Delivering Smiles — Digital Health Product Owner’s Pain
Working in the digital health as a product owners (PO) presents unique challenges, that POs must navigate to succeed. From understanding complex regulatory requirements to balancing stakeholder demands, product owners must be adaptable and resilient to drive success in this dynamic field.
In this blog post, I am sharing my top 10 challenges and my strategies for overcoming them.
Here is an overview:
Pain 1: Balancing Competing Priorities
Juggling the needs and preferences of various stakeholders while managing limited resources.
My dose of painkiller:
Use healthcare domain knowledge
Prioritize tasks based on value and impact
Regularly communicate with stakeholders to manage expectations
Use data-driven decision-making to support priorities
Pain 2: Changing Requirements
Adapting to evolving requirements based on user feedback, market trends, and business goals.
My dose of painkiller:
Use healthcare domain knowledge
Embrace Agile methodologies to complete and handle changing requirements
Maintain a flexible product roadmap
Pain 3: Limited Resources
Dealing with constraints in terms of time, budget, and development capacity.
My dose of painkiller:
Regularly assess resource allocation and capacity planning.
Prioritize, reprioritze and deprioritize
Manage scope and expectations proactively.
Pain 4: Urgent vs. Important
Distinguishing between tasks that are urgent and those that are strategically important.
My dose of painkiller:
Use healthcare domain knowledge
Set clear product goals and align tasks with strategic objectives.
Delegate and automate where possible
Pain 5: Scope Creep
Managing new feature requests or changes that can lead to expanding project scope.
My dose of painkiller:
Establish a well-defined change request process.
Review and prioritize scope changes rigorously.
Pain 6: Managing Stakeholder Expectations
Aligning and managing different stakeholder expectations about the product’s features.
My dose of painkiller:
Use healthcare domain knowledge
Maintain open and transparent communication channels
Set clear expectations from the outset
Pain 7: Decision-Making Trade-offs
Making decisions that involve trade-offs between features, quality, time, and cost.
My dose of painkiller:
Use healthcare domain knowledge
Establish decision-making frameworks based on predefined criteria
Involve key stakeholders in decisions
Pain 8: Communication Challenges
Effectively conveying priorities, decisions, and trade-offs to different stakeholders.
My dose of painkiller:
Use clinically understandable terminologies for HCPs and avoid technical jargons
Use visual aids like roadmaps and diagrams to enhance communication
Regularly update stakeholders
Pain 9: Technical Debt and Maintenance Challenges
Balancing new feature development with addressing technical debt and ongoing maintenance.
My dose of painkiller:
Single person responsibility post implementation
Allocate specific time for technical debt reduction in development sprints
Plan for regular maintenance
Pain 10: Unclear or Shifting Product Strategy
Coping with an unclear or frequently changing product strategy and direction.
My dose of painkiller:
Continuously communicate, update and re-update and align with executive leadership
Regularly review and adjust product strategy in discussion with the team, C-level (and sometimes with key users)
Take away:
Product ownership in the healthcare software development domain is a complex and multifaceted role that requires a deep understanding of both technical and clinical aspects of healthcare. Product owners face numerous challenges that can impact their ability to deliver successful products.
Medical informatics specialists as product owners can play a critical role in bridging the gap between technology and clinical practice, helping to design and implement solutions that meet the needs of both patients and providers.