Product in Healthcare and Fintech
What challenges do product managers face in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance? In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, Melissa Perri speaks with Colin Anawaty about his journey to co-founding First Dollar and the challenges of navigating a highly regulated industry.
Show Notes
What challenges do product managers face in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance? In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, Melissa Perri speaks with Colin Anawaty about his journey to co-founding First Dollar and the challenges of navigating a highly regulated industry. Colin shares his insights on Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), the benefits of utilizing them, and why he thinks they should be more widely available to all Americans.
He also discusses the importance of personal and career growth within startups, and the value of providing clear career paths to employees. He describes how First Dollar evolved into a platform, and how their focus on addressing healthcare inequities and tying together healthcare and finance can lead to incentivizing better outcomes for all.
Colin Anawaty is the Chief Product Officer of First Dollar, a health wallet platform that provides its services to plan administrators to help consumers utilize their health benefits more easily and effectively. Colin has over six years of experience in healthcare and previously worked in the prepaid industry. Before joining First Dollar, Colin worked at athenahealth, where he and Melissa first met. Colin is a product management expert with a strong focus on healthcare and finance and has a passion for helping people make the most of their healthcare benefits.
Here are some ideas you’ll hear Colin and Melissa discuss:
Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) are a type of account created by the US government to make healthcare more affordable through pre-tax contributions. Unlike other benefits, such as FSAs and HRAs, HSAs can be kept even after leaving employment and can be invested for future use. Colin believes that HSAs should be more widely available to all Americans.
The healthcare and finance industries are complex and highly regulated, and it can be challenging for product managers to become subject matter experts in both areas. Colin and his team learned about the industries by using resources such as industry experts and advisory boards, and they also hired people who had a mix of product management experience and expertise in either healthcare or finance.
When hiring product managers for a startup, Colin looks for people who have the drive to learn and grow, and who have taken courses in product management. It's important to align product managers with the product lines they oversee and to focus on problem discovery and working with customers.
Product managers need to be curious and open to learning about new things, especially when dealing with complexity.
Formal training, subject matter experts, and nonprofit organizations can all help product managers get up to speed on regulations and compliance.
Embedding security ops and compliance into the culture of a company can make it less scary and more manageable for everyone involved.
Creating a consumer advisory board or incorporating customer engagement into terms of service can help companies navigate legal and compliance issues when trying to work directly with end users.
Big companies prioritize change management and stability, while startups prioritize velocity and rapid iteration to achieve product-market fit.
First Dollar started with a mission to help people shop for care but pivoted to become a platform for HSAs and FSAs.
Resources: Colin Anawaty on LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram First Dollar
Episode Transcript
Colin Anawaty: A lot of startups, the title's a title, we don't care, we're gonna give everyone VP of product or VP of design and sometimes that stuff is great. But at the same time, we want people to understand kind of where they are in their career so that we can work together, we can focus on the right skillset development and I can grow people quickly into bigger and bigger roles so that the people who've really come to know our business, our product, our customers can then transform themselves to become team leaders. And so that's beyond just kind of things that you got to do as a founder, including janitorial services from time to time.
Melissa Perri: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today we're gonna talk about healthcare product management, also very highly regulated product management and the difference in being a chief product officer founding your own company versus working in larger organizations. And I'm joined by Colin Aniwadi, who's the chief product officer of First Dollar. Welcome, Colin.
Colin Anawaty: Thanks, Melissa. And thanks for having me. Excited to talk about healthcare and finance today.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, it's gonna be great. Colin and I know each other because we were both at Athena Health for a while. And then Colin left to start his own company called First Dollar. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Colin?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, happy to. So First Dollar today is a health wallet platform. We provide our services to plant administrators. Plant administrators can include health plans, PPAs, financial institutions, or brokers. We're looking for a modern solution for designing and administrating health benefits. For consumers, we try to make it super simple to utilize those benefits.
