Episode #19 - Kevin Holub, VP of Product at Counterpart Health

Written By Omar Mousa

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Description

Kevin Holub is the Vice President of Product at Counterpart Health, a company spun out of Clover Health to scale its flagship clinical decision support platform, Clover Assistant. With a background in product leadership, data, and clinical systems, Kevin has spent the last six years driving outcomes at the intersection of technology, value-based care, and primary care transformation. At Counterpart, he’s helping risk-bearing providers and payers harness proven tools to detect chronic disease earlier, improve quality scores, and reduce medical costs—while designing product teams that are empowered, outcome-driven, and ready to navigate the realities of healthcare complexity.

In our conversation, Kevin shares his insights on:

  • From Internal Tool to Scalable Business: How Clover Assistant became the foundation for Counterpart Health, enabling risk-bearing organizations to scale physician-support technology beyond a single health plan.

  • Building an Empowered Product Org: Lessons from Clover’s shift away from feature factory culture and how product teams earn autonomy through evidence and outcomes.

  • Balancing Long-Term ROI in Healthcare: How Kevin uses frameworks like McKinsey’s Three Horizons to prioritize in an environment where impact often takes years to show up on a P&L.

  • Growing Through Compounded Context: Why staying in one organization for the long haul can be the greatest accelerant for product leadership growth.

  • Getting Unstuck in a Feature Factory: Practical, high-leverage tactics for PMs trying to bring experimentation and autonomy into top-down orgs.

  • AI and the Future of Product Management: Kevin’s take on how generative AI is shifting the role of the PM—and how his team is organizing around short-term impact and long-term disruption.

  • What’s Next for Counterpart: Why Counterpart is leaning into flexible partnerships, customer learning, and clinical reach to serve providers across diverse care settings.

In this latest episode of Concept to Care, we had an engaging conversation with Kevin Holub, Vice President of Product at Counterpart Health, a company bringing Clover Health’s proven clinical technology to providers and payers nationwide. Kevin shared deep insights into his journey scaling a product inside a Medicare Advantage plan, the evolution of empowered product teams in healthcare, how to prioritize when impact is delayed, and what it takes to grow as a strategic product leader in a complex, outcomes-driven environment.

www.concepttocare.com

Some takeaways:

  1. From Internal Tool to Scalable Business: How Clover Assistant Became Counterpart Health: Clover Assistant began as an internal tool powering Clover Health’s Medicare Advantage plan—and its success sparked the launch of Counterpart Health, a standalone tech subsidiary now serving payers, provider groups, and health systems nationwide.

    1. What Clover Assistant does: A clinical decision support platform that integrates into physician workflows, enabling earlier diagnosis and treatment of chronic conditions like diabetes and CKD.

    2. Proven impact: Clover Assistant enabled detection of diabetes 3 years earlier and CKD 1.5 years earlier on average—contributing to a sub-80% MCR and near-perfect HEDIS score of 4.94.

    3. Why Counterpart was created: As Clover’s plan performance improved, the team realized the same tools could benefit other risk-bearing entities—leading to the formation of Counterpart Health as a separate brand and legal entity.

    4. Strategic positioning: Counterpart offers the credibility of audited plan-level impact with the operational flexibility of a tech vendor—working with customers across models including SaaS, VBC partnerships, and risk enablement.

    5. Who they serve today: Counterpart now supports a range of partners, including Duke Connected Care, The Iowa Clinic, and Southern Illinois Health.

  2. From Feature Factory to Empowered Product Org: Lessons in Evolution: Kevin walked us through Clover’s transition from founder-driven execution to outcome-driven product development, starting with one pod and growing from there.

    1. Where they started: Product was founder-driven and execution-focused—a classic “feature factory.”

    2. How they evolved: By running AB tests, investing in instrumentation, and slowly earning trust, they transitioned to outcome-driven product teams.

    3. Empowerment defined: Not carte blanche, but aligned autonomy—clear objectives, defined guardrails, and responsibility for moving key outcomes.

    4. What made it possible: Starting small, measuring rigorously, and proving that the people closest to the problem could best solve it.

  3. Balancing Long-Term Outcomes with Short-Term Action: The Product Manager’s Dilemma: In healthcare, some of the most meaningful product bets (like quality performance) won’t pay off financially for years—so PMs need tools to navigate multiple time horizons.

