Coaching Medwing’s Product Team in Lean Product Discovery

The Client: Medwing

Medwing operates a recruitment platform focused on the healthcare sector. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Medwing helps healthcare professionals find various employment opportunities. These range from temporary and permanent staffing positions to cross-border placements, targeting a wide range of healthcare roles including nurses, elderly caregivers, pharmacists, midwives, and doctors.

The company's platform is designed to streamline the process of matching healthcare professionals with hospitals and clinics, offering a digital workflow that includes job searching, contract management, digital signatures, and timesheet handling. Medwing's services are available in Germany and the U.K., where it supports a significant number of registered medical employers and healthcare professionals.

Medwing aims to differentiate itself in the market by focusing on both permanent and temporary placements and provides a solution to the traditionally manual and analog staffing processes in the healthcare sector. The company's approach has been to enhance service levels for both healthcare workers and medical facilities while also reducing overall system costs.

As for expansion, Medwing has expressed intentions to grow its presence across Europe, striving to become the leading healthcare job marketplace on the continent. The company's growth is supported by recent funding, which will also aid in reaching profitability based on its operations in Germany and the U.K

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The Mission: Product Coach

Medwing, a prominent player in healthcare staffing, recognized the need to overhaul its product management practices to keep pace with the rapidly evolving healthcare industry. We jumped in to deliver a full-day coaching session to enhance their product team's capabilities.

Our main mission was to elevate Medwing's product management team's capabilities, streamline their processes, and align product development with their growth targets.

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Our Main Quest: Coaching

In a competitive sector like healthcare staffing, agility and innovation are paramount. Medwing faced challenges with its product development cycle, which hindered its ability to respond effectively to market needs. The company's leadership sought to instill a robust product management culture to foster innovation and streamline processes.

Product People designed a tailored workshop, conducted over one full day, which centered around interactive activities on a collaborative Miro board. The workshop's design was influenced by industry best practices and the unique challenges faced by Medwing.

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Methodology

The workshop covered five critical areas:

1. Discovery: we wanted to stress the importance of the continuous discovery process in any Product Development scenario. We introduced why it is important, and its purpose. We also explained some methodologies (Agile vs. Waterfall) and provided helpful examples.
2. Double Diamond Framework: when it comes to this framework, the first information we gave to participants was about the Product Lifecycle, and what is the Double Diamond Framework exactly. Participants were introduced to this design process, emphasizing the importance of divergent and convergent thinking for identifying and solving problems effectively. We also introduced them to the ‘best questions they can ask’, and the importance of defining a strong user persona. After the theoretical part, we executed some exercises to implement previously shared knowledge.
3. Opportunity Solution Trees (OST): After an overview of what OSTs are and how they can be useful in Product Management, the team engaged in constructing OSTs, which provided a structured method for identifying opportunities and devising strategic interventions to prioritize development initiatives. Teams were tasked with constructing detailed OSTs, focusing on branching out from core problems to potential opportunities. The exercises emphasized the importance of evidence-based decision-making, weighing the impact versus the effort of various initiatives.
4. Continuous Discovery and the Product Trio in B2C: Medwing's team learned to implement continuous discovery techniques and adopt the Product Trio model, fostering collaboration between engineering, design, and product management to drive product decisions. We topped this part with exercises and suggested useful discovery activities for the Product team. The workshop highlighted the continuous nature of product discovery, advocating for a cycle of rapid experimentation and feedback.
5. Translating OKRs into Roadmaps: The workshop facilitated exercises that converted Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) into dynamic and actionable product roadmaps, ensuring alignment with the company's strategic vision. Participants engaged in translating high-level organizational OKRs into granular, tactical roadmaps, and real-world scenarios were simulated to practice the prioritization of product features and initiatives, balancing short-term achievements with long-term strategic goals.

After these 5 areas, we conducted two Product Clinics, where we discussed individual practical cases of the Product Managers present at the workshop. These Product Clinics are especially useful for tackling current challenges that Medwing’s product team might be facing. We also linked these Product Clinics with the information delivered at the workshop so the participants could see the real-life benefits of some of the methodologies worked previously.

Implementation and Practice: Each methodological aspect was accompanied by practical application:

• Teams practiced the Double Diamond Framework through a series of mock product cycles, developing and iterating on new product ideas.
• Through constructing and analyzing OSTs, participants learned to visualize the paths from problems to solutions, fostering a strategic approach to feature prioritization.
• In simulating a Product Trio, cross-functional groups worked on real-time cases, integrating continuous feedback loops into their development processes.
• The OKRs exercise was particularly transformative, as teams mapped out quarter-long roadmaps, integrating feedback from the earlier Double Diamond and OST exercises to ensure strategic alignment.

The workshop's success was evident in the immediate feedback from participants, who noted increased confidence in their ability to navigate complex product landscapes and a clearer understanding of agile product management principles.

Workshop Miro Board

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Outcomes

💡 By the end of the Coaching Sessions, Medwing had not only a theoretical understanding of the methodologies but also a practical blueprint to implement them directly into their workflow. This hands-on approach ensured that the methodologies would be ingrained in the team's practices beyond the workshop setting.

💡 The workshop's impact extended beyond the immediate team to influence Medwing's broader strategic approach, as the alignment of product goals with business objectives became more streamlined and effective.

💡 We left Medwing with a comprehensive manual for future reference, ensuring that the knowledge imparted would continue to guide the team's practices and contribute to ongoing development and refinement.