And the benefits I'm talking about is that tax acronym SUP. So HSAs, FSAs, HRAs, but also some of the new benefits you're seeing health plans offer to help differentiate their plan or to hit some of those social determinants issues, whether it's paying for care, transportation for care, or just being able to afford some healthy groceries.
Melissa Perri: Cool, and how'd you come up with this idea?
Colin Anawaty: Well, at Athena Health, part of our benefits were in HSA. Plus, we were kind of front row seeing how providers were incentivized to get compensated and to help consumers change their behavior. And we thought the HSA was a very untapped way to help incentivize those under a high deductible plan to become more informed, to shop for their care, and hopefully also stress their dollar by understanding the tax advantage nature of it and also the investability of those dollars that we're saving in our HSA.
That's how we got started. Over the course of a few years, we pivoted and we realized that the reason so many people have a very consistent experience or a very similar experience and arguably a very broken experience, is that the industry is largely powered by two 20-year-old kind of mainframe solutions. And we kind of landed on the opportunity to be, sometimes we allude to ourselves a strike for healthcare, but that's exactly what we offer to the market as a platform of apps, widgets, and APIs to be able to offer these in benefits, and not just in a better experience, but also embed them where the member is already going or the member prefers to go.
Such as your insurance portal or your 401k portal or somewhere else that you may already be managing both your finances and your healthcare.
Melissa Perri: So it took me a while personally to figure out what an HSA is. And we also have a bunch of people in Europe who are probably listening to this and going, what, because of American healthcare? But can you tell us a little bit about what is an HSA and like, why would somebody want that?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, so there's a few account types, HSA included, that are created by the US government to help us and employers kind of augment cover care and then try to make it a little bit more affordable through kind of pre-tax contributions. The great thing about the HSA versus what a lot of people confuse it with as the FSA is it's the only benefit you and I receive, whereby once I left Athena, I still kept my benefit. I was able to keep my HSA, I could keep putting money in it, I could keep investing in it, whereas the FSAs and the HRAs are very much tied to your employment.
So that's a good thing when the employer is putting contributions on it. It's a bad thing because it's just incentivizing you to spend it down to zero every year or you lose that money. And so I'm a big fan of HSAs and a lot of the work we do on the policy front is try to expand HSAs to more people.
The code for HSAs was written back in 2006 and at the time, high deductible was a new concept. Now everyone has a high deductible and premiums are out of control. And so I do think generally speaking, HSA should be something all Americans have access to.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I really like that. I know for us too, it's only available on high deductible plans, but depending on where you get the high deductible plan, for me it's like $1,500 at Harvard, but for some other people in South Carolina, it's like $7,000 and that counts as high deductible. So I'm really appreciating your fight for getting expanded access to this because I really do think it's a great tool.
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, that's right. And it's excluded from veterans and if you're on Medicare, you can still use your HSA funds, you just can't contribute to anymore. And we're having the silver tsunamis coming and my mom included was still working up until last year. And so she was ineligible to continue to receive contributions to her HSA because she had to switch to Medicare.
And even in a universal healthcare system or Medicare for all, it's just unreasonable that the government can pay for everything from assisted living to end of life care and palliative care. And so again, I just generally think the HSA could be simplified and made more available to more people and that would be a huge benefit to Americans.
Melissa Perri: So you have been working in healthcare now for a while. You've also got the financial side. These are two incredibly complex domains, tons of legislature, tons of compliance, tons of really knowing the nitty gritty about how all this works. How did you get up to speed on this domain?
Colin Anawaty: So I had the benefit of working in healthcare for kind of the last six years. And previously I'd spent some time in the prepaid industry, but a lot had changed. And so what you've seen is this rise in banking as a service. And that was an opportunity for us to get started offering financial products for much cheaper than what was required even 10 years ago to offer a card program or to integrate with a bank and work with a bank.
And so there was a moment in time where I think now was a good time to go and try to attack the financial services companies that were historically offering HSAs. And honestly, how we got up to speed is just through what you expect of high capacity people. You gotta go out there. You gotta find the resources.
