#3: Omada Health’s CMO, Andréa Mallard, on why design is too important to be left to designers

hey welcome to high resolution my name is Bobby goosa and I'm Jared rondu we're sitting down with 25 masters of the design industry and you if you've joined us over the last couple of weeks and if you're anything like Jared and me you

know that you've been learning a lot we've been learning a lot and we're going to continue to learn we're learning how the best companies in the world approach communicate and deploy design every single day in this episode

we're speaking with Andre Mard Andrea is the CMO at omata Health she'll focus on how to use design as a connective tissue how to enter new Industries with a beginner's mind and how to lead with manifestos and storytelling and we'll

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[Music] Andrea thanks for joining us my pleasure thanks for having me I almost got that right and Andrea you got it Andrea is

great okay cool all right yeah cool leave that in we're g to put that should be in there because people should know how to pronounce your name yes Andrea yeah all right Andrea thanks for joining

us you're very welcome thanks for having me awesome all right so starting off um what's one thing about design that's clear to you that you you don't think it's so clear to other

people I think it's that design is not a department right it's a discipline and I think a lot of people think well we need to infuse design in organization so let's hire two designers or let's hire 10 designers and they'll sit in the

design room on the design floor and do design um that is a total misunderstanding of what design is you know it's a muscle that needs to be infused throughout an organization it's

not a person that needs to be parachuted into an organization so for me I think it's about understanding design as the verb rather than design as the job title

okay what what so if you could just dive into the muscle for so that's the first time I'm hearing that word being used Des which is very interesting um do you

mean that it is a like does everyone exercise that muscle right um or do the designers exercise it but with other kind of people around them like what what does that mean exactly yeah I mean

I think I think certainly great designers with they do is they bring a design Consciousness or design thinking into an organization but I think the the secret is to make people aware that they

too can do great design and we we're all designers right so I always say like you are a designer whether you choose to do it or not is a separate issue but right now your your non decisions or your

non-design decisions are themselves designed decisions so let's all be aware that we are all even if you're the CFO you are making decisions that influence the customer experience or the user

experience therefore you are designing what this company does and how it shows up to the world um what I think design thinking allows you to do is have a new level of Consciousness about that and to say I'm actually going to learn how to

do this in a way that Dr risks go to market that involves our user in a smarter way that prototypes and iterates and tries and fails and gets feedback

and then goes to Market that's just for me smart business uh it happens to be called design but I think even the most backward looking CEO can get behind that as an idea that yeah I would like to

drisk going to Market actually design is a wonderful way to do that and that is what design a designer can bring to the table that's why I think it's so important that they don't show up as if they are magic fairies that do some

something beautiful in the corner and they make my work look beautiful that is that's not design at all in my opinion uh it might be corporate Identity or it might be graphic work but true design is

about bringing an organization rallying an organiz around this idea that we are going to follow certain principles as we develop new ideas and as we grow as a company and how does the designer do that like outside of the actual

day-to-day work that you do at your computer sitting down in your corner with your fellow designers around you you speak about this connective tissue about getting the rest of the company bought in how does a designer actually do that yeah this that is such a good

question so let's pretend you are the first designer at a very traditional let's say Fortune 500 company for whom design has passed them by or this idea and they're just operating the way they used to the advice I would give a

designer so for example when I started here and and this is a designled company so design was part of the DNA and that was part of the reason that that I was brought here but um if I talk to say a

commercial team or a sales team they they were used to non-design roles they were used to like oh well we we'll just go with this PowerPoint presentation it doesn't matter no one cares don't worry and I wasn't going to convince them that

it mattered by saying no it really does matter and let's have a conversation about that what I did was said cool can I can I can I get your deck though back can I have it I just want to reread it I would reread it the first time not only

did I redesign it or did we redesign the look and feel so that it felt on brand but we rote the story I was like you're telling a very dense terrible story that no one wants to listen to and I need the conversation that you have with a

potential customer of ours to feel different from day one from the first second and design is a beautiful way to do that so if they're used to 100 slide

PowerPoint decks with 10-point font and 20 bullets per slide and just dense dense paint yeah I'm going to come with a delightful story that feels like you're reading them uh reading them a great novel for

example or that you're just intriguing them all the way along so when we redid the deck and send it back to them they were bought in like that you know they didn't they couldn't intellectually get there with me but when they when you show it rather than tell it I think

people get on board really really fast so I always say to designers show me what you mean or show them what you mean don't tell them what you mean just to get that started yeah by the way those same people who were might have been a

bit skeptical about like why do we need to make this that way we're so proud to stand up and deliver that keynote you know and then they get behind it and now they don't want the the old the old version anymore they just want they want

so they're bought in all of a sudden yeah the the the actually the big thing about that though so you you take this deck and you kind of make that magic happen right um but earlier you said

design is this muscle that needs to be exercise across the organization I'm just curious so on the one hand you do the work to make design part of the conversation on the other hand you bring

you could bring design principles to the organization and and democratize it so everyone understands how you got how you arrived to a better story in that deck um what are you doing today to help

people um at aato or really anywhere your peers in the industry to think about how to exercise that muscle so that they can problem solve using design principles yeah that's a great question I mean I think a lot of it is about

there's so many good examples of beautifully designed experiences now for the last 10 years that has changed a lot right so if you think back to that early example about presentations the truth is everyone knows presentations are boring