    1. The lag of healthcare ROI: Some investments (like improving HEDIS scores) won’t financially show up for 2–3 years.

    2. Framework used: Kevin applies McKinsey’s Three Horizons to guide team focus across short-term optimization, medium-term platform building, and long-term disruptive innovation.

    3. Practical advice: Don’t lock into a static roadmap. Iterate continuously based on learnings.

    4. Output ≠ outcome: PMs need to manage both the clinical impact and business metrics—especially in environments with delayed payback.

  4. Career Growth through Compounding Knowledge: Kevin credits his rise from Senior PM to VP of Product to the power of staying, learning, and compounding hard-won context inside a complex domain.

    1. Kevin’s journey: From Senior PM to VP of Product over six years, by incrementally expanding scope and learning deeply across product, data, and clinical workflows.

    2. His advice: The most underrated growth lever is compounding knowledge—staying in one place long enough to build true context and credibility.

    3. The warning: Switching jobs too frequently resets your context and slows your trajectory. “Every time you leave, you start over at zero.”

    4. What made the difference: The right company, the right moment, and leadership willing to invest in internal growth.

  5. Tactical Advice for PMs in a Feature Factory: If you’re stuck in a top-down product org, Kevin recommends starting with a metric, a test, and a very small win—and using that to build credibility over time.

    1. Start small: Identify one metric that matters and run lightweight experiments to improve it.

    2. Get leadership buy-in: Don’t try to go rogue—align leadership around testing a new way of working.

    3. Prove and expand: Success earns trust. One win becomes a blueprint for the broader organization.

    4. Structure discovery: Use clinical teams, customer success, and internal experts to compensate for limited access to time-strapped users like PCPs.

  6. Rethinking Product Management in the Age of Generative AI: Kevin shared how generative AI is changing not only how teams build, but also what skills define great product managers in a world of rapid technological shifts.

    1. Strategic framing: Kevin uses the Three Horizons model to guide product org focus—encouraging most PMs to live in Horizon 1 (next 6–12 months) while ensuring the company is thinking ahead to Horizons 2 and 3.

    2. Horizon 1 (short-term): Product teams are expected to ship features that incorporate GenAI where it’s practical today—improving clinical efficiency, documentation, or workflow simplicity.

    3. Horizon 2 (mid-term): Teams explore use cases like AI agents in clinical workflows—work that may not ship now but informs how the platform should evolve.

    4. Horizon 3 (long-term): A dedicated leadership track explores disruptive scenarios like AGI and what happens “when Dr. Google becomes real,” focusing on organizational learning over output.

    5. Skill shift for PMs: In this new environment, Kevin emphasized adaptability, strategic range, and domain literacy—PMs must stay grounded in the present while developing fluency in how tech might reshape their market.

  7. What’s Next for Counterpart Health: Growth, Customization, and Strategic Learning: Kevin shared that Counterpart is entering a phase of accelerated growth, driven by new customer demand, flexible go-to-market pathways, and continued investment in clinical technology.

    1. Public results as validation: Counterpart’s strong performance within Clover is fueling inbound interest from payers, providers, and risk-bearing organizations seeking similar results.

    2. Momentum and expansion: Expect more announcements soon—new pilots, new customers, and new use cases aimed at delivering better care for more members.

    3. Go-to-market flexibility: Counterpart is engaging creatively with a range of organizations, offering solutions as a SaaS vendor, risk partner, or technology collaborator.

    4. PMF in motion: Kevin emphasized that while they’ve found product-market fit, they’re still discovering the most scalable and effective commercial model through experimentation.

    5. Long-term goal: Enable physicians across diverse care settings—especially those in underserved or rural environments—to provide better, data-driven care with less burden.

Show Notes

Where to find Kevin Holub

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Where to find Angela and Omar:

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Referenced:

Transcript

Kevin Holub: [00:00:00] I couldn't possibly be knowledgeable about h IDIs about total cost of care, about Medicare reimbursement and how bid works and how risk bearing provider groups work and analytics and product and AI and technology. If I had switched five times over the last five years, I only get that benefit because I'm incrementally building my knowledge on top of my previous knowledge base.

So when I get 2% smarter this year, I'm 2% smarter than I was on a compounded basis for six years. So I think the other part is it looks bleak. You're gonna want to quit, you're gonna wanna leave. It's human look, and at some point it's toxic, it's wrong. Do those things. Don't be afraid to do those things and change.