You gotta Google it. I talked with a lot of industry people at Visa, at MasterCard. There's nonprofit groups that help with the administration and the rules we have to follow around FSAs. So there was a lot of that that I did upfront. And then in my capacity as CPO, assemble that content in a digestible format and bring it to the team and help them get educated.
Through that process, it also helped us assemble our advisory board, which is a more formal cadence we do once a month with various industry experts. And that allows my team kind of front to have direct exposure, ask questions as we're building things. And that's been super helpful.
Melissa Perri: I love how you're touching on this and what you did to go learn. I think there's a really big debate in product management about do I need a domain expert? And I think we both probably worked with a bunch of domain experts who then became product managers afterwards in healthcare or other industries.
But then there's also a question of like, do I need that person to be a subject matter expert? Do I need just a great product manager? And can I teach them about domain expertise? But I'm running into that a lot with finding chief product officers. I've seen that a lot in training people to be product managers.
What's your opinion on that? When might you need a specific domain expert and you train them in product? Or what do you think about with the flip of getting up to speed in your domain instead?
Colin Anawaty: This is a fun question and it's one we still debate internally on a role by role basis. As we were kind of chatting at the start of this podcast, first dollar kind of sits squarely at the intersections of finance and healthcare. Both of those industries on the surface, I think you and I interact with them, everyone interacts with them, but they're really made up of a bunch of billion dollar segments within finance.
You have banking and processing and investments and broker dealers and all these other smaller sectors, just like you do in healthcare. And so finding someone with expertise also means going down usually a couple of levels in certain sectors to find the people who really know the domain. And so that's been somewhat of a challenge for us, but I think we've done a pretty good job of taking a blended approach.
And so I'm usually looking for one or the other. When it comes to product management, I think it's kind of understood, especially in a startup, you need to have some experience of the trade. You've got to be able to kind of manage a backlog. You got to know how to do problem discovery and work with customers.
That's kind of a given. The question then becomes what software are you managing? Is it consumer facing? Is it administration facing? Is it kind of core banking and core platform? And based on that orientation, that usually guides, are we looking for someone who knows consumer well? Are we looking for someone who knows benefits administration well?
Or are we looking for somebody who does payments well? Generally, we do try to align them based on the product lines that they're kind of overseeing. And that's worked very well for us. One of our top product leads is a great product manager, just kind of end to end, knows the skills. It was very new for her to join and do finance and to do healthcare.
But when you hire startups, you're looking for people with drive and you're looking for people with that kind of unsatisfied curiosity to keep learning and keep growing. And I think if you have those combinations, plus you've taken one of your courses and you're a great product manager, you can come here and thrive. And I think that's true really for any other industry.
Learning technology is hard enough. Applying it to different industries, it's just a matter of getting up to speed and learning some of the nomenclature.
Melissa Perri: Very cool. I agree with that wholeheartedly too. I do think it's like, if you've got a great product manager, they're usually gonna wanna learn about new things. And that curiosity is key there. When you're thinking about designing your organization too, because you got that complexity and you've got a bunch of product managers who are learning these things for the first time, are you doing anything else to help them get up to speed? Like I've seen some places embed subject matter experts or they have an open reach to different advisors. What does your team have access to, to learn more about their regulations and compliance and stuff?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, our VP of compliance, and that's not a scary name for us and it's not a scary guy. He's awesome. He helps run and facilitate a bunch of training programs that kind of touch up. Because our financial products are regulated by the IRS, including the Department of Labor and other aspects, he has helped put together training programs that really kind of apply universally, whether you're in success or you're building out some of these programs, like a flexible spending account.
So that's one thing we do, which is some formal training. The other thing we do is we join some of the nonprofits that are governing these programs. And with that comes a ton of, it is a little bit black and white and dry, but a ton of literature that people then have access to. And then the third piece I touched on earlier is just to your point, bringing in subject matter expertise.
