Profile: Samay Jhunjhunwalla, Head of Customer Operations

Part of our series of profiles of members of our Product Team

Hi Samay! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m Samay, I work in our Product organization at Clipboard Health, and I'm based in the beautiful city of Atlanta, GA. I came here several years ago for college, moved around to different cities for work and eventually settled back here during the pandemic. 

Amazing - What did you do before Clipboard Health and how did you get here?

My journey to Clipboard Health was quite unique. I started interviewing almost 2.5 years ago when I got introduced to George (George Markoulakis, Head of Product) through one of my mentors who happens to be an investor in Clipboard Health. At the time, Clipboard Health did not have much of a website or careers page so it was hard to discover them on my own so I’m glad I got a warm intro to kick the process off. The person who made the introduction said “I’ve never met a smarter group of guys who are so obsessed with solving customer problems, you have to meet them”. I’m sure we all get a lot of “you have to meet this person” introductions but I guarantee you CBH is the only time that sentiment has been true. After a quick informal chat I started the hiring process; the process was similar to what candidates go through today, with the Toledo case > followed by a live discussion on my submission > followed by a written Reliability working backwards case > final stages on the WBD/executive reviews. IIRC the whole process took ~2 weeks. It probably would have been quicker if I got my cases turned around faster ha! As an interviewee I’ve always felt it can be hard to study an organization from the outside and as candidates, interviewing can often be looked as “the company is trying to evaluate if I am good fit for them” but I reflect back on this process in quite a different fashion as it was the first time I think I felt like the process allowed me to confidently say “I enjoyed this very much and I think I can grow fast if I did this kind of work each day around these folks”. It's hard to build this level of conviction during the hiring process. 

Before Clipboard Health, I was at Google for a few years running a large Business Operations team, and Uber, as part of their Risk and Strategy Operations team. Prior to that, I was a Management Consultant for several years.

How has your role evolved here in the last 2 years?

I'm part of our Product organization, and my role sits within the Strategy and Operations (S&O) arm. S&O roles are designed to have folks plugged into different parts of the organization and solve some fun customer challenges. 

What attracted me about the role was that it was built for someone like me, a generalist, where you come in and a tough problem gets thrown at you, you think from First Principles, build a portfolio from the ground up, and solve customer challenges along the way. I have zero B2B billing experience and my first day I was tasked with running and overhauling a ~60 person team that delivers billing solutions to our customers. 

My role has evolved a bit and I've now had the chance of working with several different leaders across the org which includes Marketplace Reliability, Licensing / Credential Support, Billing, Trust and Safety, and Workplace Support. 

Another area where my role has changed a lot is that when I first joined, I played the role of an individual contributor a lot, I did the groundwork myself, called customers, did the role of an agent myself essentially. Today my role is a little bit more distant from contributor-level work (though sometimes I really miss that and there are days in which I drop everything and just immerse myself in the frontline customer queues and gather clues myself). Several team members now do what I used to do a year or two ago (and they do it much better than I did) and I think it's fascinating to see that at Clipboard Health you're able to extract learnings because we do have a very solid writing culture.

How does that look like?

It's easy to forget what you did 1.5-2 years ago and here at CBH work can scale if you have something in writing and show "this is what excellence looks like". You can hold yourself and other people to that standard, and your work multiplies very quickly. Today I always lean into my past experiences, my past documents and I’m reminded of how far I’ve come but also how much more learning is ahead of me. Not just mine actually, there's a couple documents written by other team members that strike me even if they were written a while ago. I keep sending candidates these docs when they ask me, I often wished everyone got to see the caliber of writing here and what a force multiplier it can be. 

On that note, how would you say your job here differs from what you were doing previously?

A few things come to mind. Some are related to my role in S&O, and some are more unique to Clipboard Health as a company.

The first is: a lot of companies I have worked with, interviewed with, or met people claim that they are "customer obsessed" and that they "always think about the customer". And I think in many ways, they have a set of opinions which makes them think so. But in reality, very rarely have I come across a company or a team that embodies that customer obsession the way Clipboard Health does. 

