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In our previous podcast, we interviewed human factors expert Christina Mendat. Christina worked with us in some of the software design for Spencer. I thought you would also enjoy hearing more about the development team at Spencer Health Solutions. So we invited our software product owner Mary Wrenn to join the podcast and tell us how she works with spencer and our engineering team. I’m Tom Rhodes, CEO of Spencer Health Solutions and I hope you enjoy this episode of “People Always, Patients Sometimes.”

Janet Kennedy (00:33):

You’re listening to “People Always, Patients Sometimes” podcast production of Spencer Health Solutions. I’m your host and my name is Janet Kennedy. I am really looking forward to learning something new during the conversation today I have Mary Wrenn who’s our software product owner at Spencer Health Solutions with me. Welcome to “People Always, Patients Sometimes.”

Mary Wrenn (00:54):

it is wonderful to be here. I am so excited to talk to you.

Janet Kennedy (00:58):

Thanks Mary. You know, this is one of the interesting things about a work environment where you see somebody every day, you talk to them every day, but sometimes the actual process of what they do is a mystery. So I’m really looking forward to having a conversation with you.

Mary Wrenn (01:15):

Absolutely. I think we know each other well from meeting in the kitchen, but I’m excited to chat a little bit more about what I do.

Janet Kennedy (01:21):

So you are officially titled a software product owner. Do we have more than one software?

Mary Wrenn (01:28):

Nope. There’s just one software platform across the suite of products, the mobile app, the web portal, and the device itself. I am the product owner for all three of those.

Janet Kennedy (01:40):

So what does that mean? Are you the engineer on the train? Are you the conductor on the train? Are you the caboose on the train? What is your role and how do you keep things moving forward?

Mary Wrenn (01:49):

Yeah, so I would say I’m kind of like the conductor/cat herder. So I essentially help to keep things moving in the right direction. Sometimes I’ll be picking the way the tracks go or sometimes we’ll be talking about the best design for the train. So it’s a little bit of everything. But for the most part it’s executing and kind of getting into the tactical details of how we do what we do.

Janet Kennedy (02:14):

I imagine when you joined us you really felt like you’ve jumped off a cliff and now you’re in the deep end of the pond as it were. Was it overwhelming or is there something about software product ownership that you can apply skills from your previous experience to here and settle in fairly quickly?

Mary Wrenn (02:34):

I actually came from another kind of software product owner, product manager role. I was originally at United Health Group working within Optum, so I consciously decided to go from a really large company to a smaller company. I was really enticed by the fact that I could wear a lot of different hats and I’ve definitely gotten to do that here. I really enjoy getting to do a lot of different across the product suite, whether that’s design, technical implementation, or really just getting into the details of how things are going to work and how people are going to use them. Definitely felt like I was kind of going from walking to running a marathon, but I really enjoy it and I liked that the software product ownership really has a lot of different facets to it.

Janet Kennedy (03:21):

In a sense, we’ve gotten virtual. We’ve been able to see a sneak peek into everybody’s homes and I was very impressed that you actually had in your home a giant whiteboard that was filled with all kinds of information. So you’re a very organized person, Mary.

Mary Wrenn (03:37):

Thank you. Yeah, the whiteboard is a key. Pretty much anything from any conversation we have is going to get thrown up there. I’m trying to do color coding, but I think that was an ambitious idea that probably got thrown away after meeting number 10.

Janet Kennedy (03:50):

Well, I can relate to that. So I’m curious, you’ve been in healthcare then for a while. Is there anything unique or different about software product management in a healthcare realm versus a traditional B2B or B to C business?

Mary Wrenn (04:07):

Definitely. I think so. I feel like healthcare is really the most intimate industry of any of them. You touch people’s lives and really personal places and you really get to see people at their most vulnerable. But that’s really what enticed me to healthcare in general. I really liked that you can make an impact on people’s lives, whether that’s directly or indirectly. So I liked that you can use software as a tool to really help better people’s lives, even if you’re not directly with them, say like a nurse. So I think healthcare is really special. It comes with a lot of responsibility, but it’s, it’s really exciting how much change you can drive.

Janet Kennedy (04:45):

Well, let’s talk about change a little bit. The one thing that I know about software is you’re always working on something. It is never done and there’s always more to do. So when you look at plans for Spencer, for instance, how far ahead are you looking? Is it just trying to get to Friday or is it three weeks, six weeks, six months, five years? How does the planning work for something like that?