Either they were the right fit, right product management, right background, and we hire them on the team, or they're just an industry expert and we bring them into our formal advisory board or our formal technical board if you're an engineer, and we do those engagements with those folks on a monthly basis.
Melissa Perri: So you just said the VP of compliance is not scary, which I'm sure a bunch of people just listened to and went, our VP of compliance is scary, or our legal team. But I know that that's an issue for a lot of people who do work in heavily regulated areas. What do you guys do on your team to make the VP of compliance less scary and to make Beagle not feel like such a roadblock that they just say no to absolutely everything?
Colin Anawaty: Great question, and one that I'm really proud about because arguably anyone dealing with credit card data, you and I's social security number or birth date, we really all should be adhering to SOC 2 and HIPAA and all of those privacy safeguards because of the amount of hacks and data leaks that are happening. And so from Jump Street, we really incorporated security ops into our development, our definitions of done, so that culturally this stuff was one, never scary, but two, would never become an hindrance on velocity. We just addressed it, we embedded it in the culture, and we've done a similar thing with compliance.
And what we really liked about Jeff, our VP of compliance is he's the right kind of person where he doesn't want compliance to be in the way, but he, like we've done with security ops, wants to embed it in the culture and have an equal parts of respect for it rather than fear. And we have a great partnership across product engineering, legal and compliance to just kind of understand and obey the industries, two very regulated industries, just so we're not creating further versions of technical debt down the road that we've got to walk back on. And again, it's just been one of our pillars of culture, not just at a company level, but also in a product development at the product organization level too.
Melissa Perri: What would be your advice for companies that are trying to set up a way for product development to work? They might be new to product development. I've worked with lots of banks, let's say, who are trying to navigate. We have this legal team over here and we would love our product managers to be experimenting and talking to users, but what they tend to do is they always make them go ask legal for permission first.
And then they're not sure, like legal becomes a gatekeeper, they say no to everything, or they can't get in touch with legal and it says, hey, it has to end up on our desk and we have to review it later. What's your advice for setting up this working relationship you're talking about for those companies?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, when you are in industries where at least the company has a sensitivity to engaging end users directly, whether that's administrators or consumers, which as you know is so vital to building great products, I have a couple of ideas there. One is kind of ask for permission once to create a consumer advisory board or a patient advisory board where your end users subscribe that way and just kind of design it with legal and compliance to where you have a safe forum that they've approved, that consumers are aware of, that when they join these certain functions and discussions are gonna happen. That's thing one, and I think depending on the flexibility you can kind of incorporate in your terms of service that from time to time, whether it's anonymous data or outreach from one of our team members, we're gonna engage customers for feedback under the privacy rules and regulations that we follow.
And so kind of blessing it and getting it incorporated from Jump Street is another approach that I think folks can do. As you know, it's not uncommon. A lot of consumers wanna give their opinion. They want the product to get better. And so I think it's generally just getting legal and compliance to understand the benefit to reaching out and also ensuring that you're not gonna violate the privacy, especially as we talk about sensitive subjects like finance and healthcare.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I really liked that. I never thought about putting it into the terms of service, but that's a really cool way to start that contract earlier. Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take? It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams and companies to upscale their product chops through my fully online school.
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Melissa Perri: You've now worked at smaller companies. You worked at large company. Athena was for those people who don't know it was like 5,000 people. And then you started your own company. What have you learned going big company versus small company and being a founder or CPO? What's the differences between those different scenarios and what was most surprising to you making that jump?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah. So, you know, Athena Health was a great experience for me. I had never worked at a company that large. And what I got to learn during that process, working with you, was how do we chain commanders intent and still manage and grow a zone and keep everyone kind of marching in the same order, as I, as an entrepreneur and startup founder, abstracted myself away from being able to influence the individual teams.
So that was something I really enjoyed learning, and I took a lot of things and applied that even in a smaller startup, especially now because it's a post pandemic world and everyone's remote. And so I don't get the benefit of the sighted at the desk conversations like we used to when we did startups in the proverbial garage. And so having really good ways to communicate and simplify strategy and keep everyone marching in the same direction has been a really useful artifact that I've brought down from a big company to now our new startup.
