Director of Product: Simple
Resolve to Save Lives – Digital Team
Background:
Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL) is a global not-for-profit organization with a mission to prevent 100 million deaths from heart disease and to make the world safer from epidemics. We are led by Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 2017, Resolve to Save Lives has partnered with low- and middle-income country governments, multi-lateral agencies, academic and other civil society partners, and communities to build capacity for and support implementation of enabling policies and effective programs to treat and control hypertension, reduce sodium intake, eliminate artificial trans fat, and strengthen systems for epidemic prevention. To find out more about our work, visit: https://www.resolvetosavelives.org.
A key pillar of our Cardiovascular Health program is information systems. Our team developed Simple (simple.org), a free, open source app used by healthcare workers to better manage patients with high blood pressure. By allowing health care workers to track patient care over time, we can help them control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Today, Simple is used by thousands of nurses and doctors every day, treating over 3 million patients across India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka and creating a huge impact in improving their health outcomes and saving lives. Simple has scaled rapidly and continues to focus on creating impact as an effective program-enabler for cardiovascular disease management globally. Resolve is also developing “Simple-like” strategies where learnings and good practices from Simple are replicated in other digital health tools at global scale (eg. DHIS2) and deployable in-country for cardiovascular health program monitoring.
Job summary:
We’re looking for a Director of Product to lead product development for Simple into its next phase and help us accomplish our goal of partnering with countries to save 100 million lives in 30 years. The Director of Product will co-lead the Simple digital strategy along with the Director of Engineering and the Director of Design. By joining our team, you will play a key role in helping us evolve and grow Simple, keeping it fast and reliable while providing valuable data to the public health programs we support. You will also help build and nurture the team, creating a culture that is effective, supportive, and understands the big picture of what we’re working on.
We are seeking an experienced candidate who is ready to do work that matters. The ideal candidate embraces learning about our challenges, has led teams and has demonstrated leadership. They should be very familiar with what it takes to lead a product to scale (and sustain it) especially in a dynamic global environment. Ideally, experience in the world of health tech (public and/or private) would be highly desirable so that they hit the ground running. To be successful in this role, you should: value simplicity over perfection; be a problem solver and doer, take ownership of your work; focus on outcomes instead of getting lost in details; communicate and share knowledge to empower and enable others; don’t be afraid to try things and learn from mistakes; and set clear timelines, document progress and value accountability.
Our team prides itself on:
- Delivering fast, pragmatic, simple software used by healthcare workers in thousands of clinics every day
- Working on solutions for tens of millions of patients
- Contributing to an open source project used in multiple countries
- Open, honest, and supportive collaboration among designers, PM, project manager, mobile developers, and Rails engineers
- Shipping and iterating instead of chasing perfection
- Ensuring patient privacy and data security
It’s critical that our team represent the diverse environments in which we operate. We strive for an inclusive, diverse team with different perspectives, ideas, and identities.
Essential duties and responsibilities:
As Director of Product, you drive product direction and prioritisation, with input from in-country teams, partners, and your tech colleagues. You will report to our SVP of Technology and work directly with our design, engineering, medical, and epidemiology leads. We expect directors to become intimately involved in understanding the organization and product goals and guiding the team towards sound software decisions. You will be responsible for:
Team Leadership
Lead, motivate and support a team that includes a user researcher and technical project manager. Oversee team outputs and performance management and contribute to team cohesion and productivity and, as needed, hiring related responsibilities.
Strategy
Acquire program/public health understanding, set product direction and strategy to best enable the hypertension programs we support. Ensure that the team understands the context around what and why we’re building. Encourage the entire product and engineering team to build products with empathy and respect for the people we’re building them for. We use OKRs and you will drive the development and measurement of our progress towards our goals.
Product planning and prioritisation
Working closely with the Chief Medical Officer and engineering team to build a collaborative roadmap, set priorities, and ensure that the product development timelines are met. Translating program goals into specific requirements for Simple. This will include making tradeoffs between features, schedule, and costs based on their relationship to program goals, funding availability, software architecture constraints, and engineering team capabilities.
Project management
You will work with our project manager to track progress against product plans and resolve challenges as they come up. Managing project scope by making tradeoffs between competing software requirements (say from various countries), such as time vs. cost and software security vs. speed. Highlighting risks and managing mitigation is an important part of this role.
Partner engagement
Engage with various in-country partners on product conversations, custom needs, new requests, program conversations etc. that affect the Simple product roadmap. Change management is important in healthcare and forward-communicating upcoming changes is part of your role.
Budgets and contracts
Work with leadership to set financial expectations and scope, spend money effectively, and make sure we stay within our means. Manage contracts to ensure scope of work and terms are beneficial to both parties.
Documentation/publications
Treat documentation as a first-class concern and develop documents that allow the entire product/engineering team to understand and contribute to the technology we build. Lead development of articles and publications for journals or media on Simple.
Required qualifications, experience, skills and attributes:
- Expert-level experience shipping products in the real-world that are used by millions of people.
- Significant experience product managing native mobile and web app products.
- Experience managing complex partnerships with input into product development. We work with many partners (including WHO and Ministries of Health in several countries) and you will manage relationships and input from them.
- Comfort working with numerators and denominators to clearly define public health indicators — obviously, working with our public health team. Here’s an example from our documentation.
- Expert at creating clear product requirement documents in collaboration with engineering teams.
- Experience working with user research and design to craft user requirements, so products are loved in the field.
- Direct experience in healthcare is not a hard requirement, but would be beneficial.
- Possess curiosity and a keen interest in learning and being challenged
- Strong oral communication and writing skills
- Highly organized and excellent with follow-up
- Motivated to do work that truly matters
- Can work effectively across cultures, with remote teams in India, Ethiopia, USA, UK, and Nigeria
Location: This is a remote position. Our team primarily sits between UK and India time zones. We are open to candidates based in US East Coast, United Kingdom, or India, and who will be able to collaborate with product, design and engineering teams in India/Africa. This role will require travel to countries in Asia and Africa.
Salary range for the role will depend on global location and is set according to national labor rates for the international NGO sector. In addition to salary, we offer a generous package of benefits.