Angela Suthrave: Welcome to concept to care where we hear candid stories of success and failure. Discuss strategy and dive into the details that offer advice on what to do and what not to do in health tech. 

Omar Mousa: Whether you're a seasoned pro, growing your career, or just starting out. Our aim for this podcast is to be relevant, real world and [00:01:00] tactical.

We're dedicated to not only entertaining you all, but also empowering you with actionable insights that can be applied beyond the podcast one concept at a time. 

Angela Suthrave: This is Angela, 

Omar Mousa: and this is Omar. 

Angela Suthrave: Welcome to Concept to Care. 

Omar Mousa: Today we're excited to welcome Kevin Holo, VP of Product at Counterpart Health, and former VP of Product at Clover Health.

At Clover, Kevin helps scale a tech-driven approach to Medicare Advantage empowering physicians with real-time insights at the point of care. At Counterpart, Kevin is leading the charge, bringing that very same technology known as Clover assistant to risk-bearing provider groups and health plans beyond Clover's own membership.

In this episode, Kevin unpacks how their tech is detecting chronic diseases like diabetes and CKD years earlier, what it really means to run an empowered product organization in healthcare, and how product teams can drive value in a space where outcomes might take years to realize. If you've ever wondered what it really looks like to scale a product org inside a publicly traded health plan, or how to build a [00:02:00] tech that clinicians actually love, using this episode is for you.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Kevin, welcome to the show. 

Kevin Holub: Thank you for having 

Omar Mousa: me. Yes, it's our pleasure. We're excited to finally get this on the books. Um, how about you just start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself? 

Kevin Holub: I am Kevin Holo. I am currently the Vice President of Product at Counterpart Health. Uh, which I think we'll talk a little bit about Counterpart and Clover and how that all comes together.

Most importantly about me is I am a dad with two little kids that I love right now, a five-year-old and a three-year-old, and they are awesome. And it has really changed and helped me think about how to be the best leader I can be and how to be the best parent and has really figured out the intersection of work and life.

Angela Suthrave: And you love to ski? 

Kevin Holub: I am. We're a big ski family. We're actually up school vacation for our kids this week, and they're out skiing. And I'm [00:03:00] here recording a podcast with you and working, but they're, they're out on the mountain ripping it up, which is fun. 

Angela Suthrave: Kevin, we'll get started by, uh, having you tell us a little bit about Clover Health.

So what is Clover Health? What's the business problem that you all are trying to solve? 

Kevin Holub: We're a publicly traded healthcare company. Our mission is to improve every life, and that really is where a lot of the work for us starts. Clover is most well known and synonymous really with our core product offering, which is a Medicare advantage product.

We have a hundred thousand members in that Medicare Advantage product that's primarily on the east coast, heavily in our kind of fortress market. We talk about as New Jersey, but we also have membership in Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, a couple other states and and counties. And what we strive to do is provide the best care possible to our members.

A little bit different than other insurance companies. We operate as a PPO plan. [00:04:00] Uh, so about 95% of our membership is in our PPO plan. We do have an HMO, it's about 5% of our membership. For those, a little bit less familiar with the nuances between those two. A PPO, what it really means is that we have what's called an open network.

Members have a lot of flexibility in who they can see as their doctors. The in-network and out of network rates are slightly different, but it's not like an HMO where there's no coverage for out of network. There is coverage for out-of-network care. So that means for us that our members get to go and see whichever doctors they want to go see.

They can get the care that they want to go see. And that's pretty different in the Medicare Advantage market. And what we've been able to do as a company over the last really 12 years, the company was founded by Viva Care and Poly wonderful founder and he's still our chairman and uh, awesome visionary leader was to set out and do things differently.

And that started for us by really investing heavily to build a technology product and build a differentiated approach to how Medicare works. [00:05:00] There's a couple of models out there like that. I really respect what Oscar Health is doing. They're a great example of another technology focused healthcare company.

They focused on the technology component internally to healthcare operations for them of their operating model and how they operate their insurance plan. We did it differently. We focused and set on building technology for essentially the, the physicians in our network and those that are accessing and caring for our members.

