate product. The last business model is what we call B2G or in the UK at least B2 government or B2E, which is B2 enterprise like a health system. So your your customer here is what we call in the UK the provider of health care. And again, this then needs a very different. So if you're if you're creating a proposition for a health system for the NHS in the UK or for a medical practice somewhere else, their primary question is how do I reduce my costs? So how can I better triage issues? So this is something that Babylon does really well. They sort of act as that initial triage of do I need to see a doctor? Do I need to go to hospital hospital hospitals are very expensive places for health systems. So they're really incentivized to keep people out of hospitals secondary care. So that's why Babylon something like Babylon is really successful. 30 is an organization that does remote monitoring of elderly patients. And again, that's to avoid the high cost of elderly patients ending up in emergency care. So that's how they're there and payers essentially health systems for that reason, because they're able to show the reduction in in emergency emissions. All right, lesson three. There is a healthy tension in health tech between health outcomes, customer and business outcomes. So again, this comes back to sort of like that for amigo, amigo lens in health tech. And it's a really, really tricky thing to balance. So for example, an app that, you know, is trying to improve the quality of life of users with gut health issues might do a lot of things like programs, diagnostics, etc. to improve symptoms or to reduce the severity of symptoms. But those things might not necessarily be things that drive revenue or drive profit in the short term. And they might be your business goals. So there's this natural tension that kind of evolves between driving health outcomes and driving business outcomes. And there's also a natural tension between sort of customer outcomes, what customers think they want. A lot of customers will often say, you know, I want immediate relief. But actually, from a science perspective, from a health outcome perspective, it's about, it's about long, long term sustainable behavioral change. So again, there's always this tension between sort of like the outcomes you're trying to achieve in in your product. And I think my learning or our learning here over the last year or so is what's really important is to create some kind of balanced scorecard that seeks to sort of outline the OKR so objectives and key results across each of these areas with clear measurable KPIs. So for example, my business outcome might be, I want to, you know, increase my business growth over the next year. My OKR is I want to increase revenue by 20%. Customer outcome might be, might be I want to sort of improve NPS by 20 points. And then your health outcome is I want to prove I want measurable improvement of the quality of life of my my customers. So it's really important that you set the OKRs otherwise you'll sort of be drawn into these different tension areas. And it'll be really, really hard to figure out what to prioritize within your product. And the last lesson I think is around health and wellness is really, really hard thing to define. And it's also it can be quite sort of vague and broad and specific as you as you want it to be. And we have spent a lot of time thinking about sort of what are the pillars of wellness, particularly for Helena Barrett, our focus is more on the wellness side. And we've defined it in eight pillars. So overall health, food, diet is about nutrition, exercise, mental health, financial work life, emotional wellness, social wellness, sleep and relaxation. So these all of these things contribute to your overall wellness. There are some of pillars that are more important than others for your wellness. So we know that overall health things like, own health, physical health, heart health immunity are really, really important to wellness, as well as food and diet and exercise, mental health. And even within this is sort of like added complexity, but you can really break it down. So within each of each of these eight wellness pillars, there are 26 needs that we've identified customer needs. And many of these are interrelated. But this is how we think about sort of the wellness landscape and how we think about sort of which are the highest areas of interrelatedness between between each other so that if we focus on one will be really improving overall wellness for for a customer. And also ones that are that we use this as a framework to figure out where's the most underserved areas and areas that we should focus on building our propositions for. Thank you, Catherine. So I'm going to take over some of the lessons now. So I'm onto a really shocking lesson for us. So Catherine's just talked about the whole world of complexity in terms of customer needs, business models, and defining health and wellness. But at the same time, there's a really shocking lesson, which is generally the simplest, simplest solution for all people is to improve their sleep, their diet and their exercise. And so I remember having a very early talk with Suva, who's our chief medical officer at Holland and Barrett. And she told me this fact that the vast majority of people would live longer and healthier and have happier lives. They walked for 20 minutes a day, drank enough water throughout the day and got enough sleep each night. And so as we looked at all these different journeys, and these different needs, whether it was sleep, gut health, menopause, male fertility, female health, we kept seeing this finding emerge as a key cornerstone solution. And so the problem is, if you imagine going to a doctor in the UK for your gut health, in the UK, getting a doctor's appointment can be really difficult. And NHS survey recently found that one quarter of people avoided making the appointment because it was too difficult. So you put in all that effort to make that appointment, you've traveled to your appointment, you've probably rearranged work or rearranged school pickups and things so that you can go. You go through with your doctor all your issues, and then your doctor says, okay, sleep more, drink more water and walk a bit more. Your reaction is probably one of disappointment. It's intuitively something that we already knew we didn't need to make all that travel to the doctor. And yet we struggled to prioritize this within our lives. And so these behavioral solutions are really important, and they're projected to be really useful for the majority of people. Lifestyle actually accounts for about 80% of health care issues versus 20% being clinical. But it's really underwhelming for a patient who's looking for quick relief, looking for that medicinal solution and that medicinal silver bullet. And if I'm looking for that, if I just take this thing once a day, I'll be better kind of solution. And this is something that we've encountered building health tech products for customers. Similar to the journey with the doctor, we know that our customers have gone to lengths to download our