And so that's kind of thing, one that big companies taught me, that I am now applying in our hybrid startup. And I think this is a bit of a cliche. It's a generalized statement, but the biggest difference is just this push for velocity. And I don't mean that purely from an engineering perspective, which is a metric we often measure, but really from a whole company perspective, from engaging the customer, to understanding the problem, to experimenting with solutions and rapid prototyping, to shipping a half-baked MVP and actually being proud about it, knowing it's not perfect, but really trying to keep those iteration and that feedback loop very tight.
Very fast and trying to get to product market fit so that you get to the next inflection point and the startup can continue to grow. And bigger businesses, they don't always have to worry about that, right? The product's maturing with that, processes around it are maturing. You have a much bigger change management and the place is so big.
Nobody wants to risk the golden goose that's laying all the revenue to then feed the R&D group. So the incentives just kind of change. And I think that's the biggest difference on the surface and not all big companies are slow in that way, but that is just naturally what happens and it will certainly happen to first dollar as we grow.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, as anything gets bigger, it always gets slower and it loses a lot of that juice that gives startups that speed to places as you add more people, you add more complexity. That's always what happens. So you are chief product officer founder too and it's a little bit not untraditional but I will say what I typically see in startups, right?
Is you've got your CEO who kind of runs product for a while then decides they wanna be a CEO and hires a product leader, right? But you and Jason were like, you're gonna be CEO, I'll be chief product officer which is cool. So when you're thinking about starting it from scratch as a chief product officer, what skills are you bringing in there?
How are you thinking about structuring your team from the beginning? That's different than maybe like a CEO trying to bring in somebody later. What edge do you think it gives you?
Colin Anawaty: I'll toot my own horn just a little bit, and I don't usually like to brag about myself, but I've always been a builder by trade. So when we first got started, it was three of us and a desk that Techstars let us just use because we were alumni, and it was a very nice gesture of theirs. But it was very much doing the rapid prototyping as a designer, doing some front-end coding as a former front-end engineer, and then handing that off to our now CTO to do the full prototype.
And so that's what I brought to the table as just an individual contributor, product manager, designer, slash coder, but having done the entrepreneurial thing, Jason and I work well together on the strategic aspects, the investment deck, the opportunity, the go-to-market strategy, the fundraising, and so I'm still supporting that, but as a small team just trying to put together the early iteration of what it is we want to sell and market. I do have a little bit of a Swiss army knife to my ability to do a lot of that in the early days.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think that's such an important skill set and I think you have such an interesting background because you can do that. Like I've seen you lead large teams before and then with First Dollar you watch you jump in from the beginning, be able to do the prototyping, do those things. When you're thinking about growing this too, what's your next wave for First Dollar? As you think about growing the product team, how's your position going to change? What are you going to keep doing? What have you been doing with your product management team too as they grow?
Colin Anawaty: That's also something that I think about, and the opportunity that I think most startups afford people is just a lot of personal growth and, hopefully with that too, also career growth. This was something else I was able to kind of take away from Athena, but we've instituted a lot of really great career path and giving people a little bit more perspective, instead of a lot of startups, the title is the title, we don't care, we're going to give everyone VP of product or VP of design, and sometimes that stuff is great. But at the same time we want people to understand kind of where they are in their career so that we can work together, we can focus on the right skill set development and I can grow people quickly into bigger and bigger roles so that the people who've really come to know our business, our product, our customers can then transform themselves to become team leaders.
And so that's beyond just kind of things that you got to do as a founder, including janitorial services from time to time, that's also where I put a lot of my energy to make sure my team can grow as we grow, and so that's again just something that I spend a lot more energy on than I used to.
Melissa Perri: That's great and it keeps them with the company, right? Giving them those career paths so that they can get into it, they see a place for them to go and they see you leveling up and then they can see that they can level up and they've got a lot of that space which is nice. So with First Dollar 2 because you're in such a highly regulated business, how was that getting started?