And that technology investment is how we've been able to really focus and drive what I think is pretty impressive and exciting performance as a company. Uh, we're publicly traded, so you could see all of our results. Three years ago we lost, you know, $300 million and in 2024 we're. It's gonna have positive, uh, adjusted EBITDA performance.

Final results are coming in in the next week or so, but we've had, uh, positive guidance all year. Our medical cost ratio is, uh, sub 80%. We have the industry leading HE DDIs performance in the country for any plan with 2000 members or more. Again, for those less familiar, HE [00:06:00] DDIs is the way that CMS and the government measures quality of preventative care.

And so we're really proud of those types of results in a way that is different and it's all foundationally built around our approach to serving our members through, uh, enabling physicians with our software and technology. 

Angela Suthrave: Feel free to tell us from either the patient or member experience or the physician experience.

If I'm with Clover Health, how is that different with the technology that you all have built? 

Kevin Holub: This is not completely invisible. I think, you know, we do a little bit to market and have some awareness of what our core technology product, we call this the clover assistant. They have some awareness of what that is.

But the way that that really influences the membership is that the physicians that use our technology, so we have a lot of our in-network, uh, primary care physicians that use the technology. We also as clover, we actually operate three business lines. So we have our Medicare Advantage line. We actually [00:07:00] run one of the largest in-home care practices in the state of New Jersey.

So we have our own clinical action arm. We call that Clover Care Services. They're an incredible team of doctors and nurse practitioners that are going out in the home of our membership and providing care at the point of care there. And then we run our technology business. And so the way that our membership experiences the differences is, one, we have this wonderful in-home care program.

It has amazing NPS scores, and members love the experience of having really a caring member of our clinical team in their home doing a holistic patient evaluation. Truly trying to understand what's going on with that member and provide the best care possible. Those physicians, as well as our in-network PCPs are then empowered with our technology product clover assistant.

And what we've been able to show is Clover assistant really can help in a number of ways, improve the patient outcomes. We've published a couple of white papers around how we can identify [00:08:00] diabetes. Actually in diabetes, we identify diabetes three years earlier on average, which means that a member's getting diagnosed with diabetes when their hemoglobin A1C is at 6.6 on average.

Compared to providers who don't have access to our technology, they're getting diagnosed on average at 6.9. That's a three year differential in timeline for most members. And then what's really important about getting diagnosed early is then treatment starts early. So we can then see in our data as well that members who get diagnosed with diabetes, they immediately see a spike in oral diabetics being oral diabetic medications being prescribed.

That then helps slow down the advancement in progression of diabetes. So less than 50% of the members who get diagnosed with diabetes end up progressing to insulin, and less than 50% of the members end up having hypoglycemic events. And that's true across, uh, a range of chronic conditions. We publish another white paper on CKD, we diagnose CKD three a year and a half earlier on [00:09:00] average.

And again, we're identifying that earlier. The uh, EGFR, which is the clinical way to measure the, uh, kidney function there that ends up attenuating the decline in the kidney, meaning members are living healthier, lives longer. That then ultimately translates to managing the total cost of care of that membership earlier.

We're treating those conditions earlier. They're seeing fewer downstream consequences of those chronic conditions. And ultimately that then leads to our leadership on the HEDIS side and our quality side. Because we're identifying these conditions earlier because we're treating them earlier, we're also starting and working around preventative medicine earlier.

So we're trying to identify those conditions and that then translates into those HDA scores. We, in STAR year 25, which is the most recent stars years from CMS, our HDA score was 4.94. For our PPO plan, which is close to a perfect score, is five, five stars. Close to that, like essentially all of the different measures [00:10:00] of HE DDIs, we've been able to show that our membership is, is really performant and our membership is really getting wonderful early preventative care, which all of the credit for all of these things ultimately lies with those physicians.

And what we've focused on is really how do we build technology to give them the tools, the data, the insights that they need in intuitive clinical ways to help them care for our membership. And that's worked really, really well, uh, over the last couple of years. 

Angela Suthrave: Kevin, that's incredible. I think that you all have really figured this out because it's not an easy thing to do with the HEDIS and star.

Some of them it's, you know, you don't really have a window of opportunity or they can span a long time horizon. And so I think a lot of organizations try to do this well and they try to implement the model as it was intended to have more preventive care, to find, you know, chronic conditions and diagnose it earlier to get people on the right medications.

