Sarah Jacob is Chief Product Officer at MedBridge, an online education and digital patient care platform for clinicians and healthcare organizations. She began her career as a business systems analyst at the University of Michigan before joining product at CareCloud. Prior to joining MedBridge, Sarah held leadership positions at Accolade and Optimize Health.
In our conversation, Sarah talks about how great products need to be supplemented with excellent storytelling, messaging, value propositions, and go-to-market functions to realize success. She discusses the role of storytelling in different staged companies, as well as how one can develop this skill set throughout their career.
Bringing people along the journey
You’ve talked about how it’s not enough to build great products — you believe storytelling is also an important tool for product managers. Could you elaborate on that?
This is one of my favorite topics. Storytelling is a wonderful thing because you can bring people along the journey. For product leaders, a lot of time other people think of us as if we’re building our roadmaps in our ivory towers, and we’ll tell them about it later.
Early on in my career, I was frustrated because I would build what I thought were really cool products and really great features, but they would go nowhere. I learned that you need great product marketing and go-to-market functions to go alongside those great products. That means great messaging and value propositions, as well as a solid understanding of who you are selling to and how you are selling to them. All of these things go hand in hand with the actual product.
At what point in the process do you start working on go-to-market?
As early as possible — even when you’re building the roadmap. By doing that, you are starting to signal “Here’s why we’re making a roadmap that looks this way.” Everybody starts to understand what the roadmap is going to look like and they connect it to the story. I learned early on to bring the organization and the customer base along during that process. This is incredibly valuable to keep in mind as you’re building and releasing products.
The impact of storytelling on a product
Do you find that storytelling is important regardless of the company’s stage?
Yes. I’ve been at companies of all sizes and stages. There are slight differences in the storytelling and messaging itself depending on the company stage, but I find that regardless, you still need it to help the product succeed.
For early-stage companies like Seed, Series A, and even Series B, storytelling is really about excitement and differentiation. In the early stages, it’s about explaining to the market that you’re filling a gap. You want to articulate that you’ve figured out something new and different to garner a lot of attention.
At later stage companies, storytelling is about reliability with a twist of innovation. The market generally knows you and says, “We trust you guys for this, but how are you innovating over here?” I’ve seen this dynamic play out at MedBridge. We’ve been around for over a decade and we’re known in our space. Our customers love us but they still ask, “What are you doing for me lately and how are you innovating?” They want to know how we are going to make the products they love and trust even better.
Do you have an example that illustrates the impact storytelling has on a product?
I’ll use AI because that’s a hot topic. Nobody goes out and says, “I’m going to buy an AI product.” What they ask companies instead is, “How are you using AI?” and “Why should I use your AI solution versus one of your competitors?” This is where storytelling can really shine. You see a lot of generative AI models right now but people have to give you different use cases for how those can be advantageous in your industry.
At MedBridge, one way that we’ve used AI in our clinician-facing products is to create AI-generated patient summaries. Now, when the clinician logs in, they can view a summary at the top of the page indicating how their patient is doing and what progress has been made since their last visit. The alternative required the clinician to go through dashboards, review instant messages, figure out whether a patient’s pain was increasing or decreasing, and whether or not a patient completed their program..
When it comes to storytelling, we position that AI summary to the clinician as, “Hey, we understand that you’re seeing patients all day long. You’re staying after work to do documentation for hours, and we know you’re just trying to make it home. We’re helping you do your job better, faster, and easier so you can get back to your personal life.”
That story really resonated because we made it relatable. Clinicians say “Yeah, I actually do want to get this done faster so I can go home.” We all know about clinician burnout — they spend so much time after hours doing documentation. If we can help relieve some of that stress, they will be happier and will deliver better patient care.
Why storytelling is crucial in early-stage companies
You mentioned that storytelling can differ based on the stage of the company. Can you say more about that?
Sure. I think storytelling is even more critical in early-stage companies. The message is about how you are different, special, and investable. The real role of the product leader at an early-stage company is to create that story and bring the board, organization, and customers along that journey.
What strategies or techniques do you recommend to get everyone at all levels of a company to understand and absorb a company’s story and messaging?
Repetition, repetition, repetition. It’s important to have the organization aligned and have every single function help. For example, when MedBridge decided to get into digital patient care, we let our stakeholders know that we spent two years working to understand the space. We explained why the space is important, how we can win there, what the value prop is, and what the messaging is before we even built the product. Sales, in their prospecting conversations, was able to provide us with some cover on the product side because they understood the context of the move.
