Band-aids, Duct Tape, or Concrete?
Health Problem:
Using behavioral science in day-to-day work can be the difference between positive and negative health outcomes. With no concrete, objective, or scalable data sources for these insights, it’s nearly impossible to be confident in decisions to use this powerful tool.
Until now.
Empathy Engine
Definition: An artificial intelligence technology that delivers relevant information and answers to questions in real time, by practicing active listening at scale, analyzing data, routing conversations to a human when appropriate, and cultivating trusting relationships to improve ongoing communication.
Situation: Behavioral science can have a huge impact on peoples’ lives. But with hundreds of different approaches, its difficult to implement in large organizations.
Task: After building up a behavioral science practice with a complete set of processes and services, our major barrier was data. Through extensive research and testing, we landed on natural language processing (NLP) as a solution for getting psychological data from readily available data sources like social media. The challenge was that no one at the organization had any background in NLP. In addition, building a tool like this requires time and money. So a clear business case would need to be built.
Action: We started with an exchange of services agreement that I was able to negotiate between our team and an NLP vendor we worked with regularly to build our foundations. Once work had begun, I constructed a business case and presented it to our executive leadership team and CEO, complete with ROI, payback, and commercialization models.
I was able to secure a budget of over $500,000, which included salaries for those working on the project, OOPs for working with our external vendors, and conducting studies for our learning sets.
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Idea Generation
What unmet need(s) are we solving for in the market place?
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Product Defintion
How should we refine the scope of the product based on market unmet needs?
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Prototyping
What would a visual representation of this product look like and how would it work?
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Initial Design
How do users flow through the platform?
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Validation and Testing
What are the metrics to measure successful processes, designs, and outputs?
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Commercializing
What are your SI’s for your go-to-market strategy? Who is your target audience? How will you reach them? What are your launch/post-launch KPI’s?
Band-aid
Deciding on an option that is quick and easy to implement, but will need to be replaced quickly and frequently.
Decision Making Process
Band-aid, Duct Tape, or Cement?
Duct Tape
Deciding on an option that will firmly hold things in place for a while, take a moderate about of effort to implement, but is easily replaced when needed.
Cement
Deciding on an option that is difficult to implement, but once completed it is extremely lasting. It is also difficult to undo this option.
The Results:
1. Amplified the voices of over 1 million patients in the development of pharmaceutical support services.
2. Went from 0-MVP within 6 months.
3. Generating over $6mil dollars in revenue in the first 2 years of the product’s life cycle while continuing to make improvements.