Because I work with a bunch of founders through HBS and through other places and when they go to tackle these industries like this one it's you have to infiltrate banking, you have to infiltrate healthcare, they're so highly regulated, there's so many really large company players, not even to mention the government. Like what was your biggest challenge getting this off the ground with all that complexity that goes into that?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, part of this will kind of feed into our pivot. So when we started First Dollar, the mission and vision and it's still a pillar of our quantum strategy was to help people shop for care. That's a wide aperture. What you need is a lot different than what I need and I think to do those kinds of companies well, you're looking at a Hems or a Hers or an Omada, things that are very focused on a condition and then kind of going deep and expanding that way, especially in the direct to consumer sense.
And so when we were thinking about the HSA, it was from the lens of who is most incentivized to shop and it's people on our high deductible plan because they're covering so much out of pocket and that was where we got started. What we didn't fully appreciate was how much that HSA and that high deductible plan was a real limiter, lots of tension and us actually doing direct to consumer. You spend a dollar on Facebook, guess what? 20 or 30% of people are actually eligible because of that HDHP HSA contingency.
When we wanted to offer an HSA, some of the incumbents we are now challenging had quarter million dollar startup fees would take nine to 12 months to get us a card and market. And we said somewhat foolishly, well, hey, there's all of this activity happening in banking as a service land. We can get started in a way that SaaS companies or companies that benefit from SaaS do, very little bit upfront pay as you go kind of a model generally speaking.
And we partnered with a great banking as a service provider. Then we kind of went from there. We got an HSA and market in four months, but it was a very minimum viable product. We didn't even fully account for things like overlapping tax years. And so Melissa has all the way up until April 15th to make a contribution for last year.
So you're out of box checking account that you get from a lot of banking as a service providers doesn't cut it. It doesn't account for those things. The account statements are factually wrong. The 1099s and 5498 tax forms don't work. And so somewhat by accident, we realized we were having to build a lot more than we ever accounted for.
And that's also when we realized the opportunity that the market needed more platforms to get HSAs and FSAs fully stood up, fully embedded, fully white labeled, all the things that we've kind of become accustomed to with most other services. That's when we kind of pivoted and said, you know what, we need to be straight for healthcare. There's a much bigger opportunity here than trying to build out a generic marketplace.
Melissa Perri: Wow, that's such a great pivot into there too. So who are your customers now that you're working with? Like who are you selling these to?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, so end user or you and I, employees and employers, but we don't sell direct to employers. We sell into health plans, third party administrators or TPAs. And then financial institutions are actually a big player in consumer directed health, surprisingly or not. Fidelity is one of the biggest HSA providers because they pair that as a retirement product next to their 401k. But they also do FSAs and CDH and a bunch of other banks as well. So we do service financial institutions who are also looking for a better platform.
Melissa Perri: Nice. And when you're thinking about health tech going in the future, what makes you excited about it? Where do you see it evolving?
Colin Anawaty: I will kind of answer that from the lens of FinHealth and that's kind of how we describe what it is that we're focused on. There was a survey that I think the Kauffman Group put out. Half of Americans are having a lot of trouble affording care and 41% of Americans are in debt from a previous medical bill.
And as you can probably gather, your uninsured adults, your African Americans and Hispanics, your lower income folks are just disproportionately affected. And so what I think makes me most excited about what FinTech can do for health care is start to address some of these health inequities, distribute the cost burden a little bit more, making it easier for employers and health bands and even my family to contribute to my health. One third of GoFundMe is medical debt, for example.
And I think if we can tie all this together in a better way, then we can really start to incentivize material outcomes that folks can bank on, no pun intended. So that's where I think FinTech can go. If we don't keep it segregated as just a financial instrument, we tie it a little bit more close with the health plan for some of these social determinants issues helping to close care gaps.