and no one really wants to sit through them so a lot of what I did when you handb back over a better story and a better Illustrated designed experience is you tap into what they know to be true which is like I didn't I wouldn't

want to be in the audience of my own presentation either before you know and when you can get them to think that way and and and say like you know what's a

do you want to go the DM m v today or would you rather you know do this have this amazing online exper like they can start to realize there's a lot of pain in their everyday life undesigned pain I

think like Step One is making them realize like we can make this delightful and beautiful and then helping them deconstruct a little bit like what we do isn't Magic you know I had when we talk

about how to do a sales pitch we talk about the principles of how Pixar builds a movie right like there's some standard narrative arcs that are that go back through Millennia that humans respond to

right and these are knowable things and even someone who doesn't think they're a good writer and doesn't think they're a designer if you can break down what makes a Pixar movie so effective to them and if I can layer that now onto your

sales presentation like the world opens up to them and they get really really excited about that you know they can transpose that idea that strategy that design strategy onto their own work you know so I think that's what I mean by

building the muscle I don't expect them to write great copy or to redesign a website but I expect them to suddenly see it matters it has a real business impact it's not a creative Indulgence

that these design fairies in the corner just want me to believe in you know they see right away that everyone in that room was more engaged everyone perked up everyone looked at each other when I got to slide one because I asked a really

bold provocative question and it was in big bold type and whatever it might have been to get their attention that that's obvious business impact right there awesome it's teaching the purpose it's not designed for the sake of design no

no and I mean like things can get overdesigned and we have lots of examples of that where we just go let's we are circling the drain here like come on get back out of this this doesn't matter um but I can always tell even in

writing I know when writers are just writing for other writers versus when writers are writing for their audiences and I hate the first and I love the second you know so we have to learn to design for the people for whom we're

actually trying to serve you know so you've spoken about stories you've spoken about arcs Pixar I'm I'm noticing a trend here a storytelling um so fascinating fact about you is you

actually studied journalism in school and the first five or six years of your career was in the journalism field yeah tell us about that imia so when I was in high school and University I really didn't know anything about what my potential career options were I

certainly didn't know anything about design it had never crossed my mind there were fine artists and then there were business people I mean that was sort of how I divided the world um so what I realized though is I can write

and I loved telling stories and I loved weaving together uh disperate ideas into a story and that for me was just what the heart of Journalism was about so I decided I was going to be a journalist

and you know started off uh in at the CBC which is Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto then I was at a foreign Bureau briefly um and at the time the bottom was falling out of the

media world you know so the business model was sort of falling apart when I got into it and it wasn't clear anymore how media stories were going to be told right and suddenly online comes around and and there's this move from print and

radio and traditional stuff to this very new exciting stuff um and I got just as excited about about that building those businesses as I did about telling the story but if there is a red thread that

guides my entire career it's actually storytelling like what a good journalist does is they take a lot of seemingly unrelated pieces of information and they weave it into something amazing right

they try to present uh not the facts always but the truth um so that got me really excited can I get to the point of a story in an interesting way can I force someone to think differently about

a topic it could be Global Affairs it could have been a bombing in in Ireland or uh or some political event in Kenya that that was a thing I love to do but I love to weave a story that would make

people actually listen to it and when I moved into design um I realized that my job hadn't particularly changed you know I was still exercising the same basic muscles which is what are some of the

insights that I configured about the world how do I weave a narrative and how do I take you along for the ride you know that is actually the active design for me and how storytelling plays into that you know people everyone a good

story and everything you're doing is in is in service of a narrative that I want you to go on with me and that I want you to join with me so I don't I see myself

as just a principal Storyteller now I I I wonder if you would have gotten any of that experience um or even known that you had this muscle um of Storytelling

if you think if you had gone to design school like do you do you like have you ever thought about that yeah I don't think so I don't think so I certainly not when I would have gone through design school I don't think story I don't think people were aware of story

in the same way um so no I think I had to but like I once had a friend say you know design is too important to be left to the designers right and uh and and there's there's a certain amount of

Truth just like just like story telling is too important to be left to the authors only you know there's there's I think this is just a fundamental part of the human experience that

everyone inherently responds to and if you can tap into that then you have a magic brand you have a magical company you have a magical business um because you're not fighting against human nature

you're actually leaning way way into it to how humans respond what do you what do you think some of the other advantages are of like not and this I mean I design schools obviously teaches you a lot of the core principles of

design teaches you the craft but there are advantages I I'd imagine to to not going to design school and coming to design later in life after having done other things right so I'm just curious

if you like what are some of the other advantages you think um that's a that's a good question I think there's sort of two big advantages one is I think if you're a naturally curious person you tend to be a really good designer right

so if you've had a career that's gone like this I'm not worried about I actually like that when I look at CV this person has been all over the place that's cool yeah that generally suggests to me that they're extremely curious and they're smart and they get things done

and they can figure it out and a great designer can do that you I mean I've designed cat food packaging and you know from the Absurd to the Divine but I always find something in it that's

amazing that I can get behind so we can disrupt Healthcare reimagine Healthcare or I can change the lid on a can of Friskies and there's still something pretty amazing in that I don't need to

be the world's best designer to do it I just need to understand how to apply how to apply some of these principles to both of those um so again I think anything that shows you have a lot of diverse curiosity and a lot of different

