Take Six with Paul Micheli, Senior Product Manager

Careport highlighted me for their Take Six blog in August of 2020. I am re-posting the interview here:

Tell us more about your role as Senior Product Manager at CarePort. What does your average day look like?
There are a couple things that happen during my typical day. I usually start the day early with a call with one of two offshore development teams in India, one of which I’ve been working with on our new Denial Management module, and the other with which I discuss our ad hoc reporting. These check-ins serve as a time to make sure what the development teams are building, and what I’ve intended for the product, are aligned.

I then have other meetings throughout the day – whether with clients or internally – which could include showing clients or stakeholders new product concepts and receiving feedback, or working on a product roadmap and determining what updates come next.

When I’m not in meetings, I’m either writing product requirements, documenting what’s coming with a new release, or designing new product concepts. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time reviewing documentation and working with internal stakeholders to in preparation for our next product release, Care Management 20.2.

What is your favorite aspect of your job?
I love collaborating and working with people. I absolutely love talking to clients – whether learning their problems and workflows, understanding their day-to-day processes, or identifying their pain points. It’s exciting to have new problems to solve.

Once we’ve developed new solutions or product concepts, I like talking to clients to receive their feedback to ensure the product addresses the challenges they’ve discussed with us. I was a user experience designer before working in product management, and speaking with clients and end users was always the most enjoyable part of my job. I enjoy user research, and fortunately I’m able to do that in this role, as well.

I also love brainstorming as a group – particularly during the conceptual phase of product development. I really enjoy collaborating during those early processes, when there are several possibilities to solve a problem and we need to work together to identify a singular solution before moving forward.

What’s next for the Care Management product?
Thanks for asking! The Care Management 20.2 release will be live in August, and it includes two new exciting features. I’ve been working on the Denial Management module, which has been completely redesigned. We have a new front-end technology that we’ve been working with, and it’s the first of – hopefully – many updates to the Care Management platform to ensure that we provide users with a modern and flexible user interface. I know that many of our current Denial Management clients are very excited to see this new offering. I’m looking forward to its launch, and hope that Denial Management improves workflows for clients that are tracking their denials.

The other exciting new feature within Care Management 20.2 is our post-acute authorization feature. This actually a huge release for us! It’s the first time that we’ll have two significant updates happening in one release. Moving forward, we hope to remain innovative and nimble so that we can address the quickly evolving care management market.

What else makes this release unique? Can you tell us about the redesign process?
This has been a long, three-year process. We took a user-centered design – or design thinking – approach for this. We spent a lot of time interviewing managers and end users, both on- and off-site. We did a six-month research effort to better understand how the legacy denials module was used, and I listened to feedback from clients and internal stakeholders. I like to call myself the “dartboard” on products like that: throw all of the darts at me, I will listen and I then figure out how to improve it.

We also worked with a UX designer for quite a few months to develop different design concepts, and we took those concepts to our clients for feedback before finalizing and moving forward. There were a couple false starts on the technology side – trying to find the right technology that would fit the solution.

It’s taken a lot of patience and persistence, but I feel like we did things in what I would call the “right” way. By identifying clients’ challenges to better understand what they were going through, we put our users first. I think the outcome is going to be fantastic for our clients. There’s a lot of buzz, internally and with the clients that I work with, about this release. I hope that, in the future, we follow this design thinking approach for all of our initiatives and major releases.

What’s something about you that coworkers would be surprised to learn?
Over the last year and a half, I’ve taken improv classes at The Second City, and I completed their improv program in October 2019. It’s been a fun process! I initially signed up because I thought it would be a good way to become a better public speaker – and be quicker on my feet – but I absolutely fell in love with it. I’ve met amazing people, and it’s been a great way to make friends – including a lot of very funny people from all walks of life. At first, I was petrified to go on stage… growing up, I never did drama or school plays. The first time I went on stage and performed a 15-minute show, however, it was a huge growth experience for me. From that moment on, I’ve been addicted to improv and have looked for any opportunity to perform. It’s probably the thing I’ve missed the most during COVID-19, which has been hard. I’m hoping that world will open up again sometime soon. In the meantime, I’ve tried to do some comedy writing in my free time.

What are your hobbies outside of work?
I try to keep myself really active, and I’m very outdoorsy. I ran a half Ironman the past two summers, and I used to run marathons. Unfortunately, there’s no racing going on right now – so I try to make up for it with more hikes, camping, stand-up paddle boarding and visiting local forest preserves outside Chicago. I have a dog named Biscuit, and I like to bring her along with me.

I recently went to Michigan and visited Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. I did a brutal hike – two miles each way, climbing nothing but sand dunes to get to the water. I’ve done some pretty intense mountain hikes in the past, but this was one of the hardest hikes I’ve ever done. It was amazing once I reached the water and could cool off, but then I realized I had to do the two-mile trek in the hot sand back to the parking lot!