Mary Wrenn (05:11):

It depends on which aspect of the product in general you’ll be looking at. So there are some things that when we’re designing product features, we’re trying to look really far out five, 10 years in the future, even just to make sure that we’re making a really flexible design. That’s a lot of the architecture decisions, like how we’re setting up things in terms of how we’ll read bar codes or how we’ll add different countries, things like that. Then there are other shorter term goals, like how are we going to wrap up this project to make sure we get this to the right patients at the right time. So our roadmaps, really a mix, we usually are organizing things kind of by release and customer need. So that’ll prioritize it in the next few weeks, the next few months. But within that we’re trying to make flexible decisions so that way anything we’re doing now can be iterated on in the next few years. So our roadmap is weekly, quarterly, and yearly.

Janet Kennedy (06:08):

And when you’re designing something, you need to look out to the future because when you get to two years from now and you want to add this significant element, but oops, if you didn’t do something two years ago, does that mean it’s impossible or you’re just going to have to do all kinds of workarounds to make it happen?

Mary Wrenn (06:28):

So it really depends. Right now, for instance, we’re in the process of really standing up a brand new product software wise. So when I came in we were really in the process of redesigning and rebuilding things from the ground up. So there were a lot of those decisions that were kind of baked in in terms of, well if we change it this way we’ll have to go back and completely reconfigure things. Or if we do something this way now then it’s going to be set that way, the future. So really we try to make the most flexible decisions we can, but try to align that with some of the goals or needs we know are coming. So for instance, previously we were very much aligned to care management and sort of this thought that every patient is going to have one caregiver and it’s going to be a very linear relationship. Now we’re trying to make that a flexible architecture where it won’t work just for care management but for clinical trials also. And those are very different use cases. So what we’re trying to circle back, we’re trying to make sure that we don’t have to go back and say, Oh well if we had just done this, you know, two months ago, this would be so much easier. We’re really trying to make things so they’re modular and can fit together.

Janet Kennedy (07:37):

Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Now you mentioned a cat herding and I do know what that’s like because I’m on the marketing side and there’s a certain amount of cat herding there as well. I’m curious about how people interact together. Is it a domino effect where if you’re flipping the Domino’s over and they’re running forward, but then a domino is missing, everything comes to a stop or have you got parallel paths and somebody can catch up if they’re a little behind but it doesn’t stop the whole workflow?

Mary Wrenn (08:09):

Yeah, so we’re currently trying to make the team as cross functional as possible so everyone can do a little bit of everything. Obviously within that there are people who are more embedded in their specialties. For instance, we have some people who are really good at the embedded software or we have some people who were really good with Bluetooth or others who are really good with the UI. So we try to make sure that we can have these parallel paths running, but there will always be some dependencies. So a lot of that comes into how our planning, so we’ll use a basically an agile process to go and plan out our sprints. We’ll do story points and within that we like to get the workload on people so we can ensure that not everything is just running towards one person and then it’s bottleneck did and that person just feels of pressure. So we try to spread the dependencies as much as we can.

Janet Kennedy (09:00):

I had a great conversation earlier with Christina Mendez, who has a company called human factors MD. And her role is to come in and help put together the relationship between psychology and engineering. So understanding how people as people work, look at things, interact, and then how engineering designs the things to work best with people. So I’m curious, is this an ongoing thing? Do you use human factors in a lot of the decision making you’re doing or is it literally just for the interface between the user and Spencer?

Mary Wrenn (09:41):

So it’s really across a lot of the product in general. You know, granted most of that focus is on the interface itself, which is mostly the device, but it also comes into play on the web portal, Spencer care and on the mobile apps, but psoriasis. So we really try to look at the ways that people will use that and the different use cases fair. But even into things like our API is we have some customers who aren’t going to be sending us information directly through the API. We want to make sure that those are easy to use as well. So there might not be a graphical interface there who we want to make sure that it’s logical and it doesn’t need pages of explanation just to use a simple function.

Janet Kennedy (10:20):

I tried to give Christina credit for the personality of Spencer and she said, Nope, no, that wasn’t her. So who came up with and how do you manage the personality? Because I honestly feel like Spencer is a person. He has a fun way of speaking, he’s very relaxed, he’s very engaging, he’s very easy to use. So is there something that you do that your team does that gives Spencer personality?

Mary Wrenn (10:49):

So we really made sure to work closely with marketing in general. Gail was a huge help in terms of really imparting that personality. I was really lucky when I first got here that I had a lot of time to sit with her and really go over all the wording on the screens and say, you know, how did these look? Even things as simple as error messages saying, does this really fit his personality? And I was really able to get a strong sense of who he is and how he talks to our patients. So we were able to really incorporate that into the design of the screens and all of the logic within that. So anything from the error screens to how he’s telling you to take your medication? We really just sat down and went through it step by step on how we want him to communicate with patients.