And even in the kind of underbelly, if you will, of health care administration, let's just clean up the paper. Let's streamline how we exchange data. All of that I think is pretty related to finance as well.
Melissa Perri: I'm hearing there's a lot of overlap in the health care billing admin, that type of pieces that go back into the banking and different areas that way.
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, I made a joke with my wife when we had our first baby that Amex and amazon.com were the first to know. And there's something to be said based on your card spending that it's even predictable kind of what's coming in your life. I think Amex had the ability to predict divorces as well just based on where spending started occurring on the card.
And it's shocking how little visibility health plans have in under deductible spending and out of pocket spending. And it's just because this stuff is largely lived in completely separate silos. And so that's, I think, tying all this stuff together, financial wellness or thin health is really going to be an exciting next decade, if not longer.
Melissa Perri: Where is it all living right now? When you say silos, where does all the information kind of break down and disseminate when it comes to healthcare?
Colin Anawaty: The parallels between finance and healthcare have been striking. And we talked a little bit about the size and then the various sectors, but also the infrastructure and the data. There are certainly improvements being made. I know my banking app has gotten leaps and bounds better than even five years ago, but the data itself and the main frame and the infrastructure is not all that dissimilar from healthcare.
Unstructured data, it's tracked, it's siloed. Some of these administration providers have three or four systems just trying to make a card swipe work while also having a manual claim system. None of that data is consistent. And so it's, again, just a lot of the siloing problems that exist in healthcare also tend to exist in finance as well.
Melissa Perri: Okay, so a lot of stuff is just run on really old code, old code bases. They're not talking to each other. There's no transfer between companies or even within companies. So all of this creates those problems that we all see as consumers on the other end.
Colin Anawaty: Yep, exactly. You nailed it.
Melissa Perri: Well, it seems to be a lot of opportunity then for all of us in product management to fix that. And finally, to my last question for you, we talked a little bit about what you're excited about with HealthTech, but what about product management in HealthTech? What's the opportunity? What would you say to people out there who are like, I'd love to do product management and try to help in healthcare or do something?
Colin Anawaty: So I've been doing this for almost a decade now in healthcare and now winning in finance. And I think the thing that I tell everyone, whether we're recruiting or it's another founder that I'm working with, the opportunities are certainly endless and abound. The question is kind of like, where do you start to get that flywheel going so that you can continue to work closely with your customers, especially those enterprise customers and continue to evolve both your roadmap and your product offering.
And you know me pretty well now. I don't like to be the burning bush. I don't think we're going to have one singular product that's going to solve everyone's problem. We're most likely going to get it wrong on the first day that we start with it. And so I just think there's enough for a really good product manager who's not stuck on one idea but can really engage the enterprises that can, whether it's finance or healthcare, there's just a ton of problems to be solved.
And sometimes the biggest challenge is just trying to figure out where to start. I think that's where if you're new to healthcare, you can certainly be overwhelmed. If you've been in it for a long time, you might be a little bit jaded but you can make a change. But I think right level of optimism, right level of curiosity and drive, there is just a lot of room to put on your product hat and make things better.
And sometimes too, I think just managing your expectations. I used to talk very naively in 2013 about disrupting healthcare. That's a crazy statement to make in retrospect. And so I just also try to manage people's reality there. It's just a huge industry.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, you're not going to be able to tackle it all at once, but I like the enthusiasm that people bring that want to do that.
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, absolutely.
Melissa Perri: Well, that's great. Thank you so much, Colin, for joining us. If people want to learn more about First Dollar or maybe even come work for you, where can they learn?
Colin Anawaty: Yeah, great. Firstdollar.com. And then I'm probably more active on LinkedIn, Colin.Anawati. And then I sometimes post on Twitter, which is just at Colin, my first name. I got pretty lucky in 2007 to get that. Damn, I got real lucky on that.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for being with us today and thank you for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. Next week, we'll be back with another Dear Melissa where we answer all of your product questions. So please submit them to DearMelissa.com and we will see you next Wednesday.
