How I work
Let’s understand what we’re asking of people.
A plan can look reasonable until someone has to use it. Before we commit, I ask what you are trying to achieve and what that will require of your team.
I’ll bring a point of view, ask questions, and say when something doesn’t add up. I leave room for your team to change my mind.
Learning from your team
Understand what a plan asks of people.
I prepare before we meet. I look at how your company earns money, who it serves, and what is already underway. That gives us more time to examine the choices in front of us.
Then I talk with the people handling those tasks every day. A document can describe a process. Someone handling an exception can tell us where it breaks down. We need both accounts before deciding what to change.
At One to One Health, eligibility and onboarding belonged in the same product plan as clinical care. Staff also needed something useful sooner. I chose clinical documentation as an early step while we built toward the wider product suite.
Read the One to One Health storyReaching agreement
Be clear about what we mean.
Language matters. If a service needs to be faster, who is waiting? I ask what they are waiting for and what a useful improvement would look like. Those answers shape what we agree to build.
Questions give people room to challenge an assumption, supply a missing detail, or explain why a proposal would make their day harder. I listen for that. An agreement needs to reflect what we’ve learned together.
At TPN, I asked what invoicing payers was meant to achieve. That question helped us agree to build an internal claims filing and revenue capture platform.
What I asked at TPNTaking responsibility
Stay involved and see what changes.
Once we agree on what is worth doing, I take responsibility for the part I will lead. That can mean shaping the product, making a technical decision, hiring the team, or working through commercial terms with a customer. We agree on what I own and the support needed to deliver.
Before we begin, we agree on how to judge the result. At One to One Health, the useful outcome was less charting time with clinician and patient satisfaction maintained or improved. In an agent pilot, we need to count the effort of reviewing the output as well as the tasks software takes on.
If a change saves time for one person but adds work for someone else, I count that too. We need to know whether it actually delivers value.
Where the joy is
There should be something to enjoy along the way.
My favorite moments in this work tend to be small ones. At TheraMatch, I wanted to know what happened after a recommendation, so we measured whether each person was still with their first therapist a month later. When PerfectServe cut provider onboarding from five to seven days to under an hour, providers could start using the product within the hour instead of waiting most of a week. One question about invoices at TPN changed what we built. Someone notices a detail, someone else asks why, and a team sees its problem more clearly. I look forward to that conversation every time.
Chattanooga is home. My wife and I are raising three children here, along with three dogs and ten chickens, and I serve on the board of The Mission Chattanooga. You can take a hard question seriously and still enjoy working it out with people you like and trust. I try to work that way close to home and with teams far from it.
Tell me what you’re working onSelected writing