kind of interests is good the other thing I think the advantage is I I didn't have any rules when I came to it I didn't really know what best practices were which I actually think served me very well ignorance is bliss ignorance

is a bliss and it it forces you to ask a lot of dumb questions which actually end up being the Breakthrough that you're looking for you know so I wasn't very precious about design I just wanted things to be wonderful and be delightful

and I didn't know what to call that I just wanted it to be amazing yeah and learning how you can lean on design in some places and and other things and you know I don't I don't dismiss the business or the data or the things that

feel somehow opposite they are not but they feel opposite to design those have an important role too so I didn't I never felt territorial or feeling like I'm coming here as a

designer of the capital D I felt I'm coming here as a team member who understands the role of design and story I want to weave that in in a way that's going to convince you back on my

journalist training right like I want to convince you of my point of view and take you along it's interesting um you earlier mentioned the Pixar

narrative yeah I want to go back to that for a second yeah uh the narrative Arc that Pixar uses I think there's like a book written on it right um how do you like how do you apply it what like what

is your version of Pixar's narrative on a day-to-day Bas well it I mean it depends but you but you know great stories always have some of the basic same components to them right so you have the status quo you have the thing

that interrupts that suddenly you have someone or something or a company that has to find a way around that to bring back to resolution and some new level of understanding right so these are some

basic principles so if I'm even designing uh a sales pitch I'll think about that and say look this is a status quo it's very it's very solution selling right if you're a typical sales guy but

really it's like look I often say to people you know there's five of us in the room right now at least three of us are going to die from a disease that we

gave ourselves right but that's yeah that's very different us that's yeah probably the three of us for it's definitely me it's definitely me but um but that's very different than saying 86

million Americans have type 2 diabetes you know that's not compelling um but a principle of Pixar is getting it down to the human story so it's you and it's you and it's me and of the three of us the

two of us are not going to live as long as we were supposed to and we're not going to live well either along the way and that for me is the hook that you grab them with you know and and that's how you start to tell them on the

journey you thought this you thought that the way to cure it was through drugs and getting a procedure and getting a bypasser whatever it might be but in fact it's this other thing and

here's why that's so much more interesting for you like there's some basic ideas that should apply to everything you do um even when we were redesigning our website we had a lot of conversations about you know we're an interesting business because we're B2B

to C and D to C like we're every acronym you can imagine so um but it got to the point where I felt like as a team we were getting twisted up in that I said guys forget it we are H toh we are human

to human business forget everything else people do not behave that differently at work you know you and I are not having a BB conversation right

now you know and I don't I don't walk in the office right now and say cool I'm at work let me put on my b Tob Persona and leave my BC at the door yeah my B stays

in the car you know waiting for me to get home so once you can get past that you say as long as you talk to people like they're a human being who have basic human needs and interests and

think make decisions the way they always do it just clarifies what your your job is to do so like when we were designing the website at one point we started getting twist well do we need to have a Enterprise section and then a

participant section and then I was like guys forget it you know the truth is if we do really good job on the participant side the Enterprise are going to love it you know they'll they can make the leap

to say wow that is what I could offer my employees or my health plan members um we also made the decision to lead with the UL imate objective of this company

right which is we we inspire people to be their own cure um which is a really powerful idea and it's not about a better it's not about a better it's not about preventing chronic disease or all

these other things that that's part of it but the core human benefit is that I get to cure myself and we often talk about like stories where where there's that magical moment so if you think

about the Wizard of Oz right I always talk about The Wizard of Oz with the team and there's that moment where Dorothy at the very end the Witch is saying to her she's saying I want to go home and the good witch says well you know my darling you you've you've had

the power all along just tap your feet together you know we often compare what we're doing to stories that we know it's like wow you actually right now you can

completely or almost certainly 75% of the time you can cure yourself you've always had the power and our job as a company as a brand is to unleash that within you and to bring it out of you but it's yours it's yours on the inside

so it's a story you tell yourself it's a story you tell yourself and it's but it's true you know it's a true story I also say to guys like look we are not marketing brand is not mythmaking right

I'm not here to make a myth I'm I'm here to tell the truth and if you can if your product does the right thing in the right way then you have an amazing situation as a designer where you just get to tell this truth in the most

impactful way possible so that's a lot of what I see what we're trying to do here is just tell the truth well um and that's a part of how design and storytelling play

together so you were at ideo before you came to Amada mhm um what's so interesting is I mean the lineage of idio is is amazing of all the guests on

our on our on our series here a lot of them started their careers in Ideo where they truly began to think about design the way that they continue to think about it today right

um what what is it about I what are the principles that you were taught there that you continue to use today and what what are some ideas that are probably not obvious to people but um to you is

just obvious now because of your your time at Ideo yeah that's a great question well I think anyone who's worked at Ido owes a huge debt to to that company and to the people there so I learned so much there and I and I and

I constantly go back to it so one thing I remember I came before I was at a fairly traditional company that did things in a kind of traditional way so I used to sit on a lot of focus groups you

know behind a mirror and listen to users reflect on our product and give us feedback and it always felt weird to me to do it that way but that they said we have to remove bias from the room and we really need to get the real answer and

that felt like okay we're going to sit and do this at idea was totally the opposite uh it was like we're going to put bias into the room because we don't you're never going to get someone's real opinion when they're sitting around a

white table it's a sterile environment this horrible sterile environment with someone who's reading off a a clipboard questions that they've been given without latitude to do much more so one

of the very first projects I did at Ido was for a skin company they were doing the really Innovative thing in this skincare brand and packaging and so we held what I called an unfocused group

