Having a beginner’s mindset can help you build a more resilient product — by being open to getting a lot wrong.
@othman originally teamed up with
@eladgil to build a cheaper genetic test for cancer screening. An engineer and former Google and Twitter PM, he had no experience in healthcare. So he started with what he knew: building a product.
But simultaneously learning how the healthcare industry operates turned out to be a years-long iterative process. He wound up changing many of his initial assumptions and ultimately pivoted away from direct-to-consumer testing — incorporating what what he’d learned to build an even better solution.
Today,
@Color is a billion-dollar virtual cancer clinic that has partnerships with the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health.
On The Review, he outlines the steps he took to build a product in a new industry, from mapping the flow of decision-making to studying the incumbents.