To learn more about what Paul’s been working on, read our recent blog post about our Denial Management offering, which lives within CarePort Care Management.

How Improv Will Make You a Better Product Manager

Let’s face it, being a Product Manager is a tough job. Every day can bring new, unexpected challenges: Maybe it’s a new defect in your product, or you have an unhappy client, or maybe your developers just told you that really important feature is going to take 6 months to build. Those are the days when Happy Hour can’t come soon enough.

I was looking for a new activity to take on in my free time over a year ago, and decided to sign up for an Improv course at The Second City in Chicago. I thought it would be fun, with the hope it might help me with my public speaking skills. 15 months later, I have completed their Improv program, performed in numerous shows, and have developed a taste for comedy sketch writing. Little did I know I was stepping into a new hobby that has done wonders for my professional life.

Here are a few areas where Improv can help you become a better Product Manager:

Improv helps you become a better listener

Deep listening is crucial to be a successful improviser. Names, places, and relationships are all being made up during an improv scene. An improviser needs to listen carefully to everything being said so a scene can have continuity. It can be really awkward if one player starts saying they are at a rodeo, and the other player responds by saying they’re a pirate on a ship. It doesn’t make sense and you start losing the audience.

Those listening skills become really important as a Product Manager. Developers may present you a compelling explanation about the feasibility of a feature that could affect product direction. Sales may be describing a potential new feature that could be a business growth opportunity. Listening closely to end-users will help build understanding of the problem they are really having, and help avoid building exactly what they asked for. (Which we know can be exactly what they don’t really need.) I have found my listening skills have improved and allowed me to focus on the problem space to develop a better solutions.

Improv helps you go with the flow

By it’s nature, everything is made up on the fly while improvising. There are no lines to memorize, scripts to read, or stage directions to follow. An improviser can’t control what someone is going to say. However, what they can control is how they respond to what is happening in the scene. Thinking quickly and responding to the unexpected, instead of pausing or freezing, can lead to some funny and compelling moments that will keep an audience engaged.

In my first Product Management role, I realized pretty quickly how much was out of my control in developing products. I could plan all I wanted, but I wasn’t writing the code, determining the corporate strategy, or updating regulations. I found a lot of success in the role came from how I responded to those unexpected situations. The improv lessons helped me embrace the unexpected, and allowed me to go with the flow to keep the product development moving in the right direction.

“Yes, and…”

“Yes, and…” is the classic line that is taught early in improv classes. At it’s core, the line is meant to acknowledge what your teammate said or did, and then to build on it. This acknowledgement leads to a more continuous and compelling scene. Going back to the pirate example, giving a “no” back to a teammate and going a new direction can cause the audience to be confused and lose interest. Worse, the trust is lost between teammates on stage.

As a Product Manager, I will not pretend I have all the answers. In fact, I encourage all of my teammates to speak up and share their ideas with me. My Support and Services team has shared client feedback that helped me avoid releasing a feature that would have not been used. My QA testers have come to me and explain a requirement I had written would have broken the workflow in a different part of the application. My developers have offered suggestions that improved the solution I was working on and delighted clients. If I didn’t listen and “Yes, and…” my teammates, I would not have near the amount of success I have had in my product work.

Improv makes you a better teammate

Improv is not stand-up comedy, it’s a team activity. The best improv teams will work together as a team to provide a fun and interesting show. It is noticeable to an audience when someone is trying to take over the show, and it ruins the energy for everyone. One of my instructors would hammer home that everyone in an ensemble should like each other to put on successful show. It’s meant to be fun! And it’s hard to have fun if you aren’t getting along with other members of the ensemble.

All of those skills I listed above: listening, going with the flow, and “Yes, and…” will make you a better teammate and more of a joy to work with. As a Product Manager, I rely heavily on my soft skills to influence and motivate my teammates to make sure the right solution is built for our clients. Throwing my ego around or getting frustrated does not serve me well, and frankly, no one wants to work with that. I have worked with insecure or egotistical PMs in the past, and have found it just drains the motivation of the development and design teams.

A former manager of mine once told me, “Friends build products, co-workers write requirements.” I have found a lot of truth in this statement in my career, and I continue let my improv experience help me grow as a team player.

Finally, it’s just a lot of fun!

I’m not going to tell you that you need to take an improv class to be a successful Product Manager. That’s a little silly.

I will say, that it has been a ton of fun and I have made plenty of new friends on this journey. I have grown both personally and professionally and I would highly recommend it for anyone.

In fact, I recommend you “Yes, and…” my suggestion…

“There are no mistakes, only opportunities.” — Tina Fey