I was like you know what I really want to get some insights from these wom women that are honest that are not not something I could find on a Quant survey yeah so we held a cocktail hour

essentially at an idio studio uh we filmed it um I got everybody drunk I said it was a party like we're just here to have a good time I I drank with every I wanted them I wanted them to feel

relaxed and comfortable and I didn't ask any questions of the first hour cuz I knew it was going to take at least that long for people to forget that they were cameras forget that they were at a focus group and just start having a good time

and we just had a very Fleet I had a I had a list of questions much like what you have it was not overly prescriptive it was a general sense of what I wanted to learn and I let the women lead the conversation for me and by the end of

the night we had women crying we had them arguing with each other we had them laughing I mean we had them telling me something that was actually true about how they felt about their skin and what they needed what they needed from a

company and there's no way I would have ever gotten that in a traditional remove bias focus group um another example is I

went I remember we were working with um a formula like baby formula company and they had designed a really they had an idea for kind of a a formula that would

sit on your counter you know like a aseptic room temperature you could like a beer cake of baby formula and we went into a woman's house and she was you know just telling us about what her

rituals were around feeding and and she and I asked her I was like Hey do you ever feel guilty for feeding your baby formula and I remember I had people going like like that's a hard question

that's a hard question that's a touchy and a traditional focus group won't go there yeah and but at the time I had a lot of empathy I just had my second child I kind of knew what she was thinking she's like no no no no no I

don't feel guilty not at all and I said cool where do you keep your formula can we see it and so she took us to a pantry and it was buried way deep behind the

cereals and I went why are you hiding it like if you're not ashamed why are you hiding this way but she's like well but and then all of a sudden you realize she is ashamed and this is a big deal to her and you realize as a designer I need to

make sure that she feels that it's okay to feed formula if you need to and I don't want you to feel guilty for not doing it and and all these other things that this brand needed to accomplish right that only comes out of that messy

highly qualitative um unfocused group style that I learned at idio right like getting real empathy for people and really get I would rather have one very

deep conversation with you than a 100 shallow conversations with people like you I think I'll learn more about the hundred by going deep with one than I will by going shallow with everyone you

know and that's a very different mindset than traditional market research right thanks again to Squarespace for supporting the show Squarespace is the

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Invision app.com and use our access code iv- highresolution for 3 months [Music] free okay so you've spoken about a lot

of the principles that you learned in your journalism career um things that you brought over from IDE very powerful stuff um I'm really curious about how you brought those principles into the

healthcare industry which is very old um moves a lot slower than traditional like Tech startups right um and there's a lot more people who you have to convince yeah that's a yeah great question I mean

I think one thing we did when we started this company was and and I credit the founder sha Duffy for this was have a sense of humility I know it's very tempting in the design world and in Silicon Valley to say well we're disrupting we're disrupting we're

ignoring the old rules we're just circumventing them but I don't know that that's always the right thing to do and uh a lot of what I learned at idea was to have empathy so I wanted to start by having empathy for the healthare system

as it is there are a lot of things that are really powerful and work really well about it as much as we want to dismiss it out of hand so I think one of the things we did was as a as a founding

team or as you know the initial group of us was to actually know what we were talking about and know what we were disrupting and know why it was that way and get to talk to people who are

leading health plans and leads of benefits at employers or chief medical officer and understand a little bit more what makes them tick and where they see opportunity and where we're being too

myopic in how how we're thinking about this this space so one so step one was just build some real empathy no matter what you're doing no matter how broken you think the system is there's probably

some very interesting insight and logic to that system right now be sure you know what that is before you decide it's right for disruption um you I see that in education all the time there's a lot of people who want a disrupt education

and I think there's a lot of reasons to do that there's actually a lot about education that works really really well and just because you don't like what fifth grade was like for you doesn't mean that that model needs to be totally

changed completely you know there's a lot to to find out that there's a lot of power in what's happening now and make sure you know what that is so you don't lose it along the way you can evolve it but

don't don't destroy it um so step one was to gain empathy um and to really understand all the stakeholders uh step two was to be as human as we

possibly could right was to say let's design something that you want to do not that you have to do so much in healthcare is about taking your medicine figuratively and literally you know and

it's never Pleasant so question we asked ourselves is if your health is truly one of the most important things if not the most important thing in your life why does it always feel like such a drag and

is there a way to design it so that it feels delightful and effortless and fun do I can I make logging into the omata

program as interesting and exciting as logging into Facebook every morning there's no reason why it couldn't be that way and in fact I would argue there's a moral imperative to make sure

it is that way um so that was another thing that we we went back to First principles on was just to say let's design a program that everyone is going to want to do and will be happy to do

and will willingly do it cuz if we can't do that we don't have anything and then the last thing is I think where kind of business and design comes together right so we decided very early on we did not

want to be digital snake oil right and there's a lot of that out there in in healthcare and digital health so Sean Duffy and Adrien James two of our co-founders said we're going to put our

