Anant Gupta leads Product Engineering at Grand Rounds Health. “Our core mission is to raise the standard of healthcare for everyone, everywhere,” Anant said.
As a tech-driven healthcare company, Grand Rounds Health serves both employers and their employees. The Product Engineering team, which Anant leads, builds apps to improve health outcomes for Grand Rounds Health’s members (the covered employees and dependents) while saving money for their employers (clients). “Oftentimes getting the right healthcare at the right time ends up being the cheapest in the long-run,” Anant said.
Recently, Grand Rounds Health invested in building a new product experience by adding a personalized chatbot to gather data and help members understand the best course of action for their health. They wanted to make it easier for members to get recommendations for better care, with particular emphasis on navigating the system during the pandemic.
Exceeding expectations with a lean team
When most companies are slowing for the holidays, the team stepped up in a huge way. Simultaneously, the team was moving from Ruby to Go and to a new Typescript-based React app.
Did we mention the team is only 55 engineers, despite their significant healthcare footprint? Grand Rounds Health also recently announced a merger with Doctor On Demand to become the first to bring virtual care and navigation under one seamless member experience.
The chatbot launch was successful and members were thrilled, with 98% providing feedback like, “This thing was awesome” and a significant percentage acting on the recommendations. Members use the chatbot to find the right doctor, connect with the appropriate clinician about their current condition, and track their healthcare spend.
“We want to build a new standard of healthcare for everyone,” Anant said. “Imagine having your own ‘Jarvis’ from Ironman looking out for you and guiding you through your healthcare journey.”
They also decreased page load times from multiple seconds to well below a second.
Increasing focus to achieve outsized results
Launching the chatbot required coordinating with multiple teams, including Data Science, Infrastructure, Data Engineering, and Customer Care. Coordinating across all of these teams, especially around the holiday season (and let’s not forget people’s work from home schedules during the pandemic) was particularly challenging.
By automating calendaring and opening up Focus Time, Clockwise unlocked latent potential for Anant and the team.
“Trying to work with everyone's schedules and calendars takes time and is annoying. Clockwise made that super easy for me. It saves me at least an hour a day. Maybe more, depending on the week. I feel like I am at least 5% more efficient. And that’s pretty impressive for a software tool and that time helps me deliver additional value for the company.”
Our research found that companies where Engineering Managers have more Focus Time also have higher revenues, speed, and productivity. Specifically, 90% of Engineering Managers said they’re more productive when they have more Focus Time. Focus Time helped 80% of Engineering Managers finish projects faster. And 76% of Engineering Managers said Focus Time helps their company bring in more revenue.
Anant attends meetings he would have skipped or had to continually postpone pre-Clockwise. “Clockwise proactively moves things for everybody. It's like a magical admin that figures out time on your calendar.” It also creates Focus Time for Engineers, which helps them get more done in less time. “I'm used to having a completely fragmented calendar with 30-minute chunks. As an Engineer, having a de-fragmented calendar is very beneficial.”
When Clockwise started moving his meetings, Anant was skeptical until he realized the moves were opening up Focus Time.
When Clockwise started resolving conflicts, he was sold. “This is amazing! It's magical. I feel much more effective and efficient at my job.”
Now when anyone joins Anant’s team, he tells them he uses Clockwise to manage his calendar, “So please don't freak out if our one-on-one gets randomly re-scheduled. It's not me. By the way, you should try it out. It's made it a lot easier to manage my calendar. I highly encourage you to download it.”
“I love the product.” Anant mentioned a blog post he really liked. In it, Rahul Vohra from Superhuman explains that you have product/market fit if more than 40% of your users say they’d be very disappointed if they lost your product.
“Clockwise has done a fantastic job in figuring out and optimizing my own calendar for me. I think it's great. I love using it. I'd be very sad if it went away.”
