Design Strategy

Vision planning to feature pilot

Amazon’s annual planning process is intended to be future looking and help teams define a long-term product strategy. It is broken up into two main operational planning sessions (OP1 and OP2). The OP1 session allows teams to define critical steps to reach long-term product direction, OP2 focuses on making corrections and adjustments to a team's original OP1 plan. 

Both OP1 and OP2 sessions use a mechanism called “working backwards” to help teams generate ideas that are later added to the final operation plan. The working backwards process involves five stages: Listen, Define, Invent, Refine, Test & Iterate.

My role in the planning process was to design and organize the ideation workshop during the define stage. The outcomes from this workshop would identify our top OP1 priorities that would be distributed across multiple product teams.

Listen Stage

During the Listen stage of the working backwards process, we aim to understand the customer and what insights we have about them. I partnered with my lead researcher who gathered customer insights from recently completed customer interviews, various surveys led by the design team, customer usage data, and direct customer quotes filtered through our support teams. 

The output of this research was summarized into seven top level themes, used to inform the ideation of the workshop during the define stage.

Define Stage

Now that we had customer insights it was time for me to take the lead organizing an ideation workshop to begin the define stage. Our goal was to come together as a large cross-functional team to generate customer solutions that would later be prioritized and delegated to product teams for implementation. 

With seven core themes to ideate on, I scheduled the workshop over two days to ensure each set of opportunities had enough time for teams to generate high quality ideas. The workshop included four main activities: 

1. Review and discuss research and customer insights

2. “How Might We” Statement creation 

3. Group brainstorming exercise

4. Storyboarding solutions

In total, there were 45 attendees across 4 groups, working as a team of 11 or 12. Each group included leaders and individual contributors from design, product management, engineering, customer support, and marketing.

The output from the workshop produced eight concepts that would continue through the working backwards process to the invent stage.

Invent Stage

After the workshop, each of the eight concepts were delegated to multiple product teams to begin exploring the idea in deeper detail. During this stage, I worked directly with a product manager to invent what a personalized customer experience could be at Amazon One Medical. 

Already armed with the customer insights, I pulled together a small group of cross functional leaders and ICs to look across the customer journey.  The goal was to identify moments both digitally and in person where personalization would have a positive impact on the patient's care experience.

The top themes from this workshop were: 

1. Quick access to appointments best for me

2. Care companion to support health goals

3. Support between appointments

4. Condition focused care with access to relevant support tools

5. Surfacing health history to inform appointment booking

6. Post-appointment care plans and customer referrals

I presented these six ideas to the leadership team of Amazon health services, as part of our OP1 presentation. The personalization concept was prioritized and added to our OP1 documents for 2025.

Refine Stage

Now in Q4 of 2024, we are in preparation for our OP2 session. As part of this, I am working on the refine stage of the personalization work, focusing specifically on supporting our patients with health goals. 

I kicked off the project by completing an audit of apps across health and fitness, wellness, Travel, and finance using the Analogous Inspiration framework from Ideo. Source

For this audit, I looked at how we could explore making a goal tracking feature within the one medical app that takes on attributes of each of the identified apps in order to evoke the same emotion the users have when engaging with the selected app.

I translated my findings into a mock customer journey that explores a fictional story of a patient moving through the phases of setting and completing a personal health goal. I also considered how this experience would change when initiated by their health care provider versus a more self directed goal.

Main takeaways from this session included: 

1. Goals are most effective when a patient is activated

1. Patients need to have high motivation to see high engagement with goals

2. Provider led goals are still very much driven by the patients desire to change

1. If a patient wants to get off antidepressants, the provider will consider what steps have already been taken independent of the care encounter and work with the patient to establish goals with intention and clear next steps, like establishing care with a specialist. 

3. S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound) goals tend to be more successful

1. More actionable, task oriented goals keep patients motivated and more likely to meet their goals. 

4. Be mindful of triggering moments

1. When a patient doesn’t hit their goals or loses motivation to continue it’s important to maintain trust between the provider and the patient and help them rethink their goals and consider a new way to approach their goals. 

In partnership with my product manager, we gathered our findings to propose how we would introduce health goals to the Amazon One Medical apps. Early research conducted during the listen stage of the working backwards process showed that patients who set health goals are 40% more likely to adhere to prescribed treatment plans and preventive care recommendations. Therefore, we presented a pilot program that incorporates goals within a patient's care plan. 

The pilot design follows 42 year old Ezra, a new patient with One Medical. Through personalization, we can leverage provided health information and present focused health and wellness goals that take the guesswork out of age-related screenings and health maintenance.

She is presented a health and wellness goal specific for women over 40 that combines regular health maintenance, like physicals and important screenings, with more personal goals like increasing daily exercise or improving her sleep.

Because health maintenance isn’t exactly a time-bound goal, I offered the ability for Ezra to schedule check-ins with the care team. This is to help ensure Ezra is accountable for accomplishing her goals, but not feel penalized if she hasn’t scheduled her mammogram by the recommended due date.

As Ezra accomplishes her short and long term goals, she can see her progress and what she’s accomplished. Proactive reminders are sent when needed to remind Ezra of important health tasks to keep her on track. She’s also prompted to modify personal goals to ensure she’s being challenged at the correct level to keep her motivated and engaged.

As part of a small team, we’ve released a limited pilot of the goals program to test and iterate, which is the final stage of the working backwards process.

Test & Iterate

The pilot was released to a small cohort of 200 women over 40 years old and will be monitored through January 31, 2025. During this phase we will measure the percentage rate of members who set at least one goal, the frequency of engagement with tracking goals, and the number of scheduled screening visits. Goal completion rate will also be monitored, but since the pilot is only 3 months long we can’t assume patients in the cohort will need to accomplish relevant health maintenance screenings during that time period.