money where our mouth is and we are going to design a business model that forces us to do the right thing and the way to do that is to have an outcomes based pricing right so this is where you

get a business designer designing a model to force an overall user experience that is the best it can possibly be so what we said is people aren't going to pay to use our program

they're going to pay when our program works which is very different in healthcare it's very very radical but it forces it holds our feet to the fire because what we're not we're saying you

don't just get to we don't make money unless we help you literally get you're paying us to fix a problem we're going to fix the problem you're not paying us to try you're

paying us to actually fix it um which is very very radically different but again that's not that's a really good example of where design overlaps with business design plus business design Plus Finance

like you can get really really clever and figure out that that one business decision is actually what allowed us to focus on design we needed this program

to work it has to work so so so it sounds like you you guys created this forcing function yes for not just quality yes but efficaciousness yes absolutely and and Designs feet were

really to the fire to make sure that that the outcomes reflected the promise the company was posing in the in the market I have a question about um so I

led your framing of the three things uh empathy um understanding the problem first principal mindset and where design and business comes together there was something interesting you said about the first one where coming into Healthcare a

very old industry there were a lot of things that actually worked um and that's a really strong contrast to uh how Silicon Valley works right where it's like everything is broken you hear like emails broken education's broken

like healthcare is broken everything's broken everything needs to be disrupted right and here you're saying is Well if you come with a sense of empathy in a beginner's mind and you look around you actually notice that maybe there are five things that are broken but three

things that work well right I'm really curious about the things that you actually found that work well in healthcare um that the startup industry is just not aware of yeah that is a really good question I mean so I'll give

one example is is um peer review journals all right the process of peer review is actually really critical in in healthcare

and that has saved so many lives I mean the the ability to replicate someone else's results cannot be the importance of that cannot be overstated and and you know

that's why we don't use leeches anymore and all those other things right like at some point people went H wait a second and so one thing we said was like look let's understand that a lot of this

feels like it ought to work and as designers and as you know tech people we think it should work but let's question whether it does so I'll give one example um we all know that there's all these

fitness trackers right out there and everyone gets excited because like oh if you track if you get more data and you track yourself that's going to lead to better Behavior we know that the average fitness tracker is worn for about 3

weeks and then it's put in a drawer and it's never worn again like that's guilty yeah same here that's a pretty amazing statistic right so uh it's very easy for

Tech to say well it's cool and I like it and I like tracking myself and I'll say yeah but you're a triathlete and you would have been fine with or without this tracker you're not the person that I need to help the person I need to help

lives in rural Georgia and is a single mother and lives in a food desert where she has a convenience store near her not a Whole Foods like I'm solving for her cuz I think you're going to be fine um

and so a lot of that peer review forces you to ask yourself does this work for me or does this work for everyone we also made a decision early it's very tempting in

this business to say can we tweak our numbers somehow right so why don't I just pick the people for whom it will be easy for us to help who have easy lives and have access to money and time the

resources they need to take care of themselves that can be tempting early days and I remember there was a conversation way back when when we said is that what we're going to do but we go back to the core of what our company is

about right which is helping everybody avoid or reverse chronic disease it's not helping the elite or helping those who need it the least yeah so we de said you know what even if that affects our numbers even if we know that certain

people will not do as well in the program because of a lot of other things we want to be the best solution for everyone so that we can still say yeah that person might be harder to treat

than a wealthy white 40-year-old male in San Francisco but we're still going to be better at helping them than anything else on the market and that's a huge as far as I'm concerned so yeah I mean peer

review is really really important and making sure that you're designing for all not designing for the people who need it the least uh and Healthcare you kind of forces you to do that you don't get to pick and choose and you shouldn't

you shouldn't get into health care if you you're pick and choosing the people that you're helping the thing I also find interesting is when you guys entered the market you didn't you didn't kind of step in and assign incompetence to the entire healthcare industry uh you

want to use sugar not poison if you want to you know you need allies in a mass Legacy uh not organization but certainly a market right um is that advice you'd

give every startup founder and every designer and every engineer trying to build a company in a space that they're trying to quote disrupt yeah it it is and i' it's funny I've gotten in some fairly heated conversations with entrepreneurs who totally disagree with

me which is like no you need that level of arrogance you need that sort of factor you need to just build it from scratch because you can get tangled in the Legacy and get pulled down um I

disagree I I don't know what harm comes from truly understanding how it works even you know you have to be prepared to say yes I know I know the world says it can't be done I know the world says it

can't get better I'm going to have to believe that it can yeah right that is the definition of entrepreneurial right is that just insane belief that things

can be better but but I you know we met a lot of amazing doctors and clinicians who've spent their lives working on this who are very very smart and have a lot to teach us I think the second you think

you can't be taught it's it's over for you and a lot of the companies right now that you know who do amazing work and whom I love but the industries they disrupted yeah they've they've managed to grow fast as

companies but they're facing a lot of social pressures from the other side they've done a lot of accidental damage along the way that they're now needing to figure out what do we do about that you know and I think had there been a

little bit more understanding going in urban planning you know you might have realized that gee if I can talk to some people about urban planning and gentrification as I'm

building this I might realize going in that we might have an unintended consequence here that at least we want to be aware of going in so we are not dealing with PR issues three or five years down the line where we're

scrambling and we have communities fighting to kick us out like that to me is the result of a failure of empathy in the beginning and a failure to learn to

