Comment Come work for us (Score 2, Interesting) 886
Oddly, we've been looking for people who sit at the crossroads of clinical knowledge and CS/IT for quite a while. Boring details are at www.patientkeeper.com, but the jobs look something like this:
Here's the skinny:
Clincical Product Manager is possibly the hardest, most satisfying, and most visible job at PK. Product management is the ultimate cross-functional leadership role. Through intellectual horsepower, interpersonal skill, domain knowledge, technical depth and attention to detail you'll be the most respected voice in the organization for your product. Sales, marketing, software engineering, QA, customers, and senior management will all want to know what you think. The job: Design and manage an enterprise clinical application, acquire and synthesize wisdom from customers, clinical experts, engineers, and doctors, and formulate a viable plan for success. A successful tour of duty in product management positions you for a leadership role almost anywhere else in the company and is a time-honored path to senior management (viz. Microsoft's Program Manager role). The downside: high visibility, high pressure, responsibility to make a serious difference and enough rope to hang yourself if you screw it up.
The position requires three major skill sets:
Technical aptitude: you don't need to be a software engineer, but you have to be able to take one to lunch. You must understand, extend, and work with the technical issues as they impact your product. You must master all of the customer-facing details of a product so that seemingly minor issues are NOT solved by otherwise clueless software developers. That takes a lot of horsepower.
Clinical aptitude: we're an enterprise (i.e. hospital) clinical applications company. Customers want to feel that you are capable of understanding physician, nurse and administrative workflows and can discuss the product issues with them in their language.
Social aptitude: this role has been identified as having minimal official resources, maximimum responsibilites and the maximum number of interested parties (ie, executives). You'll sink or swim in this role based on how well you can command the respect of the rest of the organization, for that will determine how well you'll be able to rally various constituencies around your plan. It ain't easy, but it is great training for completing these tasks in a larger pond. Intellectual bandwidth required.
Realistically, nobody has all three skillsets out of the gate. You need to have the social aptitude and one of the two others (technical or clinical) "out of the box", and be able to shore up your weaknesses on the third. Clinical depth is particularly prized.
Here's the skinny:
Clincical Product Manager is possibly the hardest, most satisfying, and most visible job at PK. Product management is the ultimate cross-functional leadership role. Through intellectual horsepower, interpersonal skill, domain knowledge, technical depth and attention to detail you'll be the most respected voice in the organization for your product. Sales, marketing, software engineering, QA, customers, and senior management will all want to know what you think. The job: Design and manage an enterprise clinical application, acquire and synthesize wisdom from customers, clinical experts, engineers, and doctors, and formulate a viable plan for success. A successful tour of duty in product management positions you for a leadership role almost anywhere else in the company and is a time-honored path to senior management (viz. Microsoft's Program Manager role). The downside: high visibility, high pressure, responsibility to make a serious difference and enough rope to hang yourself if you screw it up.
The position requires three major skill sets:
Technical aptitude: you don't need to be a software engineer, but you have to be able to take one to lunch. You must understand, extend, and work with the technical issues as they impact your product. You must master all of the customer-facing details of a product so that seemingly minor issues are NOT solved by otherwise clueless software developers. That takes a lot of horsepower.
Clinical aptitude: we're an enterprise (i.e. hospital) clinical applications company. Customers want to feel that you are capable of understanding physician, nurse and administrative workflows and can discuss the product issues with them in their language.
Social aptitude: this role has been identified as having minimal official resources, maximimum responsibilites and the maximum number of interested parties (ie, executives). You'll sink or swim in this role based on how well you can command the respect of the rest of the organization, for that will determine how well you'll be able to rally various constituencies around your plan. It ain't easy, but it is great training for completing these tasks in a larger pond. Intellectual bandwidth required.
Realistically, nobody has all three skillsets out of the gate. You need to have the social aptitude and one of the two others (technical or clinical) "out of the box", and be able to shore up your weaknesses on the third. Clinical depth is particularly prized.
