Tracy Lasseter is a product manager at NurseGrid, a leader in healthcare scheduling and staffing technology. Tracy works on the NurseGrid mobile app, which is used by half a million nurses whose job is extremely stressful. She thinks deeply about what it takes to make their lives easier using technology so that they can focus on the real work of caring for others. She points out that when talking to her users she focuses not on what users like or dislike in the app, but rather on what the stressors in their job are, and how the NurseGrid app can be used to alleviate some of that.
“I think it’s really important as a product manager to understand your product’s mission statement and to constantly go back to it. If you are building out something new, you need to stop and say: how does this feed into our core values as a company .
If this isn’t something for my users then who is it for and why are we doing it?”
In Tracy’s work, context is everything, and so she is laser-focused on asking the right questions. Before looking for solutions, she says, it’s much more important to look for the user’s pain point.
We also chatted about segmentation, building a team that you can trust, and the irritation that comes from trying to solve things that are already solved.
