Launching a HealthTech MVP & Meeting Regulatory Compliance for Alira Health as Interim Product Managers

The Client: Alira Health

Alira Health is an international patient-centric and technology-enabled advisory firm whose mission is to humanize healthcare. Through real-world evidence, they work with healthcare and life sciences organizations looking for support across their entire solutions lifecycle, from development to medical care.

In November 2021, Alira Health acquired Patchai, a digital health technology company headquartered in Italy. Patchai offers intelligent digital health solutions that engage and empower patients in clinical research and care pathways, enabling better self-management of their health conditions, and improving adherence to study protocols and care plans, while facilitating care delivery for clinicians with robust, real-time data.

Patchai ****presents itself as the first cognitive platform offering an empathic virtual assistant for collecting and predictive analysis of patient-reported data in clinical trials, opening the doors to a new frontier in patient engagement through the adoption of conversational ePRO.

The Mission: Building MVP for Decentralised Clinical Trials

Our mission lasted for 5 months, from April 2022 until August 2022.

We joined the former Patchai team in Alira Health as an Interim Product Manager to help with the delivery of an MVP scheduled to go live in September 2022. The company had previously built solutions for clinical trials and patient support programs for Pharma companies like Novartis and Roche. Our mandate was to support the development team and stakeholders in launching a flexible, scalable, and modular digital solution for clinical trials.

After we joined, our mission unfolded with a couple of additional complexities:

• The Head of Product left the company in the second week of our onboarding, and the Co-Founder & COO took over as our main point of contact.
• The team had been lacking an additional Product Manager and a Designer for a couple of months and was overwhelmed by the workload.
• The product processes were not completely set and optimized for team productivity.
• The engineering team was not previously involved in technical scoping the MVP, and it wasn't clear whether the solution could be delivered within the deadline.

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How We Helped

Rescoped, descoped, and reprioritized the MVP’s features to meet the goals and an aggressive launch deadline.

The team was halfway through the MVP development. Still, the planned features in the MVP roadmap didn't have a clear prioritization, the technical dependencies were blurry, and the scope of the initiatives was vague.

Moreover, the sales team didn't have a detailed understanding of the product they were selling. To provide clarity about the final solution scope and introduce more visibility into the development process, we:

• Led the initiative to map all the features in the original MVP scope.
• Introduced prioritization, rescoped, and descoped some of the initiatives that were not crucial for the launch.
• Facilitated several meetings with the engineering team to estimate prioritized features.
• Created a detailed roadmap taking into account the redefined scope and dependences.
• Documented all the initiatives in an easy-to-read features list to support the sales team.
• Supported the team in creating new documentation of the features in a structured way.
• Unified nomenclature and created an extensive glossary of terms used in the product and between teams to avoid confusion in communication.

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Migrated the Product Roadmap to Jira for visibility

When we joined, the product team was managing their roadmap and sprint planning in PPT presentations and Excel Sheets that were hard to keep updated and were limiting them in providing more comprehensive information in one place.

For compliance, we were restricted to using only pre-approved/existing vendors (e.g., Atlassian and Microsoft products). We have introduced a new roadmapping tool managed as a Jira project that provided a more visual roadmap overview, linked all the related information together, and made updates and planning easy.

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Introduced Continuous Product Discovery

After we had helped to establish clarity of the MVP scope, we shifted our focus to processes that were about to take place immediately after the MVP launch.

We reviewed current processes, and the current continuous discovery practices to develop a structured proposition allowing a focused approach to discovery and prioritization in a regulated healthtech environment. We’ve also have embedded the new processes in the Jira roadmapping tool that we introduced earlier so the team can manage discovery and delivery of initiatives in one place.

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Delivered Outcomes

💡 Helped to set new Product Management processes to optimize productivity and working on the right things.

💡 Led rescoping and prioritization of MVP features to ensure timely delivery of a successful healthtech product.

💡 Moved roadmapping and prioritization from Excel & Power Point to Jira as the single source of truth for the development team and stakeholders.

💡 Created user app and web app user flows to uncover design edge cases and streamline delivery with engineering.

💡 Introduced Continuous Product Discovery.