Profile: Alex Wong, Group Product Manager
Part of our series of profiles of members of our Product Team
So Alex, tell us a bit about yourself!
I grew up on the East Coast before going to college at Boston College, where I studied Economics and Math. I spent a year abroad at the London School of Economics. After graduation, I moved to New York City, where I live now. And I've been at Clipboard Health for just over 3 years.
A lot must have changed around here in the last 3 years!
Definitely. It is a different company today than it was then, in many ways. Although I will say what has been surprising is what stayed the same. I think the culture is stronger now than ever before. So it's been an interesting journey.
What is that culture for you?
When I joined, it was clear that we cared a lot about hiring really excellent people. But it's hard to maintain that, and I think we've done well in the specific impact hiring has had, the talent density in the team is even higher than when I joined. Which is saying a lot because when I joined I was already excited to work with a bunch of smart people.
How big was the team when you started?
I think the product team was 4 people. When it's what… 30 now?
That's quite the growth indeed. How has your role changed over time?
I work on New Verticals, in two capacities:
The first is as an independent contributor. I'm running our Home Health vertical: sending nurses directly into patients' homes by staffing Home Health Agencies and Hospices. We are fortunate to have a huge supply of workers to build this business on, unlike some other verticals.
The second capacity is as the portfolio manager of new verticals. At this point, we have 5 new verticals running simultaneously, and there's a large chunk of thinking around what we are attacking, and what we need to see in each of these verticals to ensure they're worth spending our time, attention, and money on. There's also the different phases and milestones that we want to see to continue investing.
Interesting. And I take it your day-to-day looked rather different when you started?
For sure. I've worked on a lot of different things. When I first joined, the process for booking shifts was very manual and done over text by our Support Agents. At that time, there was a large question around what needs to exist to make this process smooth. It required a lot of digging through text messages to unpack which mechanisms our Support Agents were operating on their own, manually, so that we could build those into the app. Part of that quickly became obvious: it was pricing - so we started working on a much better pricing algorithm.
From there, I wanted to start PMing. Relatedly to the example above, one of the first things I PM'd was a smooth onboarding experience. That was my first project, and it's roughly the same onboarding experience we see in the app today. It was probably one of the more growth-limiting factors for us, and just making the onboarding smooth was a huge boon to our supply base.
Then I became the Group PM for the Worker Group, which handles all of our worker problems, and I worked on a few things there - including referrals. Referrals are essentially about paying Healthcare Professionals to refer their friends. When your referral works their first shift, you both get paid. There was a really strong mission alignment in that role for me, because I would rather spend our marketing budget on paying nurses than on ads. So the referrals project was a very satisfying one for me from a mission perspective.
After that, I started working on New Verticals. I started out looking at hotels to staff them with cooks, cleaners, receptionists and bartenders. It turns out that's difficult, for a number of reasons. I'm still pretty bullish on Hotels as an opportunity, but we realized quickly that it would take a long time, and that there were other kinds of lower-hanging opportunities in front of us.
That's when I started working on Home Health, and managing the New Verticals portfolio.
That's quite an evolution! What's your favorite part of your job?
Talking to customers. It's painful to hear when things go wrong, but extremely rewarding to fix them. On one side we have Healthcare Professionals, for whom improvements we make to our app can really improve their lives. On the other hand, you have Healthcare Facilities, and the improvements we make to their side of the app have a lot of impact too - both on the business and the people. For example, you can think about a facility's Director of Nursing having to go work the floor on their day off because they're short-staffed and couldn't get someone to fill in.
So the problems we solve are genuinely very impactful for people, and by far the most rewarding part of it is hearing about how we've been able to make their lives easier.
Has that changed when you think of your previous jobs?
This is actually my first job out of school. However, when I was in college, I had a startup of my own, which is what made me look for relatively early-stage startups, and one of the reasons I looked at Clipboard Health to begin with. But I don't have a great point of comparison for you!
Gotcha. So how did you get to know about Clipboard Health?
I found out about Clipboard Health on the YC job board. At the time, we were in the middle of the pandemic, and only a few companies were hiring. I spent quite a long time looking for a job, and I was very stubborn in my search. I was deathly afraid of accepting a job that I was just moderately happy about. I wanted a role that would challenge me, and that I could grow while doing. I ended up rejecting a few opportunities for that reason.
Clipboard Health interested me from the perspective of how the business works. Back in school, I got very interested in Development Economics, especially at LSE. You can think about it as Economy Building: you're running experiments to understand the effects of different shortcomings of an economy and a society, often technologically, and track that back to the impacts they have on people.
In a lot of ways, it's similar to what we do at Clipboard Health, because we're running our own labor market. There's obviously different types of markets, but the labor economy is the largest one in most markets. So in essence, Clipboard Health is like a labor developmental economics problem, which I thought was fascinating.
How did interviewing to join CBH go for you?
I actually got rejected at first, which was a disappointment, but I moved on. And then, about a month later, Bo (Bo Lu, Co-CEO) emailed me to say that the team had a project that they would like me to take a crack at, and asked whether I was interested in joining.
That's amazing. How did you then get involved in hiring yourself?
I just asked - I knew we were hiring, and that it was the number one limiting agent to our growth. I wanted to be involved in interviewing in particular. I was a little nervous that I would hate it because it's kind of like asking strangers uncomfortable questions. But it turns out I find it very enjoyable! A lot of the candidates are very smart, and even if we're not at a stage where it makes sense to send them an offer, most of the conversations are genuinely a lot of fun, because it's actually just jamming on hard problems with smart people.
And how do you socialize in our distributed environment?
Well, the quarterly Product Team Offsites are great, but thankfully there's also a bunch of us in NYC. We occasionally meet up, and I've become close with a couple of different teammates that way.
Nice! Has working for a fully remote company changed how you organize your life?
Well first of all, I sleep until 8:30, which is amazing because I stay up late. So I don't think I'd be able to pull that off if I were going into an office.
I've also traveled a bit without having to take lots of time off, and it's really nice: I went to Brazil last year to visit Eliseo, and he showed me around São Paulo. I took 2 days off, but I was there for two weeks. It's a really cool city, surprisingly similar to New York in how it feels. I think it's a function of the density of buildings, maybe? And the graffiti, I'd be lying if it said I said it wasn't graffiti-weighted (laughs).
What else do you like to do when you're not working?
New York is a fun place. There's so much to do: my Google Maps has a ton of pins of places that I have been to or have heard about. A lot of my friends from high school and college live here, too. Otherwise, I cook and bake a lot - my mom has a background in food.
And I also play a lot of guitar. That's probably where most of my time goes when I am home and not working! I have an acoustic that I've been thinking about replacing lately. I also have a semi-hollow body, which I'm considering replacing with a true hollow body. And I recently bought a used Strat: it's a 2019 Mexican Strat that's reliced. It's my favorite guitar right now. Whoever owned it before stripped the neck of the paint and the finish, so it's just bare wood - and they polished it really smooth. I'm 100% going to do that on every guitar I have, it changed how I play.