app, not quite the same length of visiting a GP, but they've still committed some time. And generally we find the focused nature of an app is highly useful. So that was a big learning from our holistic health app. Actually, if a customer's got a problem with a gut, they're going to search for a gut app. If they've got a problem with mental health, they'll search for a mental health app. We've seen that, like with a doctor, if we give a really simple solution, it's too bland and generic, it feels like it lacks insight, it's not specific enough to the ailment that they want. It feels like we're cheating and we're asking the customer to do the work rather than actually giving them a proper solution. But likewise, at the same time, these products need USPs, we can't just have lots of sleep more, drink more water, walk more apps for every single ailment. And so we've got this really simple solution that we're trying to layer on something more complex to. And not all customers will need an app to do that and to make that behavioural change. And I think this is a real problem within the health tech market as a whole, is that simplest solution is really useful to a customer. And also, there's a huge bloat within this market. There are over 350,000 apps on the app store. And that's projected to grow at about a 10% Kaggle rate over the next year. It's only going to get more and more crowded, there's only going to be more and more of these solutions and options. And if you're being customer focused, you want to keep the simplicity of the solution. But you also need this USP and you don't want to disappoint them like you have with those NHS visits. A very, a very big lesson to learn. Which brings us nicely on to lesson six, which is finding an MVP is really hard. And I know that we know this is true of every product in every industry. But I definitely think it's more complex within health tech. So let me explain. A lot of us are really familiar with this illustration of how to build towards an end product via iterations. It makes sense. You find the smallest slice that allows the customer to complete their job. Because if you build it in four steps of the car, then the customer can't transport, they can't move. So you try and find ways for them to move, ways for them to get from A to B, whilst getting better each time. And the reason that I think this is a bit harder in health tech is the motivations of the people working in health tech. So if you're feeling a bit sassy, you might call it delusions of grandeur or having a hero complex. But a lot of us work in this space because we want to help people. We want to help people and solve their health issues. And so there's a big altruistic vision within this space of why people work here. And but what it means is it's really hard for us to let go of the fact that a fake door or wizard of Oz experiment isn't actually going to help someone with their health and wellness. We might be just testing for demand to see do they want help with their health and wellness. And so that can feel quite difficult at times. And one of the best type ways that we found to solve for this problem is to accept that your MVP isn't going to be efficacious. It's not going to be scientific and a proven solution. And actually to start with, you're looking at are you helping customers feel better? They feeling more empowered? Are you giving them a bit of hope? Or are you capturing demand that there's enough people struggling that you can then use that as a business case to build that hope? So your end goal might be like it was with us, like an app that helps people sleep better. But you know, building something that scientifically helps people sleep better is going to take a long time. So in the meantime, focus on what you can do, which is give customers a greater awareness and understanding of sleep, work on proxy metrics that such as do they now know more about sleep? Are they feeling more confident about how to manage their sleep? So do cultivate and create this vision. It's why you and your team are getting out of bed each day to work on this health tech and work in such a tricky subject. Keep the vision in mind, print it out, put it around your office, put it above your desk. Remind you and your team of it, but accept that right now you have to work on your MVP and you have to let go of some of those those complexes where you really want to save and help people today. And this leads us nicely on to lesson seven, which is supporting a customer can often Trump solving their needs. So a really useful product technique that I found and used a lot is something called a sales safari. It's invented by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman and it's a research technique where you go and observe customers and their pain points in the wild and their natural environment rather than what we often do, which is bring them into a focus group or bring them into a lab and ask them really leading questions. So we were using this technique in health tech Holland Barrett and this very busy image that you can see here is actually a screenshot from Mirro of a menopause safari that I did on Reddit. Reddit's a great place to do these things because users themselves will upvote key topics and themes on a subject into you quickly build a picture of what's important to that community. And I'm sure Reddit wouldn't consider themselves health tech, but the finding from the menopause safari was actually a lot of these health and wellness outcomes would be driven in a space such as the menopause community on Reddit. Lots of women simply wanted support. They wanted to be heard. They wanted to empathize with each other. They wanted to share their advice, their hints and tips, or they just wanted to share in Gallo's humor. So there's a lot of incredible memes and jokes in that community if you ever want to go check it out. But the learning here for us was that customers sometimes just wanted community. They wanted support. They didn't want a scientific solution. They wanted a place in a space to feel not not feel completely alone and to be feel like they were shouting into the void. We found this was particularly true of needs that were chronic like IBS or more reflective of a life stage like menopause. Sufferers had long learned that there wasn't the silver bullet that we talked about before. There wasn't that medicinal silver bullet of going to a GP. And so linking to previous lessons, the MVP didn't need to be efficacious to meet expectations. We found that standing up a menopause community for our Thrive offering that I talked about got brilliant feedback from users. And that included my mom. So I'm finally able to say that I've built a product that my mom uses and loves. But as always, health tech is far from simple, which I think Sonya is going to now talk about in lesson eight. Thanks Bill. So it's lesson eight and this is arguably one of the most trickiest lessons that they've all come to learn over the last few months. And that is that personalization and regulation are intrinsically linked in health tech and the impact on roadmaps can be