just know this is what happens if we do X this these things get will get affected we can choose to do it anyway but at least you know that's going to come um so yeah again I think you can

disrupt without being dismissive yeah of people of an industry um and that's that's the tack we we decided to take so it sounds like a balance it's like the empathy to see how it works and then

the boldness to make change where it's needed I think that's beautiful I think that's exactly what it is you know you should know what you don't know and and then decide to move forward anyway that's fine I think that's fine that

puts you in the most powerful position as a designer in my opinion just d on that I'd like to walk into a room with you and Kaiser right one of your big customers right um and on on the one

hand you have this institution that's been around around for a long time that's a massive institution across the entire country on the other hand you've got you yeah um and some of the new ideas and perspectives that you're

trying to bring to the table to work with a company like Kaiser right take us into that meeting room what do you guys talk about how are you using design principles to help lead the or are you even leading the conversation I'm making

assumptions here but um yeah you know I actually have a lot of heart for Kaiser um they have in fact they've partially invested in our company as well um you know I don't it's funny I would often go

into those conversations assuming that g I'm going to have to really like I'm going to have to put up my elbows and show them what's what um more and more I'm finding that's not the case I think a lot of these older or more established

traditional institutions are very open to this I think they want to understand how we work and and they are not you know it's very different though to be fair to them when you are dealing with

billions and billions of dollars versus where we might be today you know and I think there's a healthy respect there where we say we want to learn from you and what keeps you up a night and where

this is painful for you uh and I hope you'll do the same and so far that's been the case um you'll find that there's big companies like you know big banks are looking at venmo and going

what the heck you know but to be fair venmo doesn't have the pressures that like a JP Morgan has right now you know they have slightly it's easy to praise them and they're doing a great job but

but it's a different scale right now and so I find that in these conversations luckily because of so many Industries have been disrupted I think there's a humility on both sides now which is really refreshing I don't think that we

have we don't come in as conquering Heroes but we also don't come in needing to fight we come in with there's a lot of curiosity from their side and we're just as curious about them we want to be

as big or bigger as Kaiser is one day so so we start going let's learn let's learn from you first um but again when we show them a beautifully designed pitch and we show them incredible

results and they love it I mean they they don't they can't do they might not do it themselves but they love what we're doing and and they appreciate it so so it's not a fight is the honest answer so we've spoken a lot about

storytelling yeah um something that we spoke about offline before was this concept of a Manifesto right um and creating one that a company rallies behind and kind of guides us forward

I'm curious to what is like what does that even look and then as a follow on how can a team actually create their own yeah the great

question um so for me the manifesto is actually really really important and uh and it may be because I come from a writing background but I found there's nothing that kind of galvanizes the troops quite as much as

this idea that we have this rallying cry that this is what we're here to accomplish um so at certainly at idea when I worked with different companies and and at aada definitely we had a moment where we like what is our rally

and cry like what are we actually trying to do not a tagline not something that you say that sounds like py copy but actually like this is the change we are trying to create in the world you know

and you know we can write that in 10 or 12 sentences or four it doesn't matter but we wanted to write something that was very clear that this is this is what we're doing and why it matters and why

you should come with me um and once we had that it was you know it's a very ground in place to start because again it goes back to story it's not it's not corporate it's not our annual goals it's

not Q4 results you know it's not our kpis oh my God it is the story you would tell your friends or your parents or your kids about why you do what you do and I think everyone responds to that

emotionally it doesn't matter if you're the CFO or the chief design officer or the intern who started everyone wants to feel that they are part of something bigger and a Manifesto is a really nice way to do that you can do it at the

corporate level or the company level but we also have done it at the chronic disease level right the topic level so we have we've just written a chronic disease Manifesto which is like hey

world this is what's going on in chronic disease preventable chronic disease not only in the country but in the world this is why you really need to care about it and here are some here's some

light that we see that we're going to walk into because we think that there's something amazing that's to come in this space um so writing it down sharing it as a story I just think if you can't

write a Manifesto I'd be worried if you can't figure out what your Manifesto is or the change you're trying to create and if you can't put it into words that get someone excited um I would say you got you got something with your business

that needs to be figured out does that uh does that come from a leader though like it's it's like when I think of manifestos I think of things like principles and values of teams organizations yeah and the thing I've

always struggled with is how much like is the onus on everyone to kind of band together and figure out what we believe in so that we become authors of the or

is it is it that the leadership is strong and the vision is strong and the manifesto uh builds uh from the vision that is set by the leader and that people just ban around that or not right

so like that's something I've I've always wondered you know what I actually think it kind of goes like this quite honestly you know so there's of course the founders or the the first people to company are setting some I they have

some of what they're trying to do whatever it is but in our Cas um all of our you know all of our core statements about who we are our values in particular they were co-written by everyone at the company in fact we

opened it up to everyone we kind of had a first pass which is this is what we think we're doing and how we need to do it this is how we're going to behave what did that process look like when you said you open it up to everyone so we literally emailed out you know we had a

lot of conversations with the entire team but we then emailed out here's the I mean I wrote a first draft along the CEO and I sat and wrote a draft together we co-wrote it um but then we put it up

and people started editing it and then we had you know people who raised their hands and said I really want to be involved in that process they got off sort of in a subgroup and they really refined them and they made them so much