There are a couple of tools that I like to use to inform the organization. One is the Amazon PR/FAQ framework and the other is the working backwards framework. They are both valuable when you’re building something from scratch. It’s powerful to write a future-facing press release for the product that you’re about to build, especially for folks who are non-technical or aren’t on the R&D team. They can read the press release and the CEO quote and understand what you’re trying to put out there in the world.
The other thing that helps is that I have a stellar design team. For things that are difficult to understand, I go deep with the designers. Prototypes are very underrated. They help both engineering and go-to-market folks understand the possibilities and how the product that hasn’t been built is different from what we already have.
Aligning with the CMO and other stakeholders
You’ve been at companies during acquisitions and public offerings. How have you used storytelling to communicate and align your team with product vision and strategy during these transitions?
This is one of the times when storytelling is really important. At MedBridge, it took the time and effort to communicate the pivot we underwent when transitioning from a well-known, well-loved online education platform to being a leader in the digital musculoskeletal (MSK) space.
My CMO and I needed to be perfectly aligned. The message as to how we would enter the MSK space was also critical. Our story was that we were already serving 300,000 clinicians across the country. They use our platform to send over 70 million patients home exercise programs. So we had to ask ourselves, “Who knows better about what those patients might want or need than we do? Who knows better about what the patients are going to need to get better at home based on all of this data that we have?”
Our user base and knowledge led us to conclude that we were in an optimal position to go into this space and double down on what we’re calling digital patient care. We believed that we could take the MSK industry by storm. And that’s what we’ve done. In July, we released our digital MSK platform called Pathways.
When you’re creating new product messaging, who’s involved in that? Besides you and the CMO, who else needs to be in the room?
At MedBridge, I involve the go-to-market team as well. Messaging is both a product and go-to-market exercise. We involved product marketing, sales enablement, and strategy teams. We also considered competitive intelligence and input from customers and in-market prospects.
When I first was hired, my CEO asked me, “What do you think is going to be the hardest thing about building this product?” I said, “I think it’ll be the go-to-market because we can build it, but shifting the company to sell to larger organizations is a different selling motion. It’s a different value proposition and economic model.” All those things have to be figured out as you’re building the product. When you’re launching something new, having product, go-to-market, and product marketing live together is invaluable.
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What would you say was the hardest part of launching a digital patient care platform?
We’re still in early GA but I would double down on the go-to-market piece. We’re really lucky that we built the product marketing, messaging, and value proposition upfront. We also did a six-month beta program where we tested the messaging and objection handling, and picked out the quotes that our customers found interesting about the product.
I think this product is more upstream than our existing solutions. Also, the market is still being refined. Patients love it. Our CSAT is through the roof, so we think it’s the right product. Now it’s a matter of selling to different folks. For example, we used to close deals in 30 days, but with our new product, the sales cycle is more like 3–6 months. That’s a big difference, so our go-to-market teams have to adjust to that small hurdle.
Growing one’s storytelling skills
As a product leader, how do you go about promoting and helping people on your team develop those storytelling skills?
Storytelling is one of my favorite product skills, but I don’t want it to come across like it’s a must-have for everyone. When you build a team, each member will have different traits, strengths, and weaknesses. Ideally, there are storytellers on the team who can get folks excited about what’s happening. I especially love including both product and go-to-market folks in my weekly meetings.
Our product folks will give the update on the roadmap, where we’re stuck, what’s working, what we’re learning, and what we’re doing in discovery. Our go-to-market folks will follow up with, “This is something that we keep hearing from customers and we don’t have a good answer to. What do you all think?” The product people think about what the prospects care about, and the go-to-market folks stay in the know. That back and forth has been great because it makes product managers think about objection handling and functionality from both user needs and PRD perspectives.
When you’re hiring for your team, what are some things that you look for before and during the interview process?
My favorite interview question is, “Have you ever launched a product or a feature?” I’ve found that individuals in the product management space are so specialized now. Product managers can be good at writing requirements, working with engineering, getting things into agile sprint planning, etc., but if they have never launched anything, then they haven’t really had to work cross-functionally. They haven’t had to think about finance, legal, or marketing concerns. Working cross-functionally toward launching a product forces you to have way more business context than if you’re in a silo.
Across the board, I want to see that a PM has gone through the whole process — through stakeholders, messaging, legal, etc. I feel that that’s an underrated skill that a lot of product folks have not done in my experience. That’s the number one thing I look for.
The other thing is presentation skills, which go hand-in-hand with storytelling. These skills can be learned, so it’s perfectly OK if you’re starting in your career and you’re still learning how to be a great presenter. I was once there, so I get that. But being a great presenter means that you can be a great storyteller. And when you’re a great storyteller who can bring the rest of the organization along with you, that’s what will make you truly successful.