product Archives - Digitizing Biology

April 12, 2021May 18, 2021

a16z and my own journey

a16z is a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm. I listened to their recent podcast episode where they talked with Jeff Lawson, CEO and author of Ask Your Developer. Generally I am very interested in the topic of software development as a creative exercise, this is probably why I chose that particular episode of the podcast to listen to. But what I found of particular interest came in the final 30 seconds of the interview.

Jeff has a view of his own trajectory as a CEO, from that of a Technical-CEO, through Product, and then to Go-to-market. The a16z interviewer pointed out that they have an entire series on the concept of how technical people develop as CEOs and they see them moving through the following sequence:

April 5, 2021May 18, 2021

Mind-map customer needs

I have 20 years of professional experience. It took me longer than I would like to admit to learn how much we all lie to ourselves. I am a smart person. I am particularly good at constructing convincing narratives which keep me happy and oblivious to reality. It was only when I was working with incredibly smart people, during my PhD, that I was finally forced to write my ideas down. And then I didn’t need the other people to point out the flaws in my thinking; they were there in black-and-white, clear for me to see.

From this experience, I now encourage teams which I work with to make knowledge explicit. This is even more important the more intelligent the team are. The following is an example of how I did this with a team for their Customer Needs mapping, but the same advice applies equally to the Business Model and the Go-to-market Strategy.

March 29, 2021May 18, 2021

Product Differentiation

The following is a version of something which I wrote for a team I was mentoring recently. They were in a market-place with 2-3 main competitors, and each of the competitors was best-in-class at one specific thing and considerably worse on the other factors. When the team, which I was mentoring, compared their planned product against this market-place they basically rated themselves as second-best in every factor. So only the respective market leader in that factor was better than them on that factor. They thought this seemed pretty good – with a little bit of compromise, the clients could order just one product, theirs. I was not so convinced…

October 19, 2020May 18, 2021

Preprint Announcement – Guide to Regulating Medical AI

One year ago, I left the start-up where I had been working on an AI-driven companion to accompany patients through their cancer treatments.

When I left, I was deeply frustrated with the start-up environment surrounding AI in Healthcare. I was still convinced that AI could help in this space, but all I was seeing was teams going down what I considered to be the wrong paths.

March 24, 2020August 22, 2020

Preprint Announcement – AI in Medicine Product Development Framework

Working in industrial research is usually very motivating but occasionally it is also frustrating. You’ve just done something really cool but you’re not allowed to tell anybody outside the company about it. Indeed, in a small company there might not be anybody inside of the company who can even appreciate it!

I have worked on roughly 4 really cool projects since leaving academia at the end of 2017. And apart from some basic mentions in my blog (e.g. here and here) most of what I have done has been known only to a few key stakeholders.

Since leaving Fosanis last September I have had a visiting researcher affiliation at the Digital Health Accelerator of the Berlin Institute of Health. I have used my time to mentor a cohort of teams attempting to spin out their ideas; to work on a causal inference project; and, to write a paper about the structural aspects of medical AI products. This week, along with my co-author Vince Madai, we submitted that paper.