And it's challenging [00:11:00] for a lot of organizations. And so what have you found that you've done that's different, um, from what other people are doing? Like what's the secret? 

Kevin Holub: I think our secret lies in a couple of things. The first is, so often the healthcare ecosystem is fragmented, specifically from a data perspective.

So we focused a lot on investing on interoperability, bringing different data sets together. Unifying those data sets. So we do a lot, we're pretty, pretty active in making sure we go out and get all of the data possible to help a physician. So if doctors are telling us, Hey, I need clinical charts, what are we gonna do to go help them get the charts?

If they say, I need lab results, how do we go and make sure we get the lab results that they need? And there are little things in the healthcare system that make that really complicated. If your cardiologist orders a lab result, unless they remember to put your PCPs name on there, the result never goes back to the PCP.

So that just becomes a gap in the PCPs ability to manage those chronic [00:12:00] conditions. So one is we've gone out and we've, we've really worked to make sure we're doing all we can to have the right data that allows physicians to do their job effectively. And then the second thing that we focused on is we run all that data through.

So we've built a pretty large interconnected, interoperable healthcare platform. We then. Bring all that data in. We deduplicate it. We normalize that data on our side. We follow industry standards and best practices. We have a fire R four normalized clinical data model that then runs through hundreds and hundreds of machine learning models.

We have patents and true intellectual property around things like we have a model for diagnosis, suspecting we have a model for medication non-adherence. Those are patented models that we have because what we're trying to then do is that, that key thing, pull those insights out and then give them to doctors in clinically intuitive ways.

The goal from a clinical perspective is evaluating for [00:13:00] the type of diabetes, the associated conditions, the clinical answers, and then the treatment of that diabetes. I think a lot of healthcare, we, we fall a little bit short. We say, oh, doctor, here's an ICD 10. What do you wanna do with that? And doctor's like ICD tens are not conditions.

I CD tends coding. It's not relevant to clinical care, so get rid of that. We don't focus on those things. We focus on how do we actually think about, there's a human in the room that you're seeing, you need clinical data to treat that human. Let's give you the right clinical data at the point of care. And that's key is if you have that data at the point of care.

And our doctors are using our technology at the point of care. It's an EHR sidecar, so we integrate deeply with lots of EHRs. We also have a web application for doctors that are on paper charts or even the long tail of EHRs that we just can't reach, and they all get access to this technology. Some of my favorite quotes is we have a, a partnership with Duke Connected Care, uh, leading academic [00:14:00] medical center down in North Carolina.

Their community physicians and others are using our, our technology under counterpart. And one of the doctors gave the quote, and we love this, of, he was just so thankful to finally get the data for his membership. He works in a rural clinic. He's not on epic. He's not on one of these larger EHRs where sometimes you can get a, a pretty good view of that, but truly in a web application, not an EHR integrated version.

And he's just over the moon excited to finally have access to provide the care that he can. He's a phenomenal doctor. He just didn't have the tools to get what he needs to support his members who are showing up with a bag of meds and a discharge and trying to coordinate the care, and they can't remember who they last saw.

It's we, we put the onus in the wrong place. In healthcare members shouldn't be the stewards of their healthcare data. Instead, we need to build a system that allows that, and then physicians should be empowered with the right data to then make the right clinical decisions. We don't need to make decisions we don't do.[00:15:00] 

We identified cancer for you. Uh, there are great companies doing that. We just say, Hey, here's the right data. Can you evaluate with this and, and let us know what's going on so that we can support the member? 

Omar Mousa: Kevin, you mentioned Counterpart, which I think is a great segue. And then you also earlier mentioned Clover Assistant.

You're the VP of product at Counterpart Health, not Clover Health anymore. So let's talk about that. Um, what is Counterpart Health? And, you know, tell us about kind of the mission go to market. We'll, we'll actually first explain the, the relationship and we could talk about the, we'll, we'll segue to the others.

Kevin Holub: Awesome. Yeah. So Counterpart Health is the third business unit of Clover Health. So Clover Health is the parent company. We have the Medicare Advantage line, we have our clinical practice, and then we have a technology business. We have built a wholly owned subsidiary, so it's a separate legal entity called Counterpart Health.

