With great collaboration comes great services
In March the product I had worked on for the past 14 months won three awards: two category wins — Best service design, Best digital service — and the Grand Prix at Grand One 2023, Finland’s largest competition for digital solutions and media.
This inspired me to write about the journey I had at Terveystalo and what I want to highlight as our keys to success together.
https://www.terveystalo.com/grandone2023
(Competition entry page, available only in Finnish)
Successful collaboration leads to impactful user-centered products
Before Medoma, I had established a great collaboration with the Product Owner (PO) through another service that we had been designing and developing together. During an internal shuffle of designers to keep perspectives fresh, we capitalized on our great working relationship, and I took ownership of Medoma’s design.
When I first met the PO, I was responding to an urgent need from the client straight from the comfort of my good friend’s summer cottage in the Finnish Archipelago. During that first meeting, it became clear that as a Product Owner, she was driven, user-centric and what we don’t see often enough, in complete charge of her backlog. We quickly established clear goals and deadlines for me to deliver on. This is a great starting point for any consultant–client relationship.
‘We co-operated super efficiently from the start. We had defined the project and its scope with a design sprint, and with the goals and schedule so clear, it was easy to take off and start delivering fast. Our whole development team quickly found their roles and the development was done in a very user-centric way with real insight always showing the way.
I always want the co-operation to be genuine and real; I believe it is the only way in delivering award-winning digital products with great user experience. In this project, it definitely was so, from the very beginning.’
– Sara Kinnunen, ex-PO, current Commercial & Tribe Lead
Throughout the year and a half I worked with the client, we evolved our relationship and ways of working, but the fundamentals of a good working relationship never changed: we set clear goals, deadlines, and communicated excellently. This was evident in both the speed and quality of work that we were able to do together. When the original PO started to take a larger role in the organization and a new Product Owner took over Medoma, we managed to keep up those good practices and the quality of work.
‘Even if work is “just work”, we do it human-to-human, which means we want and need to be empathetic, not just within the team but also with each other. Jesse is a great example of a multi-talent who follows this rule and can design innovative solutions, read the in-between needs of different members within the team and the users and tie it up into great UX.’
— Sara Kinnunen, ex-PO, current Commercial & Tribe Lead
Designing for healthcare professionals
Some of the more interesting things that I noticed during my time designing Medoma and other digital services in the healthcare sector was the skepticism toward healthcare professionals’ capacity for digitalization and change.
Especially in the back-end systems and operations side of things, the established processes were sometimes put on a pedestal. During my interviews with real users, I found that healthcare professionals were more than willing to adopt new processes and were not as resistant to change as the existing processes had suggested. What I DID find was that the users were more than willing to go above and beyond to adapt their reporting and channels for finding new gigs, as long as we continued listening to their pain points and designing new ways to solve them.
We were not changing processes for the sake of operational efficiency, but as a team and organization we understood that through designing processes and interfaces with users at the heart of them all, we could achieve operational efficiency. And that I believe is a key factor in the success of Medoma both in competitions and in real environments.
Packaging it all for the competition
The client has harnessed Netlight’s expertise and delivery model* in numerous instances. Through a Netlight consultant like myself, clients have access to the whole network of consultants and operations at their disposal. In this particular case, we could for example harness the potential of the network to research and spar the winning communicative angle for the competition entry. This is of course in addition to all the input and sparring given by the network during the design of Medoma itself.
* Netlight’s delivery model provides consultants with comprehensive support before, during, and after engagements, including support from a Delivery Coach, a senior colleague to enhance delivery quality. And an Engagement Coach who oversees the process from a strategic business perspective ensuring an impactful outcome.
For Medoma in particular, the way we helped them was two-fold: we helped them both with the product itself and also in co-designing and creating the entry for the Grand One competition itself, in which Medoma enjoyed tremendous success. While it may seem like an isolated design task from the product, it is so much more than a competition entry page. We helped the client formulate their value proposition, their unique selling points and select the right language to communicate it all. This work is something that is read not only by the judges in the competition, but also inside the team and the whole organization.
Winning these prices is validation for user-centric processes, clear communication of value and Medoma as a product will surely be a champion for user-centricity and user research for the organization and the healthcare industry going forward.
That is not to say that Medoma is the only proof. Terveystalo has won Grand One prizes before (just the previous year, in fact), and winning again is a testament to the great work that they have been doing from a design and user-centric development point of view for years now. Their team of designers keeps growing, and they keep doing great things that have real societal impact.
‘Secrets’ behind Terveystalo’s continued success
How does Terveystalo’s Design Team keep winning competitions then? It might have something to do with them having such easy access to interview and understand their end users, both the medical professionals and their patients, who in my experience are both very open to participating in design work when more efficient and convenient healthcare is concerned. It makes co-designing products and services really easy.
Terveystalo’s Head of Design has also made sure that the designers in his team are all able to take ownership of the things they are designing all the way from the concept to the very last pixel. This makes sure that all the implicit knowledge that is generated throughout the design process is not lost to handovers, which we all know is a risk no matter how well the handovers are done.
‘I believe that the key to a successful product is a “full-stack designer” who can think about the product holistically and contribute along the whole product design process from setting the product vision to final UI.’
— Janne Lammi, Head of Design
It really is not simply by luck that the team produces high quality design consistently. They have an extensive design system which helps not only with generating pixel-perfect interfaces quickly, but lets the designers focus on generating and using the user insights they gather. And if that isn’t enough, weekly sparring sessions make sure that no designer is left behind or gets stuck on their problems. All these practices and systems lets the designer — and let me — generate real value and impact for the team and the organization.
Collaboration and user-centric approach is a winning strategy
The great victories that Terveystalo and Medoma enjoyed at GrandOne gala 2023 give validation that excellent collaboration, focus on end users and systematic support for designers help create great products and shows that believing your users and developing your products users first is a winning strategy.
When product teams have access to real user needs and the power to meet them, we can alleviate complex issues that can have great societal impact that generates recognition for the whole organization.
Terveystalo is a leading Finnish healthcare company with a digitalization strategy aimed at promoting accessibility, efficiency, and quality of care. The company’s mission is to promote and support the health and wellbeing of its customers by providing high-quality, accessible, and affordable healthcare services with the help of digitalization.
Netlight is a consultancy company with 2000 role models providing a full range of consultancy services from tech, design to data and management making aspiring digital leaders successful.
GrandOne is Finland’s largest competition for digital media, including advertising and digital service development.
#digitalization #collaboration #healthtech #design #productdesign #servicedesign #awardwinning #potentialunleashed