Janet Kennedy (11:33):

Speaking of communicating, we’re very excited that Spencer has headed across the pond to Europe and that the first country Spencer has been in that doesn’t speak English, is the Netherlands and so Spencer’s now Dutch speaking, what was it like to take our existing product and redo everything in the Dutch language and then now I guess we’re going to be looking at French and German and Spanish, et cetera. What is that like translating a complete platform to another language

Mary Wrenn (12:07):

in a word difficult, but it was a really great challenge actually, I think for most of us on the team, this was the first time we had done something in another language, so there were a lot of decision points and things that you don’t even think about that we really had to consider. So even things like the word, okay, is that going to fit on a button to the colors mean the same thing to the symbols mean the same thing and how do we make that really universal? So we really had to think about how we were architecting the platform and even how the text and the colors and the voice prompts would all interface with each other. There’s some important things about the voice prompts as well. You want to make sure that he’s actually telling people to take their medication and not to say, well, if you want to do, maybe go take it.

Mary Wrenn (12:52):

So it was a lot of things like that. The process itself actually I felt like went pretty well. It was a learning experience at first for sure. We realized for instance, that Dutch has a lot of really long words which don’t necessarily fit on buttons and the current font size that we have. So we actually had to reconfigure the UI a little bit to accommodate that. We also had to adjust how we were displaying questions when we were trying those out with some French examples just to see how those would look. So it actually informed a lot of our design, the sizing, the display. There were a lot of things we had to account for that we didn’t initially in English.

Janet Kennedy (13:29):

What do you consider some of the biggest challenges that you have to deal with in trying to make Spencer work in multiple types of business environments?

Mary Wrenn (13:41):

The overall architecture, because if you’re taking care of your grandma, you would kind of need a different machine and you would look to it for different uses than you would if you were a clinical trial trying to give a drug to hundreds of patients. But fundamentally it’s all the same platform that’s going to be used. So you really have to design that very flexibly so that way you can accommodate all of those different things within the same platform. So it’s really important to keep in mind the personas of who’s going to be using what and making sure that everything will work to align with those use cases and work in their best interest. I think the most challenging piece is just making sure that you are staying flexible enough that the product is usable for all the different personas.

Janet Kennedy (14:27):

So as a marketer, I haven’t been as involved as my boss. She’s been very involved in getting Spencer launched over in Europe. But one of the things that I did get to participate in was selecting voices for the Spencer voice. So Spencer is sometimes female and sometimes male, which I think is interesting, but I love the reaction to the voice we chose for Dutch. And I wonder if you had heard the story and can tell everybody a little bit about what we found out once we pick the special voice.

Mary Wrenn (15:02):

Absolutely. That was definitely one of my favorite parts of the translation. So initially we got to just all sit around and listen to these lovely Dutch voices, read us things we could not understand. We finally landed on this really nice, soft sounding female voice and everybody was like, Oh, I really like her, chose that, didn’t think much of it. And as she was reading out the video tutorials, we got a feedback from our Dutch partners that apparently this woman had narrated animated shows for kids in the Netherlands and it was really popular. And so one of our business partners would say, Oh, it’s so soothing. You can feel like I’m watching cartoons. It reminds me of childhood.

Janet Kennedy (15:41):

That’s awesome. We found the Mary Poppins of the Netherlands to be the voice of spencer. That’s pretty serendipitous. I think

Mary Wrenn (15:49):

that was my favorite. I think she has a lovely voice. I love that she explains how to use Spencer in Dutch. You’re like, I don’t know what you’re saying, but I love it.

Janet Kennedy (15:57):

Well, Mary, it sounds like you actually enjoy your job.

Mary Wrenn (16:01):

I do. I really like a challenge and this always keeps me on my toes. I love that. At a small company like this you can wear a ton of different hats and do a lot of different things, so I think it’s been a great growth opportunity.

Janet Kennedy (16:12):

Well, I look forward to the time when we can all be face to face again in person as opposed to virtually, hopefully covert 19 will be resolving itself in the not too distant future so we can get back to working together a little more closely.

Mary Wrenn (16:28):

Absolutely. But in the meantime it has been wonderful to speak with you at least virtually.

Janet Kennedy (16:34):

Thanks, Mary and thank you for downloading this episode of “People Always, Patients Sometimes.” if you enjoy the conversation, a review and a rating on iTunes will help us find more listeners. This podcast is a production of Spencer health solutions.