Part 1: Differentiating a new product in market
My Role
Lead UX Researcher
Responsibilities
Research, Synthesis, Insights
Timeline
6 months
Cedar is a consumer-friendly enterprise platform that helps reduce admin burden and billing friction, leading to better financial outcomes for providers and patients
The Product:
Cedar Pre engages patients before their visit with a digital check-in solution. Patients can fill out their paperwork, check-in, view, and pay their copay and visit estimate before their appointment.
THE PROBLEM
Cedar Pre is a new product, and while our existing clients are happy with our solution, it doesn’t feel differentiated enough in the market against our competitors.
THE APPROACH
To quickly and confidently build and sell the right product, we implemented a Product-Market Fit Sprint program created by our team to rapidly de-risk products and features and rapidly refine how we describe value in the market. Our insights informed our product charter and feature development. Read Part 2 to see how we tested and validated our new feature.
RESEARCH GOAL
Product
We want to gain a better understanding of our buyers' priorities to ensure that our products are aligned with their key metrics.
Understand how buyers measure the impact of the patient access flow.
What are their benchmarks and how do they measure against them?
What features or tools have positively or negatively impacted their key metrics?
Commercial
We also aim to test our existing messaging to better inform our commercial conversations and know how to communicate success in the market.
METHODOLOGY
We spoke with 5 healthcare provider buyers across C Suite who reflected Cedar’s ideal buyer and used our competitors pro’s pro’s product.
Why this method?
By deeply understanding our buyers’ priorities and key metrics, we can align our product offering to ensure we're designing solutions that drive meaningful results—products they are eager to invest in.
SYNTHESIS
Good research is never done alone. I had the Lead PM, Design Manager, and Director of Commercial sit in on sessions and participate in debriefs. Together, we could share our perspectives from each of our respective lenses. This helped build trust in the insights, foster collaboration, and improve our teams' chemistry—we were all working on the same problem, aligned on the approach, and bought into the same goal.
INSIGHT
What we believed…
We had assumed the No-show rate would be most important to buyers because the cost of no-shows is high, and no solution in the market targets that metric.
What we learned…
Buyers care most about the Early collection rate. The particular buyers we spoke to seemed resigned to spending the overhead to collect, but they resonated with a metric around an increased collection rate in pre-service.
IMPACT
Product
The learnings from this study informed our 2023 product charter to focus on our financial impact and understanding our buyers' priorities, which helped the team prioritize guaranteed estimates, a new feature to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.
Commercial
The sales team built a clear narrative of Cedar’s value on top of competitors, focusing on our financial features, including a new feature, “guaranteed estimates.”