Innovating Healthcare is Product Management

Ambreen Molitor is responsible for overseeing Planned Parenthood's innovation lab, which is called the Digital Products CoLab.

How did a very shy developer become an incredibly successful product manager? Ambreen Molitor learned how to raise her hand, started thinking differently and “went from someone that was delivering, to someone that was participating in decision-making.”

Her multifaceted product management background in everything from nonprofits to media to ed tech has brought her to her current role overseeing Planned Parenthood's innovation lab, which is called the Digital Products CoLab. Ambreen has an interesting perspective on being a product manager at a nonprofit vs. being a product manager at a for-profit organization:

And your KPIs are probably going to be different, but you're still responsible for helping grow your business and making an impact in the field or industry that you're in.”

One benefit she’s found at Planned Parenthood is it’s easier to live the value of “users first.” “In not-for-profit, it's really about users first,” she says. “In for-profit everyone always says, ‘Users first, business second.’ But it's pretty much an impossibility to get there. There's always this friction. And for nonprofit, it's easier to tell that story where you think about users first because that is certainly their mission.”

A key part of that mission at CoLab has been to scale healthcare and education services specifically to Gen Z and millennial audiences. To that end, they have created an award-winning app, Spot On, and an award-winning chatbot, Roo.

Learn more about how Ambreen’s bot achieved an 80% accuracy rate, and hear her thoughts on developing user insights and metrics, as well as the future of healthcare education, on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript of this episode here:

Here are the Highlights:

• The difference between product management in for-profits and not-for-profits: 7:29
• The importance of “users first”: 9:02
• How Planned Parenthood created an award-winning chatbot: 18:50 
• Managing cross-functional teams as a product manager: 6:21

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• Transformation is Product Management
• Mindsets and Metrics is Product Management
• Accelerating Innovation is Product Management