Last month, we launched a call-for-founders. We were looking for very early-stage companies working on visionary products in the healthcare space. Specifically, we were hoping to connect with founders from traditionally underrepresented and underfunded groups in tech and healthcare so that we could help them reach the next level in their business and product journey with a complimentary Product Design Sprint. These founders have critical insights into how to improve healthcare, yet often lack access to resources to be able to validate and advance their business ideas.
We are excited to share that after conducting the submission process and reviewing some wonderful applications, the thoughtbot team has selected the founders of Health Match 360.
Meet our founders
Bailey C. Bryant, Psy.D. - CEO and co-founder Bailey is a licensed clinical psychologist and serial entrepreneur passionate about helping people access mental healthcare.
Jeremiah Harlan - CTO and co-founder Jeremiah is highly skilled at creating full-stack technical solutions to solve everyday problems, and is passionate about mental health.
About Health Match 360 Mental health needs are growing and the CDC recently acknowledged a critical need during the pandemic. Many individuals who need care struggle to access it due to cost and difficulty accessing a provider. The Health Match 360 platform helps clients overcome the obstacle of accessing care by connecting them with qualified treatment providers. Bailey and Jeremiah are thrilled to have been selected for the thoughtbot PDS. From their submission:
We are a scrappy duo and passionate about our company but struggling to get funding to help us improve our platform design. I have been pitching and applying all over the place but keep getting feedback that we are “too early” for investment. When one of my advisors sent me a link to thoughtbot I about fell out of my chair because what you are offering bypasses the problem of outside funding and gets straight to solving our design issues. We would absolutely love to partner with you to help people gain access to quality mental healthcare in a time when we could all use it!
Moving into the Product Design Sprint
After a beta program that has resulted in useful user information, Bailey and Jeremiah have identified some core issues with the platform that they need help figuring out how to move forward with:
- Patients sign up but don’t take the next step - selecting a therapist or even reaching out to them
- Patients that do select a therapist don’t have next steps in their journey that would keep them as a recurring user
- User interviewing about mental health is very personal and challenging:
- How can they learn more about the patients or prospective patients when they won’t engage in user research?
- Is the matching (powered by their proprietary algorithm) even working?
- How can they get the needed feedback to improve it?
thoughtbot Designers Kyle Fiedler, Eric Bailey, and Alex Chen will be conducting the PDS with Health Match 360 the week of November 30th. We had a call last week to kick things off and tell Bailey and Jeremiah about the PDS process.
Follow along
In addition to sharing the Design Sprint results after the fact, we’re going to do some live sharing as well. You can follow along next week via thoughtbot’s Twitter or LinkedIN. Starting Monday, November 30th:
Monday: Understand
Day 1 of the design sprint is about gathering all existing information/knowledge on the business, the customer, and the problem to expose assumptions and knowledge gaps. From here, we can make plans to address the riskiest knowledge gaps and validate or invalidate our higest risk assumptions.
Tuesday: Sketch and Decide
Each Design Sprint is unique and tailored to the outcomes that the team is aiming for. For this sprint we identified having extra time to prototype would be important to the success of the sprint. We’re condensing Sketch and Decide phases into one day to give more time for prototyping.
The first part of Day 2 will explore as many possibilities as possible, regardless of how realistic, feasible, or viable they may or may not be. From this explosion of opportunity comes insights made when considering the implications of radically different perspectives and approaches to solving a problem.
Then, in the afternoon, we’ll take all of the possibilities that we have exposed in the morning and decide on a single version of the prototype that we will build on Day 4.
Wednesday and Thursday: Prototype
The core purpose of the prototype is to test the assumptions you are trying to validate/invalidate or the knowledge gaps you are trying to fill should have all been discussed in Converge. During this phase you will build a quick and dirty prototype. Since you only have at most a day to build the prototype it should be as low-fi as you can get away with during Testing. This lets us cheaply and effectively see if we’re on the right track.
Friday: Test
The last day of the Product Design Sprint is to test our assumptions by seeing how prospective users react to the prototype. Going into each test we will have a plan of what we’re testing, and how we’ll know if that is successful or not. We will test with around 5 folks that are users or fit the user profile. If the prototype is validated, good news! The team moves forward building the product. If the prototype is invalidated, good news! They didn’t spend time and money building something that isn’t needed.