And we did that a bit. Uh, I like cars, so I always [00:16:00] use the analogy. Ford has the Lincoln brand. We're the Lincoln brand of Clover, because when I say clover in the market, everyone says, oh, so you're an insurance company. Counterpart Health is not an insurance company. Counterpart Health is a value-based care technology, technology enablement platform.

So we work with risk-bearing provider groups. We work with other payers, we work with other technology companies. We are truly trying to provide that technology that has been incubated and built within the Clover entity for the last six years, seven years. We're taking that technology. We've now put it into a, a legal entity so that when we go out to market, other people know what that is and that we can then help other physicians and other members.

Our mission at Clover Health is to improve every life. The way to get there is we're, we know we have to support members who aren't part of the clover plan. I'll admit I'm biased. I do think our clover plan is wonderful and members who are eligible should consider that as a [00:17:00] plan, but also I wanna support everyone, right?

I think what we're doing in our technology could be useful in a lot of context. I think a lot of physicians can benefit and we've seen that. Play out now. So we've announced, uh, publicly three customers already. So that's Duke Connected Care. As I mentioned earlier, we have a, in the Midwest, the Iowa Clinic is a leading multi-specialty group, and we're very excited to partner with them.

And then we have another partnership with Southern Illinois Health, and they're a wonderful group and they also have, uh, a large rural population that they support. And it really speaks to the, the range of different organizations that can access and use the technology. Clearly we have our Medicare Advantage plan that uses it.

Clearly. We have an in-home care practice that uses the technology and we're continuing to see a lot of things I can't announce on this call, uh, uh, about the momentum we're seeing there. But those things will continue to be announced, uh, publicly as we're able to. 

Angela Suthrave: Kevin, I think that business model is really compelling because, you know, if I'm sitting in the shoes of a lot of these entities that are trying to manage [00:18:00] their patients better and knowing that their risk adjustment changes, you know, there's more focus on HE DDIs and better care.

And so the opportunity for you all is incredible. How do you think about the go to market and how do you segment the market? 

Kevin Holub: It's a really exciting time for that because as you said, Angela, we're uniquely positioned as counterpart that I can go back and show longitudinal actuarially and actually publicly available results from our product.

If someone wants to know how well we're doing as a product, I can literally point you to our SEC filings of clover going from above a hundred percent MCR to less than 80% our HI scores. So that's actually really helped us and enabled us in our go to market motion. And what we've focused on then is to your point, where are the different places that we think those types of results will most impact patient populations and businesses?

And there are a couple ways that we see that. The first is there are [00:19:00] other payers that could benefit from the technology that we've built and deployed. So we're talking to and have a number of conversations and, and work there. That's with other payers and how we would offer that. The second is in healthcare, increasingly providers are essentially payers, right?

If you're a provider group and you're fully capped or you're in various value-based care arrangements with gain shares and other components, you're essentially taking on the total cost of care and responsibility of that membership. So a lot of provider groups are very interested in what our technology can help them achieve in those businesses.

So we've seen a large number of risk-bearing provider groups that are interested in improving their performance in those risk, uh, arrangements in those total cost of care arrangements, as well as improving their quality. Then the last group is there's a lot of physicians, and we actually see a lot of this in the Clover MA network that are not highly sophisticated from a value-based care perspective necessarily.[00:20:00] 

They're amazing physicians. They're caring for their membership. They have a couple of doctors in their practice. It's really hard for those groups to get to value-based care. There's a lot of investments you need to make. There's a lot of cost that goes with this. A lot of organizations are doing really impressive things there.

I think a highly of how many organizations are going about approaching that, but we have a model that we think works in that space as well. And so we're going and working with those smaller groups to help them get to value-based care outcomes as well. So we really think about it right now in those three areas.

And I leave the right now there because we're early, right? We only launched counterpart externally to third parties sometime last year. We've got a number of customers and a number of conversations that are continuing to evolve. So there's an interesting dynamic internally for us is that we're a publicly traded healthcare company, and counterpart is very early.

So there's a different dynamic there. I, I don't say it's entrepreneurship. I don't say [00:21:00] it's a startup within a company because I've been a founder. I know what that's like, and I promise it's not what we're doing. I, I love what we're doing, but anyone who says that hasn't really been at a company with four employees and no one knowing what the hell's going on, I've been there.

