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XColumn: How to Embed Your Audience in Your Product Teams
Have you ever used an app or product and come across a fundamental feature that was either hard to access or somehow more confusing than helpful? These are surprisingly common problems caused by a similar root issue.
When companies create products and experiences, they are often focused on a set of considerations: goals, budget, resources, timing, etc. But often one ingredient is missing: their audience — not just through research but through the direct makeup of the team designing the product.
Building New Features Through Mixed Perspectives
Representation comes in many forms: gender, sexual orientation, race, age, upbringing and more. Depending on the product, some criteria may or may not be relevant. What's important is that you build your team around the audience you're trying to cultivate, both now and in the future. As the chief architect of your customers' experience, you want to make sure your team can anticipate all the possible problems and provide unique solutions people might encounter. As head of product at Albert, an L.A.-based money app that helps people manage their financial lives, this idea of representation is important to me. That's why we've sought to build a balanced team that includes experts in personal finance, but also people who might not have known how to budget before. Our audience tends to skew slightly female, and, while I don't represent all women, I'm proud to lead design in a world where women fill less than 11% of design leadership roles across industries, despite representing 54% of designers.
Empathy and research will always be key to product design, but they can't replace representation. Without having stand-ins for your audience on your team, it's hard to know if you've covered the nuances in addition to missing the blind spots.
To achieve that at Albert, we aim to hire a cross section of our target audience: people who understand what it's like living as a young adult with limited access and experience with financial tools, as well as true personal finance experts. Fortunately for Los Angeles tech companies, this city has a huge pool of diverse, creative talent to hire and embed in product teams.
Assembling Representation in the Right Places
L.A.'s landscape offers so much to help companies achieve strong teams. It's a tapestry of SoCal born and bred as well as transplants from across the U.S. and the world, who bring influences from across the globe. These different backgrounds create a local ecosystem of potential representation. For Albert, financial needs like living costs and spending habits inherently vary by region, and that breadth of experiences in L.A. talent helps us stay relevant for a broad audience.
To find that perfect mix of representation, it's important to know what role you want each background to play in the product process and then source talent accordingly. I've found that the sweet spot is leaving the user experience up to the non-experts, the deep inner-workings to the experts, and the content to a collaboration between the two.
We want to make sure the core and operations of our experiences come from the experts who know what our target audience needs. The non-experts who can relate to our audiences play a crucial role catering the experience and the delivery, based on what they know will be most accessible to them.
Working on Albert's investing feature illustrated this for me personally. Our goal is to make investing approachable for those who feel overwhelmed at even the thought of taking control of their finances. To make it as easy as possible to get started, we have people on our team who are deeply experienced with the investing landscape, but it has been just as important to have team members who know nothing about investing.
For the deeply experienced, it's hard to know what needs more context. For the beginners, it's hard to know what's important to focus on or where to begin. Using investment lingo like ETFs and stock tickers would seem like a foreign language to our audience. Trying to teach technical aspects upfront doesn't solve our goal of making investing more approachable, and may even heighten the sense that it's overwhelming. Rather than trying to force it, we can get creative with new investing experiences that are easier to relate to as someone just starting out.
Those on our team who were newer to investing concepts gave critical feedback on what may be difficult to approach and what could make it more relatable—in this case, it was introducing themes like "sustainability," "technology," "biotech," and "women-led companies." On the flip side, without the experts on our team, we wouldn't know what kind of investing would actually be most appropriate for our audience. It's the teamwork that helps us make better, fresher products.
The Business Case for Inclusion
This is just scratching the surface of how important well-rounded representation is for making successful products. When working entirely from a place of empathy, decisions can be made on assumptions. With research, assumptions become educated guesses based on what users tell you. But, with your audience embedded within your teams, that information becomes fact from personal experience. Red flags can be raised quickly and easily internally instead of waiting to hear from your audience.
Product teams absolutely can and should include people that don't look like their target audience. It's an important piece to having good balance and perspective. But ultimately, you risk missing the mark on multiple fronts without representation. Companies nationwide are finally putting more action behind their words when it comes to embracing diversity within their ranks, and Los Angeles has a unique local ecosystem of talents of all varieties that no business based here should miss out on.
No matter what industry you're in—representation matters.
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TikTok’s Latest Ad Strategy: Let Brands Crowdsource Creators
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
TikTok’s newest advertising program will allow brands to crowdsource content from creators.
Branded Mission, which the Culver City-based video-sharing app announced Wednesday, is currently being beta-tested. The program lets brands release briefs containing specific creative directions—such as incorporating a specific hashtag, visual effect or audio—with the goal of procuring videos that will become promoted ads. Creators with at least 1,000 followers will be compensated with cash payments if the content performs well.
Creators participating in the “authentic branded content” program, as TikTok described it, can choose which brand initiatives they wish to participate in—with each Branded Mission “page” highlighting details like how much money a creator could potentially receive for participating. TikTok told Business Insider that it’s testing various payment models, including a first-come, first-serve model as well as “boosted traffic” compensation.
“Creators are at the center of creativity, culture and entertainment on TikTok,” the social media firm said in a statement. “With Branded Mission, we're excited to bring even more creators into the branded content ecosystem and explore ways to reward emerging and established creators.”