better by the way so much better than what I initially wrote or what our CEO we I was like this could not have been better and the best part is that people feel real ownership over that now it's

not I mean nothing is more painful than corporate values that have no relationship what I mean Enron wrote corporate values right there's a lot of companies that do that but when you have

people helping co-design them co-create them and we constantly refer to them so when you're talking with your manager or in a meeting and I'm giving you praise I'm referring back to one of those

values that you have shown that you've brought to life right so it feels like a real meaningful thing it's not some empty platitude that sounds good but could be any company and anywhere you

know it's very unique to us and what makes us think Oman is special and What Makes Us tick so yeah Co I think if it comes from on high you're in trouble uh it needs to be co-designed to some

degree and it needs to be constantly referenced to some degree right and when you get lost and when you're not sure how to make a decision you should be able to go back to that Manifesto and should be able to set you straight right

so when we were lost we were never lost but if we ever had a moment where we said should we cherick the kind of people we get into the program just to make sure that we have the best possible results you go back to our Manifesto you say no way it is not worth it that is

not what we're here to do we're going to help everybody even if it temporarily depresses our results it's going to make us better in the long term so the the leader kind of points in a direction yes but the people build the tracks the

train can ride on to get there that's basically you said it better you said it better than I did that I think that's exactly right so we we spoke about story arcs right um and the manifesto sounds

like it is a story in some sense that the company is telling itself right um if if I wanted to write one today for a company say I'm a startup here I have 20 people in my team what kind of story arc

should I follow in my Manifesto yeah I might I mean I think you can the I would almost just to start you off I'd go back to the most traditional one right which

is today there is tomorrow there ought to be we believe this because and we're going to achieve it this way you know like it can be as simple as that but if

you can get that down I mean if you think about big really interesting companies right like like Airbnb for example which I love you know um it

started as a way to get cheaper hotel rooms ultimately right there's not much of a Manifesto there like pay less for hotel room is not super exciting where they've evolved to is actually about

world citizenship which for me is an incredible idea and I can get behind that and and that I think can rally a lot of new ideas and it has you know and

bringing people together um being able to live anywhere that for me is the process of getting from your initial thing that you're the benefit the initial core benefit to something much much bigger which I think expands the

platform for how your business grows over time but like that's a Manifesto right that you can belong anywhere is a very very big idea at the manifesto level as opposed

to I just saved $50 a night yeah renting in Alam or whatever it might be what's a Mod's Manifesto well there's it's got a few components to it I mean and fundamentally what we're trying to

change in the world is we want to inspire and enable people anywhere and everywhere to live free of chronic disease right um that is what we're trying to do uh we have a broader which

I can share but a broader chronic disease Manifesto which is like hey people need to understand the state of the world right now and why you have to pay attention we're actually doing a very beautiful sort of stop motion

animation to bring that to life yeah it's going to be really cool and and it's interesting because there's not a lot of business reason to do that uh and if I said hey guys you mind if I take

three or 4 months of three or four people to do this kind of expensive thing that is a chronic called the chronic disease Manifesto I think most businesses would be like what you know why why but what's a pleasure is no one

no one baded an I here everyone thought like yeah we need to do that because we want to have a larger purpose in the world and we need people to understand the problem and part of the issue for us is that people don't realize that this

is an issue whenever I say there's three of us and two of us are going to die die from pre preventable chronic disease every everyone's always surprised yeah they always assume Oh I thought it was going to be cancer or you know something no it's it's something you could have

avoided that's a really big deal and we need people to wake up to that so these next set of questions uh we reached out to the community and we asked them what are some of the things that are burning up in their minds right so we have a few

that we're going to ask every guest we like to get into that with you okay okay so we're going to kick off with this one how do you explain the role of design to

people at omata I think design is a way to drisk go to market if I'm being very

pragmatic about it um because it allows us to understand who we're serving better to connect with their Humanity to be humble enough to iterate

along the way and improve and to make sure they come along for the ride with us um in general though I don't explain

design I always sh instead of tell yeah I think it's just the fastest way so I don't have when someone new joins I don't sit them down and go well let me

tell you why design is so important here I show them what we have and I walk them through some of our core assets and the writing on our walls and I think they instantly get it that way we're in a

privileged position now where people know better people joke like they'll come up to me be like I'm really sore you know look at this can you help but I never help by reskinning something I always help by saying let's talk about

it like tell me what you're trying to achieve like for whom and why all right well then I would think about it this way like I'm always trying to teach that that that's why we're doing this to actually have just a bigger impact in

the world not to make look something look pretty so yeah that's how I show I show as much as possible that's awesome and how is the design um organization

structured here at omada Health yeah so we have um so we're actually restructuring a little bit right now but we have a couple big design teams so we have sort of brand and marketing RIT large that's that's my team so that is

we have you know a director of copy and content and campaign leads and filmmakers and motion designers I mean we have the design team there that works on any kind of marketing project that we

have going on but they help us Define what the project is by the way it's not it's not a marketer being like can you please Design This s it's not like that it's we want to achieve this this is something that's important for the business help us think differently about this and that's when all sorts of cool

stuff happens it's like well that could be an animation or what if we did it this way or what if we made this a beautiful infographic or it shouldn't be a video it should be something like this we just have this amazing moment where the creatives and the suits or the