This is different. But there's a lot of things about what we're doing on the counterpart side that don't map cleanly to the way running a publicly held company works. Right? I, I can't give you my four year roadmap that I just can't. Whereas on the Clover Medicare Advantage side, we actually have a better way to be able to think about what those long-term places look like.

So we are willing and open and trying to figure out, as we're scaling up our go-to market motion, what ultimately is the right place for product market fit? We have product market fit. We see that. But now in the go to market motion, there's a lot of ways in which we could fit into those ecosystems differently.

And so we're, we're working with a lot of different organizations. We're very open to being creative about how we can provide the technology, [00:22:00] how we can partner with them in value-based care, how we can bring our expertise as a Medicare advantage plan and being a full risk entity. We can hold risk in counterpart with groups.

We're comfortable with that, but we can also work with groups that hold their own risk and we're more of a SaaS and technology vendor and we can support them there. So we have a lot of ways that that works. Again, a differential benefit for us is we, were incubated with a health plan. We know what these models look like, so we also have disproportionate resources to go out and try to do those things.

Whereas I do think it's hard if you're a smart up, uh, excuse me, if you're a startup and you've raised even $50 million, that's nowhere near enough to hold risk, right? I think Vivec was a visionary founder. We've raised more than a billion dollars of capital and until this year hadn't made money. It's hard to get to risk.

It's hard to be that sophisticated and scaled. So our ability as an entity to be able to do that also [00:23:00] allows us to be thoughtful and partner with organizations appropriately so that we're not trying to force a small practice with, you know, 200 members that are eligible for value-based care programs to hold risk that that doesn't work.

You need a larger aggregated risk pool that can make something like that effective. So that's been something, as we think about our go to market, how do we support all of those different groups and we will meet our customers where they are so that we can really help them achieve the types of results we've seen in our own patient populations and then within our customers now how they can get that same benefit.

Angela Suthrave: So Kevin, I think what you're saying is really interesting. So you have this health plan arm and then you have Counterpart health. How, when you're planning your roadmap, are there considerations to how, if you help other risk-based entities or other health plans improve that it might be disruptive innovation for your health plan business because it hinders [00:24:00] clover's ability to attract new members?

Right. 

Kevin Holub: There is, we do have conversations around what cannibalization could look like ultimately within the Medicare Advantage side. Now, part of setting up our legal entity is putting in the appropriate firewalls. So for instance, the CEO of our Clover Medicare Advantage Plan. Jamie Renoso, she's wonderful.

She's amazing. I love working with Jamie. There are some calls where I just can't talk to Jamie about certain things. So to some degree, yes, that's a consideration. That's something that Andrew Toy, our CEO and Vivec, our chairman, we talk a lot about strategically, how do we organize this, that we do this effectively?

Right now, the quick answer I'll give is we've got about a hundred thousand members in New J, New Jersey, Georgia, South Carolina, a couple other markets. The Medicare Advantage market is in the millions and millions of members. There's a lot of places that we can go that don't run into that conflict. So for [00:25:00] now we're in the fortunate Blue Ocean strategy moment where we don't have to make that trade off deeply.

And so that's what we're doing. We're we're just trying to avoid that conflict right away at some point. There are those considerations, and that is really where we come back, and I love working at Clover for this. We are rooted in the mission of Vivec from when he started the company to improve every life.

At some point, whether we do that through Counterpart or Clover or anywhere the whole company is aligned, that that is our mission. So we'll work through those problems and we'll try to solve that. For now. Fortunately, the market is big enough. We don't have to worry too, too much about that overlap. 

Omar Mousa: Kevin, when we first met, it was a bit over a year ago and we were talking about Empower Teams and I think it was timely 'cause there was some content that came out on Lenny's podcast about feature factories.

And then you told me a story about when you had first joined Clover. Can you set [00:26:00] the stage for us? Can you tell us about when you joined Clover, what your role was, and then how was product being built and what was the culture around product? 

Kevin Holub: So I joined Clover six years ago. I was hired as a senior product manager for this new product that we were trying out.

It was this thing called Clover Assistant. We had handful of doctors in New Jersey using it, and the goal was, Hey, can we figure this thing out? Can we get to product market fit? Can we make this work? How do we go do that? Like many startups, it was founder led. At that day, V vec, Andrew, they were calling the shots.

