Max Kerwick
Ro
Max Kerwick heads up insights and customer strategy for Ro, a direct to patient telehealth platform serving patients with specific health concerns around sexual health and aesthetic conditions like dermatology, immense hair loss, and weight management.
Insights is a big bucket.
It is!
When you're thinking about a new project or a new quarter or the new thing you're working on, where do you start? What kind of information do you need and where do you turn to get that information?
We have been fortunate over the three and a half years that I've been building this function to have built a pretty strong foundation. And we have a very large customer base. So we have a lot of flexibility to go out to people and ask questions and start to educate ourselves on whatever the thing is.
But you're always going to start with what's already available, what people have already done in the market. A lot of that is secondary research: going in and finding “Hey, what has somebody else done and already published on this that we can stand on top of?”
I have a clinical research counterpart that is great at finding academic sources and things like that. That's not so much my forte, but we like to start there and then quickly move into talking to people again.
Who owns that? What's the process and workflow there? Is it a quick sprint, is it multiple sources…? How do you think about it?
It depends on the project, what our timeline is and what the goal is.
Typically we're trying to move as quickly as we can. This is a tech company operating in a healthcare environment – we have short timelines. I’m lucky if I get four weeks on anything. Most of the time it's more like two. So I'm trying to keep that phase of it as quick as possible.
And then I'm trying to move as quickly into the more custom work – buy myself as much time as possible to do those custom conversations that are going to give us something that's differentiated.
When you think about all of the ways you collect information, all the types of insights that your team leverages, we've typically heard three buckets. I'm curious if these resonate and where you lean.
On the one hand, there's big things – big projects. Tentpoles where we have a clear finish line.
There's little things. We have a quick question. Some executive has a need or an idea.
And then there's the drumbeat in between to stay smart on a given topic or be monitoring x, y, z.
Do those resonate? Where does your team spend most time versus none, maybe?
Yeah, that broadly resonates.
Of those big tent poles as foundations, typically those are things that if it's worth investing that kind of time, they have longevity to it, right?
The little things, maybe they're more just short term, right? More ad hoc.
And then, yeah – especially if we use weight management as an example, it's an area where a medication class has changed drastically over the past couple of years, right?
There's a revolution happening in obesity care, with Ozempic and Wegovy and Zepbound and all these injectable medications that really fundamentally change peoples’ lives. So just staying up with all of the things happening there, whether that is the academic work, what people are talking about, media coverage … there’s so much there that we just have to stay smart on to be able to even do either of those other things. So yeah, broadly those resonate.
When you think about desk research specifically, so you start collecting the “known knowns,” what's the most painful part about it today for your team?
In general, stuff is so fragmented. There’s a lot to pull from and there's a lot to go search for. We’re in the healthcare space, where there's a ton of clinical and academic work that we can pull from – especially in categories like weight management that are so buzzy.
There's a ton of social listening.
There's a ton of media coverage.
We look at Facebook groups and there's a lot to pull from. And so being able to quickly distill “Hey, what is the best source for this? And where can we find it? And how can we pull that thread through?” I’d say that's probably the most challenging part.
Last two questions, speed round.
When you think about desk research and the goods and bads of Google, the LLMs, and all these different types of solutions, what's one word that comes to mind in current solutions?
Non-existent. I haven't seen something that actually hits on these issues. I can Google all day and still be missing things and LLMs can be hallucinating all day. It's good to help shape my thinking and things like that. But I know that there are still sources out there that I haven't thought of.
Second question. When you think about AI and research, what's your top of mind word?
They're promising. Some people are over promising, but in general, I've already seen how it can really, positively impact our workflows and shorten timelines on things that used to take a lot of time, or frankly, things that I just used to not have time to do.
That's the other part. We would skip steps because it was like “Well, I can't do that. We don't have enough time to do that.” I think that's where the benefits are.
Love it. Super interesting!