marketers come together and really have this this moment of what could this be what should this be if we want to achieve X um so we have branded marketing uh with which has in-house design you know we brought it all in-house I chose very deliberately I

didn't want to work with agencies if I could avoid it not because they don't have value they do but I needed us to develop that muscle ourselves right I wanted us to know how to do it when push came to shove not have to defer to an

agency I just from the ground up I wanted to be able to do it we can choose not to um but I wanted us to be able to then we also have the product design team so the designers actually have a very interesting community and they're

always sharing work with each other so the product designers if they get stuck or they just want to check in we'll have a design Circle and all the designers come together and give critique on it everyone here has been through our program everyone understands how it

works so everyone has really useful feedback for each other um the product designers also have really good feedback for marketing and what we're trying to do is say we want have one unified experience so from the moment you ever

find out about aada to the time two years later when you've graduated from the program you're telling all your friends that should be one coherent doesn't need to be consistent but one coherent design experience that you know you're in the right place um so the two

teams do a lot of just critique and collaboration with each other and then we are currently looking for a principal brand designer who's going to sit over top of product and marketing and just make sure that we have that overall look

and feel aesthetic as tight as it possibly can be um so that that that rolls open right now cool well you guys heard that so there we go now you

know well so when you're the only designer just try and picture a startup for a second or even a mediumsized company where you might have one or two maybe three designers yeah

um how how should those designers convince leadership that design is important well I think it's it's Step

One is stop thinking about design as a thing you do but a way that you operate instead um if I were the one designer though being very pragmatic I would try to find an opportunity to show them what

I mean rather than tell them you're never going to argue your way into great design you're just going to have to convince them by being like look at this yeah this is what if we did it this way instead um I think also you would point

to some of the big juggernauts right here like around you it's obvious that if you can have Airbnb worth more than Hilton Hotels right now not own a single Hotel design is on something's happening

there that I need to pay atten to you know so so I think there's a lot of just business case studies out there to say these two companies do the same thing in the for the same audience with the same

business model but this one one why is it well it's probably about the user design people just like it better you know Apple you know there's all sorts of good examples where a beautifully

designed experience wins every time and people know that so I think I I would probably if I were a designer I would try to not use the language of design because there's too much bias I

would just use the language of good business which is you know drisking go to market learning as you go iterating failing fast failing cheaply all those

things I think are pretty appealing so I would start there let design be the children like let let design come in through those

conversations Co um and at om ma Health how do how do you measure and present the results of design that's a good question so I mean

luckily we have a product where we can prove design works because it either affects clinical outcomes or it doesn't right so we can measure it very tangibly and say you know when we added this feature when we added this video when we

changed this flow people did better in the program so we have a very like onetoone way of saying see it's working you know and when we when we do a Ab test and we remove it they do more

poorly and therefore we want to have this design experience however um I would argue be careful with the data because there is a world where you'll make a small design decision and doesn't

seem to move the needle that's not the time to abandon ship you just need to have I think an inherent faith that great design matters even if it doesn't show up in the numbers right away like

the the bend the arc is always going to Arc towards design being important even if at a discret moment in time you can't prove it you know so I think when you're going to these conversations you need to

teach people that this is not an overnight thing but overall I'm going to show you that over the years or over the quarters this is having a really important impact that's driving people

to our company but I might not be able to prove it on Wednesday yeah right so I want you to be able to hold those those two ideas at the same time which is data is going to support it but it's not

irrefutable evidence and we need to have a philosophy that we're okay with that as we as we go this way so we can end with this question here as the purpose and function of design has been evolving

and continues to evolved uh what are some of the roles and methods you think uh will start to emerge over the next 5 years I think I think one thing we're going to see is just a lot more diversity of the people who are brought

to the table to solve a problem right so before if you didn't have an MBA you did not work at certain businesses I think like the MFA might be the new MBA and that these kinds of people are going to

be invited and seen as actual catalysts for problem solving at these kinds of companies for me that's hugely exciting you know as I look back to my degrees and I think they're important there's

very little that I learned at the London School of Economics though I loved it there yeah that is directly helping me today thank God though I had it because that got me to the table to begin with

but I didn't need it so I would predict that in the next few years people who used to be excluded from these conversations will suddenly be invited

and their value will be you know they won't we will open up uh we will open up the rooms to different kinds of people different kinds of backgrounds by Design because we know that they're going to

influence and help us think differently about this problem I think the old methods the world is changing so rapidly that the old tools aren't serving us anymore and we have to be open that there must to be some radically

different approaches and perspectives that we constantly need to try so it has to be a revolving door come on in like everyone's welcome show me what you got how would you how would you approach that for me that is one of the most

exciting things it's interesting because even now as I interview people I'm so much less concerned with pedigree Than I Used to Be Right we actually end up just talking about who they are as a person

and the kinds of problems they've solved in their lives and how they went about doing it that tells me way more than anything I could read on a piece of paper about them you know so so I think

what I predict will happen is there will be I hope I hope a great diversity of perspectives will be encouraged to join these Brands and

these businesses to open to open people's perspectives even further once we see the power of doing so that's my Hope anyway wow cool thank you so much thanks hey you made it to the end

congratulations thanks for watching the episode I really really hope you liked it if you did like it please leave us a review on the iTunes Store and by the way if you have any questions that came up because of the content that we

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