Career Summary / What’s Digital Health Product Management? / Career Insights
Alexa Murray is an operator on a mission to empower women in technology, standing on the shoulders of female giants, to build a healthier world for us all. She was lucky enough to discover the field of technology early and the flywheel has been spinning ever since. Today, as a Product Manager on the Health Team at Boston based late stage wearables startup WHOOP, she’s helping to develop consumer products from a wealth of experience in high performance endeavors.
Alexa’s initial exposure to science & technology came from her 5th grade science teacher. Over the years she gained more confidence and the positive feedback loop turned faster with the help of teachers, mentors, and peers. In middle school she competed in FIRST, sponsored by Dean Kamen (founder of the Segway), an organization that inspires young people to be science and technology leaders. Alexa’s all female team competed to build lego robots and made it all the way to the world championships, furthering her passion in engineering and robotics.
As the oldest of three athletic siblings, she attended a local all girls school in Connecticut where she continued to nurture her love of technology while competing at the highest levels athletically. She was recruited to play field hockey at the University of Pennsylvania as the only engineering student on her team and served as a team captain. While at Penn, the Cambrian explosion of ideas between her ears continued, built around the diligence of the scientific method, far beyond the rocks & tectonic plates in her grade school textbooks.
She learned she was capable of material capacity, studying Systems Engineering with some Computer Science classes on top after days deadlifting in the gym. During her junior year, she won the Jaros Baum & Bolles Award for Advancing Women in Engineering. All of her teammates came to the awards ceremony straight from the practice field to surprise and congratulate her. It’s ok, I understand it’s dusty where you’re reading this too.
Alexa has a scientific mind. Every move she makes, professionally at least, is to validate or disprove a hypothesis. After completing two summer internships at Goldman Sachs, she wanted to continue to learn how to think. Figuring out which problems to solve came a bit later. She started at Goldman Sachs full time after graduation as a Product Manager in order to maximize her exposure to smart people and difficult problems. Goldman doesn’t typically hire PMs right out of college but she had already impressed as a software engineering intern.
The firm’s culture of success really resonated with her. She helped build a mobile currency trading app and grew to love Product Management. But she came to realize, in order to be a great Product Manager, she needed to more deeply understand her users. She eventually moved to Goldman’s consumer bank, Marcus, to build products for their credit card portfolio.
She grew to love consumer technology and, as she began to plan her career further, realized that to excel as a Product Manager she needed to go work for a technology company. Alexa shared “it’s really important, to the extent possible, to work in the area of a company where they’re the best. If you work for an investment bank, go be an investment banker. If you work at a software company, go work in the software development organization”. It was time for a move.
Boston based WHOOP was hiring for her dream role, a Product Manager, to lead their Health Team. Alexa had been interested in the intersection of digital health and technology since her college days. She loved the product, the consumer (herself), and was able to test a new hypothesis – did she love working in consumer health & wellness? The answer has been an emphatic yes.
Even though she moved to Boston in the middle of February during an arctic freeze that gave a colder shoulder than the British received in 1775, the city’s culture is really aligned to how Alexa likes to spend her time. She enjoys being outside and maintaining a healthy balance. She’s found the startup community to be tight knit and she’s enjoyed getting quickly immersed in the technology & investment ecosystem locally.
At WHOOP, Alexa’s responsibility set spans mental health, women’s health, stress, and nutrition across product features like Health Monitor, Stress Monitor, Menstrual Cycle Coaching and Pregnancy Coaching. Alexa is part of a team thinking through how they grow the company to reach broader market segments. How will they build features for health-focused personas while continuing to serve their high-performance population? And what does health even mean to WHOOP members? They’re on a mission to go figure it out!
What’s Digital Health Product Management?
Building products in digital health is a little different than other technology verticals. A Product Manager for a company like WHOOP needs to understand their customer very deeply AND understand the science behind health & wellness to figure out roadmap prioritization.
Alexa focuses on the “objective function” behind everything she does. Everyone has a unique health journey and, if WHOOP tries to build products that meet all of those needs, they’ll implode. She makes sure to stay focused on goals that cover specific time periods in order to maximize solving for their most important product development priorities. These are the core underpinnings that drive Alexa’s product management workflow for digital health products:
- Understand the Customer
- Understand the Science
- Ensure Alignment
Understand the Customer
Most people have a personal connection that prompts them to begin working in the health & wellness space. Her favorite customer interview question to ask is “if you could wave a magic wand, add anything or change anything, what would you do?” If you can start a conversation that connects to your potential customer on a human to human level, they’ll have a story to share if you give them the space to tell it. Asking customers to recall a specific memory evokes even stronger answers. She likes to ask an “imagine a time” question. “When was the last time you opened the WHOOP app? What were you doing? When you checked the app, what was that experience like?”
To give a more specific example, WHOOP has active product features for women that support menstrual cycle tracking & pregnancy tracking. Next, they’re researching the transition to menopause to more fully cover the lifecycle of women’s health alongside our aging population. If you seek to understand women and their health needs, naturally you need to look at the transitional phases of their needs over time.
Understand the Science
Next, Alexa has to get smart on the science behind the customer’s needs. The WHOOP Product team is dedicated to learning every week. Their slack channels are always active where they share podcast recommendations, like Huberman, and rigorously read the latest health studies. Every day they’re asking each other “how do you learn about the space?”
The Product team collaborates internally with WHOOP Labs as well as the Performance Science and Data Science teams to create studies, collect data, and turn those novel findings into products. The Labs team emphasizes stress testing and validation to make sure new products meet appropriate quality thresholds for all of their members before they get rolled out.
Ensure Alignment
In the meantime, she seeks to align her focus on critical roadmap items. She gut checks her customer research and scientific research process against their team goals to make sure that the pool of ideas are categorized into various swim lanes ranked by potential impact.
Personally, Alexa maps her goals she wants to accomplish in a given quarter and determines whether each project will contribute meaningfully to the team goals. If not? Time to change her prioritization and time horizon.
Career Learnings
Test Your Hypothesis – “When you’re thinking about taking a role or a project or even zooming out to think about a job or career, come up with a hypothesis. Find a way to test it and look at the data. Then you can make a go / no go decision about it. Ask yourself – based on the things I want to do in life or the things I want to learn, does this move the needle for me? Does this help me stretch in new ways?”
Time Is Precious – “You can never underestimate the importance of the people you surround yourself with. Those determine the conversations you have, the ideas you have, and how you spend your time. You have the right to be ruthless about who gets your time.
Many Paths to Many Things – “There are many paths to many things. There is no such thing as a fully closed door. As long as you are continuing to learn and solve interesting problems around interesting people, opportunities will appear and atoms will collide. Things will happen. A deviation from your expected path is not the be all, end all. The more important thing is to determine what is your north star? What are you trying to optimize for? If you’re clear on that it becomes a lot easier to say yes or no”
Eventually, Alexa would like to run a women’s health company and raise a fund to invest in women’s health. As an operator today, every move she’s made has been to validate or disprove a hypothesis with intention. She’s investing her time and efforts to make that dual future a reality. She aspires to help give more women access to opportunity and capital, driving a big impact for herself and the community around her.
If you want to learn more about Alexa, you can check her out on LinkedIn, Twitter, getting outdoors around Boston to test products, or owning them at WHOOP’s new HQ in Kenmore Square. Thanks for sharing. Excited to see the far reaching effects your product work, operating efforts, and future investments have for women and ecosystems far and wide!