By that I mean a few things that are rooted in my experience around here. During my first few weeks at Clipboard Health, all I did was literally pick up my phone, and call maybe 100 customers - Healthcare Facilities and Healthcare Professionals. I asked them what they loved about our app, what they hated about it, why they used it, and really dug deep, which got me to uncover different edges of our product.

I thought that was a phenomenal way to onboard and learn. It builds this muscle for me, where every time I have a question, I think like a customer. And because I've talked to so many of them, I can now think like them when a teammate pitches a new feature. I'm thinking "How would this customer perceive this feature? Can I sell them this feature? What problems does it solve for them?". It's the classic empty chair rule from Amazon being embodied so effortlessly here in the Clipboard halls. That is such an important skill for everyone.

People who work at Clipboard Health for an extended period of time start to develop habits that I think are very important for future entrepreneurs/operators: you develop a knack for uncovering and solving customer challenges and that curiosity never allows you to sleep. It's slightly invigorating. 

The second one is also unique to Clipboard Health, and we started to touch upon it earlier: the writing culture.

Here people do a lot of writing each week: product updates, pitching a project, memos, etc. But I think oftentimes it goes unsaid that this writing culture is only as important as the reading culture, and the "no toes" culture that we have here. The culture is so inviting that I actually look forward to people coming and probing, pushing, and asking me sometimes uncomfortable questions. It's a unique culture, very different from silos that can appear when everyone stays in their lane and not much ends up being challenged or questioned. Here everyone leaves their ego at the door, we're all here to learn, solve fun problems, and if people ask questions it's probably because they care about the problems. 

So I think a combination of the customer obsession and the writing culture makes Clipboard Health a very unique environment - not just for new grads and young professionals, but anyone to be able to come and actually learn, and be extremely self analytical about themselves 

And what makes S&O at Clipboard Health so different?

I think one reason why S&O differs here is that we don’t care about priors at all. 

You are given a lot of latitude in your individual domain. I mentioned this earlier but I had never done Billing in my entire life - short of spelling "billing", I likely would not know what billing even means in a B2B context. But when I first joined, I was thrown into a sort of Head of Billing role, with a team of ~60 people. Billing wasn't the best experience for our customers, and I was tasked with fixing these issues for them. 

That's when you realize that the way S&O works at Clipboard Health has less to do with domain-level experience, and more to do with "every functional problem that we have can be broken down into clear first-principles like interventions and components that we need to design". 

In many cases, we would describe that as taking a large rock, chipping it down into individual chunks, and solving each of those chunks separately. And when you break a domain problem down into these smaller chunks, you realize you don't need domain-level expertise to solve it. Its systems design at its core and look at that system from an optimization lens as an operator. That's an important function of how S&O operates here, and it's so different from what I've seen in other companies. 

Going back into the latitude: we move very fast here, and that might require you to make certain decisions to take an initiative off the ground. Typically, what would take you hours of meetings to kick off in another company… you can get this started yourself here, and answer potential questions along the way. You're essentially capped at your own speed and your own capacity, which I think is an incredible differentiator for our team.

Among all this, what's something you're especially proud to have accomplished here?

That first experience here with the Billing team was likely the one that stuck with me the most. When I first joined, one of the biggest challenges we faced was that it would take us 7 to 10 days to get back to a customer for a billing issue, or a dispute they had. There are various reasons why that would happen: we had no mechanisms, no processes or systems in place - everything was done on email and Slack. So, naturally, a lot of things fell through the cracks and customers were extremely unhappy.

Over the course of implementing several process changes, control points, reporting mechanisms, we're now at a point where 99% of our disputes and billing issues get solved the same day they come in, which I think is a phenomenal turnaround for a business our size that closes several million of dollars in billables each week. Especially when you consider how complex our invoices are. So yes, that's a metric that I feel very proud about, that I feel very close to.

That's awesome. Alright, enough work talk. What do you like to do after hours?

We have a newborn in the house, so I don't know that we get a lot of time outside of work for hobbies or… anything else (laughs). We spend a lot of our free time hanging out with the family, making memories. 

Outside of that, I have slowly gotten into pickleball, which I think is a fun sport. I try to go once or twice a week with a couple of friends to play, and I also like swimming a lot. I'll try to do more of both now that Summer is coming on. 

Nice! And congrats. I'll let you go back to work - or your family!