Finding the opportunity to succeed
It was late spring of 2013 and I was recently coming off my first year in grad school. In the year prior I had decided to leave my job as a risk analyst at, Marsh, the world’s largest commercial insurance broker. . I wanted to pivot away from the insurance industry and land a more marketing or new media-centric role. As a part of my decision to quit Marsh, I applied and was accepted into DePaul University for Grad School. I was pleased with my decision to choose DePaul to continue my postgraduate studies and my first year was spent dabbling in different coursework until I stumbled upon the New Media Studies masters program.
It was while searching for marketing jobs at digital and advertising companies in Chicago that I first came to realize that opportunities rested beyond developers and designers at technology startups. In my hunt across job boards I kept noticing various marketing, operations, and analytics roles at small Chicago-based companies. With this new realization in hand, I set out to search for and apply to opportunities at local startups.
Within a month or two of searching, I stumbled across a unique opportunity at a local startup that focused on health and wellness. The role that I applied to and quickly accepted was for a marketing research assistant at higi, a startup that recently rolled out around a 100 health kiosks in the Chicagoland area.
The accidental product manager
I never intended to be a product manager. To be honest, 5 years ago I didn’t know it was an available role, particularly in companies that build products and technologies. My mental model of those types of companies, specifically technology companies, was much more naive. To be honest, I assumed the workforce consisted of two types of builders: those that build with 1s and 0s and those that build with pixels and then maybe a few sales and business people to keep the lights on.
I was initially brought on to the higi team to assist with our higi Station rollout by gathering market feedback from the pharmacies in which we were distributing the new machines. Shortly after starting, our new head of marketing wished to revise our business model so I was asked to shift my focus to assist our head of business development in updating our business model to reflect our new marketing strategy. As is the nature of a small startup without the luxury of deep pockets or immediate revenue opportunity, I, like most of the other 25 employees, were simultaneously wearing multiple hats.
Within 12-months of being hired I had exposure to the following roles and lines of business: user research, business development, kiosk platform support, kiosk operations, web design, and mobile product management. It was at this time that I learned how far an inquisitive mind and eager demeanor will take someone, especially in environments that are operating in a very lean manner.
A deeper reflection upon this time with higi leads me to believe two things. First, constraints, while frustrating, are an interesting and often beneficial force in eliciting production. Because higi was a bootstrapped company that didn’t have the resources to hire an endless supply of people I would find myself tasked with organizing and running meetings to introduce business requirements to our designers and engineers, while the next day I’d been on an operations call that exposed me to the multiple problems we faced in our attempt to support and scale our growing kiosk platform. It was in this bootstrapped environment that I solidified the power of asking multiple questions and taking a very realistic approach to problem-solving.
Second, constraints force one to adapt and become creative. I would be hard pressed to find an opportunity that would have allowed me to work on so many interesting projects. On the surface, higi has and continues to be a network of health stations but over the past 5 years we’ve evolved into something more involved and expansive. And during that time I’ve had the pleasure to work on a food identification app (yes, we could identify a picture of a hot dog way before Jian Yang), a proposed FICO score for your health, and the overhaul and launch of a health engagement platform. I may have never been afforded the opportunity to be a part of the development and design of such products had higi not been operating, like most startups, on a very lean budget during those initial years.
The future is now
Five years into my tenor at higi I find myself as the product lead for higi's direct to user communication, content curation and distribution, and ad creation and distribution. I lead a cross-functional team that focuses on all of the media and messaging that exists on our platform. higi is thriving and set to close out a series B round of funding this summer which will allow us the necessary resources and runway to execute on a new business model. Needless to say, I’m excited about the journey ahead.
As our company evolves and the product becomes more complicated, I need to remember to spend my time focusing on and prioritizing problems that help the most people and have the greatest impact towards our business success. Over the last few years, I’ve gained a lot of real-world experience around what it is like to build digital media technologies while being afforded the opportunity to further my academic understanding of new media. Not only do I need to leverage this coupling of unique exposures in my future product development efforts, I intend to take advantage of these unique experiences by further my professional identity online through the use of my new website and a new commitment to blogging.