very significant. So really being intentional intentional and prepared in when to engage with the process is really key. So MDR stands for medical device regulation and it's a regulation for software that's developed for a medical purpose. But MDR can provide a really great defensibility to any business, as Catherine mentioned earlier, and will make your product compete amongst the very best of your competitors. And that's largely down to the personalization that the regulation allows you to achieve with your product. So using the two scenarios here, I'd like to take you through examples of features that have and do not have MDR. So the first scenario is an example of a non MDR application where a customer can choose what symptoms they have and we as a business can provide a link to the most relevant content for them. The second example ask customers to tell us the symptoms they face some more personal information and we take the information and using an algorithm we diagnose what we believe is their most common symptom. And that's based on the proxy of others just like them in their demographic. So you might be wondering why is the second scenario MDR but the first isn't. And that largely comes down to the fact that we're providing our customers with new information in the form of a diagnosis in the second option. And this new transaction here is what makes the product MDR. To conclude, it's very complex. It can be time consuming and costly. So our advice here would be to really focus in what you need to do to drive the most value for your customers. And then once you've identified those features or experiences that may be contenders for MDR, test them rigorously before committing to the process. Lesson 9. So you might be wondering in a world where product and science collide. Are product techniques still viable? Do they still make sense? I'm pleased to say that they really are. And I'll take you through how we've merged both worlds. So jobs to be done is a framework that approaches developing new products based on understanding the specific goal or job a customer is trying to achieve with your application. The quote on this slide is by Theodore Leavitt and it sums up this framework very well. Customers have an end goal that they're trying to achieve and our job is to help them innovate and find the best way for them to complete that specific job or goal. When I started to go through our new propositions at Holland Barrett's I combined the jobs to be done framework with a science focus lens to help understand the health outcomes that people in the gut health space wanted to achieve while choosing our app. Here is a five step process that you could use yourselves, which combines jobs to be done within health care. So the first part of this process is really defining your jobs to be done target market. As Katharine's also alluded to before in health that you can be focused on developing products for consumers, employers or even government health care bodies, but really be intentional about who you're going after first and why because the market differs drastically and the focuses and aims will differ depending on what you choose. So the second will be to hypothesize what jobs your customer could be trying to complete. So gather your insight, data, competitor research and work out the biggest pain points for you and your customers. Health care within your health care topic and hypothesize the customer out what the customer outcomes would be. We focus all of our jobs to solve one really key aim and that was to improve overall quality of life for gut health users. The third part of this process is then testing out your hypotheses. So the best way to sense check your theories is to test them with real customers. But we went one step further and tested them with our internal science leads, our store colleagues, our gut health experts, as alongside all of our customers. Then asking them to rank what they find as the most important feature out of 10, as well as what is the specific job and whether it's cater for in the market is really key again out of 10. That then allows you to do step four, which is to discover your opportunity space. So once you've had all your feedback and you've ranked both what's important to a customer and how well it's served out of 10, you can map out a simple diagram that plots the importance of each job on an axis and how well they're served on the other. And I'll allow you to kind of stratify your data into three areas to identify jobs that are really served well, jobs that are served appropriately and jobs that are really underserved. And that's really where you should focus your main efforts in. The other needs to point five, which is once you've identified those really underserved areas and no hanging fruits, the next step is then to ideate on how you solve for those jobs and again, seek to go test them with your customers. Final lesson number 10, and this is probably one of our most shocking lessons alongside our regulatory one. And that is that sciences isn't is itself an MVP and it isn't as clear cut as you may be led to believe. When building health tech products, it's really important to understand the nuances and biases that exists within the health sphere that you're working within in order to really build inclusive experiences. Here are just two examples. So as you can see from the diagram on the left, although high breast screening results in higher treatment numbers, it also means that there is a higher chance of overdiagnosis and thus people who do not even have cancer often face unnecessary treatment, worry and anxiety. The second, the diagram on the right, people were shocking shows that how demographic status is and who you identify as can have a huge impact on how we receive and access health at care. This example shows that in the UK, health inequalities exist across different ethnic groups. Take, for instance, the key step, which is black women are four times more likely than white men women to die in pregnancy. The lesson here really is to make sure that you realise that it's important to understand the complete health landscape and all the plays that exist within that area, all the groups and all the demographics to ensure that you're building intentional products that are doing no harm and not further perpetuating health inequalities. Back to you, Phil. Thank you, Sonia. So it wouldn't be a product taught by me without at least one meme. So here is the meme. You've heard a lot of info from us today and a lot of things in terms of our top 10 lessons. We've put together this little takeaway in case you wanted a short summary of those 10 lessons. So please do use this, take this away and use it as you will. But the last thing just to do is to say thank you. We've learnt this, not just the three of us on our own, but with a lot of other people. So thank you to everyone on that journey. And please do get in touch with any of your thoughts, questions, your opinions on what we've said and shared. We'd really love to hear from you. Huge thank you to Catherine and Sonia for doing this with me. Thanks, Phil.