fbpx skip to Main Content

Customer Discovery for a Fortune 500 Medical Device Company

Fahren’s global medical device client provides remote patient monitoring programs that help improve patient health while delivering economic benefits to payers and providers within the healthcare system. While the client is an industry leader in remote patient monitoring, the market is being disrupted by nimble competitors looking to disrupt the industry. These new competitors are built on modern technology and are developing new business models that reduce costs for the payers and providers.

Geometric pattern

The Opportunity

Our client realized that in order to compete in this new environment, they would need to evolve, specifically in becoming hyper-focused on their customers. In this case, the end-users of their platforms – the patients themselves. 

Fahren was hired by the Sr. Director of Product Marketing to help guide her organization through a new way of working and thinking that would allow them to build empathy with their patient users and to understand how to better deliver value to them, in the form of new capabilities, features, and functionality that would differentiate our client in a rapidly changing market.

Our Approach

Our approach to helping our client become more customer-centric was to provide the organization with an interim digital product leader who was able to help them drive new ways of working and thinking through the team. Our approach was designed to do two things: first, get more and better insights into the needs of users, and second, make sure the product roadmap reflects our insights into what matters most to those users.

The interim leader, Joe Ruekert, was able to step in and immediately guide the core team through a series of exercises and workshops over ten weeks that developed new insights about patients and care coordinators who use remote patient monitoring tools.

The Work

We delivered a ten-week engagement with the client’s product marketing team to help them become more customer-centric. During the engagement, we led a series of facilitated virtual workshops and activities that focused on developing deep understanding and empathy for their end-users, including:

  • Mission & vision statements for teams to provide a north star in decision making
  • Segmentation of patients into personas that went far deeper than demographics into 
  • Developing journey maps of current and future states and ideation on value streams that the client can develop to address patient challenges
  • Patient and Care Coordinator research interviews focused on learning the challenges and pain points within the current remote patient monitoring experience
  • Jobs to be Done analysis focused on why patients and care coordinators ‘hire’ a remote patient monitoring platform and how they chose between them
  • Product hypothesis ideation to generate ideas for new capabilities and to test internal assumptions
  • A sequenced roadmap that defined new capabilities across multiple time horizons

The outcome was a prioritized backlog of enhancements and new capabilities that would allow our to leapfrog their competition and remain the leader in the remote patient monitoring space.

In addition to building deep empathy for their patients and care coordinators, the engagement also helped our client leverage agile methodologies to help them think and work in new ways. The engagement was structured in weekly sprints with kick-offs, standups, and retrospectives that were designed to help the team modern ways of developing products customers love.

The Results

The results from the engagement was a fundamentally shifted understanding and refocus on their end-users, patients, and care coordinators. The team had a renewed focus on the patient experience as a differentiator and a sense of urgency about delivering new value to its customers.

To achieve this patient engagement, they understood that their user experience needed to be simplified and fit into the lives of the patients they serve. Their technology must be scalable, reliable, and usable if they want to create a competitive advantage over their competition.

Based on these needs, we were able to achieve the following results during the engagement:  

  • Alignment of the teams and executive leadership on the vision and mission of the teams
  • Research-led patient and care coordinator empathy developed by the marketing team using new methodologies, including Jobs To Be Done and product management models
  • A sequenced roadmap aligned to now, next, and future priorities
  • Teaching the team about modern product development and ways of working. It wasn’t just about the output, it was about training them to think and work differently to achieve greater results

Fahren was able to help our client become more deeply connected to its core customers – the patients and care coordinators who use their platforms, by guiding them through a structured engagement that focused on new learnings and new ways of thinking and working. Coming out of the engagement, the client was better equipped to handle changing customer needs and market conditions with new tools to help them move faster and deliver better value to the market.

Let’s discuss the next step in your digital journey

How can
we help
you?

Contact us

Interested
in leading
change?

Join us

Sign up for
Business
Drivers

Sign up
Back To Top