TikTok’s previous advertising strategies have relied on creators with large followings, with the recently announced TikTok Pulse targeting users with at least 100,000 followers. Branded Mission, on the other hand, gives creators with smaller platforms a chance to make more revenue beyond programs like TikTok’s Creator Fund.
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Greater Good Health Raises $10 Million To Fix America’s Doctor Shortage
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The pandemic highlighted what’s been a growing trend for years: Medical students are prioritizing high-paying specialty fields over primary care, leading to a shortage of primary care doctors who take care of a patient’s day-to-day health concerns. These physicians are a cornerstone of preventative health care, which when addressed can lower health care costs for patients, insurers and the government. But there’s a massive shortage of doctors all over the country, and the pipeline for primary care physicians is even weaker.
One local startup is offering a possible answer to this supply squeeze: nurse practitioners.
On Wednesday, Manhattan Beach-based Greater Good Health unveiled $10 million in new funding led by LRVHealth, adding to $3 million in seed funding raised by the startup last year. The company employs nurse practitioners and pairs them with doctor’s offices and medical clinics; this allows nurse practitioners to take on patients who would otherwise have to wait weeks, or even months, to see a doctor.
“This access and equity issue is just going to become more pervasive if we don't do things to help people gain more access,” Greater Good founder and CEO Sylvia Hastanan told dot.LA. “We need more providers to offer more patients appointments and access to their time to take care of their needs. And in order to do that, we really need to think about the workforce.”
There has been a growing movement in the medical industry to use nurse practitioners in place of increasingly scarce primary care physicians. California passed a law in 2020 that will widen the scope of nurse practitioners and allow them to operate without a supervising physician by 2023. Amid a shortage of doctors, there’s also the question of what will become of the largest and longest-living elderly population in recent history, Baby Boomers. Public health officials are already scrambling for ways to take care of this aging demographic’s myriad health needs while also addressing the general population.
“By the time you and I get old enough where we need primary care providers to help us with our ailments and chronic conditions, there aren't [going to be] enough of them,” Hastanan said. “And/or there just isn't going to be enough support for those nurse practitioners to really thrive in that way. And I worry about what our system will look like.”
Nurse practitioners function much like doctors do—they can monitor vitals, diagnose patients, and, in some cases, prescribe medication (though usually under the supervision of a doctor). Nurse practitioners need to get either a master’s degree or higher in nursing and complete thousands of hours of work in a clinical setting. All told, it usually takes six-to-eight years to become a nurse practitioner, compared to 10-to-15 years to become a practicing physician.
Greater Good Health’s platform puts nurse practitioners in often years-long care settings where they manage patients—most of whom are chronically ill, high-risk patients that need to be seen regularly and thoroughly. This allows them to follow up more carefully on patients they have managed for years, instead of catching up on a new patient’s history and treating them in the moment. Patients, meanwhile, don’t have to see a rotating door of clinicians and can talk to a provider they already have an established rapport with.
The one-year-old startup will use the funding to provide learning and development opportunities for its nurse practitioners and also connect them with each other through virtual support groups. Burnout has been an issue across health care during the pandemic, spurring an exodus of nursing and support staff and leaving health care facilities woefully understaffed. Greater Good hopes that keeping nurse practitioners in more stable, years-long care situations and offering them career development opportunities will help retain them and keep them in the workforce longer.
“We want them to be well-rounded and balanced both in work and life, and we see that returns us healthier, more engaged and ready nurse practitioners,” Hastanan said.
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Plus Capital Partner Amanda Groves on Celebrity Equity Investments
On this episode of the L.A. Venture podcast, Amanda Groves talks about how PLUS Capital advises celebrity investors and why more high-profile individuals are choosing to invest instead of endorse.
As a partner at PLUS, Groves works with over 70 artists and athletes, helping to guide their investment strategies. PLUS advises their talent roster to combine their financial capital with their social capital and focus on five investment areas: the future of work, future of education, health and wellness, the conscious consumer and sustainability.
“The idea is if we can leverage these people who have incredible audiences—and influence over that audience—in the world of venture capital, you'd be able to help make those businesses move forward faster,” Groves said.
PLUS works to create celebrity partnerships by identifying each client’s passions and finding companies that align with them, Groves said. From there, the venture firm can reach out to prospective partners from its many contacts and can help evaluate businesses that approach its clients. Recently, PLUS paired actress Nina Dobrev with the candy company SmartSweets after she had told them about her love for its snacks.
Celebrity entrepreneurship has shifted quite a bit in recent years, Groves said. While celebrities are paid for endorsements, Groves said investing allows them to gain equity from the growth of companies that benefit from their work.
“Like in movies, for example, where they're earning a residual along the way, they thought, ‘You know, if we're going to partner with these brands and create a tremendous amount of enterprise value, we should be able to capture some of the upside that we're generating, too’,” she said.
Partnering in this way also allows her clients to work with a wider range of brands, including small brands that often can’t afford to spend millions on endorsements. Investing allows high-profile individuals to represent brands they care about, Groves said.
“The last piece of the puzzle was a drive towards authenticity,” Groves said. “A lot of these high-profile artists and athletes are not interested, once they've achieved some sort of level of success, in partnering with brands that they don't personally align with.”
Hear the full episode by clicking on the playhead above, and listen to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.