They were the ones with the idea, they were the vision. They were trying to set this up as a senior product manager. My job when I came in v vec or Andrew wanted to try to do something, how do we make it happen? Right? That's, that's a good way to operate a company when you're a startup, that's, that's what you need to do.

Now, we talk about that a lot in the product [00:27:00] org and in the product world is that's a feature factory. I think there's a little bit of a negative connotation around that in some places. I agree with that. That's a bad way to operate a a product organization. If you are a large organization, you've got lot, you're spinning out features.

Well, there's a time and a place. When I joined Clover, the time and the place was where we were, Hey, ship these features. We don't know if we have product market fit. We don't know what doctors like yet. We don't know what's gonna impact our membership. So we tried a lot of things. We, we pushed them down.

Vivec, Android, have ideas, they'd wanna go try it. We'd chip those things, we'd go do what we're gonna go do. And so that was when I joined, how We Operated as a product team. And I was, you know, upstart PM at the time. I thought I had a lot of good ideas and ways to change the world and, and how we could do things.

And that can be a little bit of tension. I think you, we run into that even today sometimes that people say, Hey, well what about all of my ideas? How do I go do these things? And you feel like you're [00:28:00] just, I think that's where the term comes feature factor. Well, it's like, no, my job is to move this widget along from a product development perspective.

That's good. There's a natural time in place. And so I'm fortunate at Clover and now Counterpart. We have evolved because we've met that product market Fit. Andrew especially is a technologist. He's he former founder himself. His previous company Divide was acquired by Google. He understands product, he understands technology new.

Hey, we've gotta evolve from this feature factory out. And so I was fortunate that as I was working with Andrew, uh, saying, Hey, can we, can we work in a different way? Can we try to move away from a feature factory? Not to be mean, Andrew and Vivec, but they, they needed to start focusing on other things.

Product was starting to work. Clover assistant was working. We were growing. I didn't need the only ideas to come from them. And so we worked on resetting the expectation where Andrew and [00:29:00] Vivec set the roadmap of what are the things we want to solve for? What are the outcomes? And they said, okay, go solve this outcome.

And what we started doing was slowly and specifically, not the whole org, not overnight, we stopped working one way and started working the other. We said, okay, here's one problem. Let us start testing this other way to operate. And we started testing that other way to operate on that problem. And pretty quickly what happened is we'd show up to that weekly meeting.

We'd have results from the last test and we'd have new ideas. And what we kept showing up now is like after two or three or four meetings, Andrew and Vivek didn't have the next 12 ideas. And we had the next couple ideas and the results that we were starting to show were from the ideas that we were shipping because we were a little bit closer to the problem and started getting more of the insights because Andrew Vivek were spending 30 minutes once a week doing product with us.

And then they were spending the rest of their week being executive reading company. And so what happened is that team started building more of the context and knowledge and started to be able to get to that [00:30:00] what is now what we call an empowered product organization. They were really operating against an outcome.

It wasn't ship features, it was move this business outcome. And that team started to get to those outcomes. And what we've been able to do now over the last couple of years is the entire product organization has scaled up a lot. Our technology organization, I think of product, is product design, engineering, data science, clinical, it's, it's truly all of that.

When we build. We are now organized around outcomes. What are the goals we're trying to move? And then the teams are set up to go and move against those goals specifically and not told, build this feature, build that feature. They're saying, Hey, we, we have these hypotheses. We're gonna test these assumptions and we're gonna truly iterate towards the best outcome we can achieve in those areas.

And that's how we've evolved from that feature factory to empower product organization. 

Omar Mousa: I, you actually make a good point, like it's kind of a negative word. Uh, so I, and [00:31:00] I, I do firmly believe that the founders early on for like a good portion of the early days should have. Perspective on where the product should go.

And I even think about like the Brian Chesky model working in some cases, right? Like, oh yeah. Even a point beyond that where that makes sense. 

Angela Suthrave: Kevin, I wanted to ask a question about how you were able to do that. So I think it's really easy to say that, you know, you orient around outcomes, you do discovery.

I'm wondering if you could dig a little bit deeper into how you were able to get the findings. Like was it prototypes, was it, you know, how did you set up your experiments? Were engineers involved? Because I think some of the struggles that I have is our engineers were really busy building the things like, you know, how can you take half their time to do discovery?

And so wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that worked for you so that you were able to make the shift. [00:32:00] 

Kevin Holub: So when we made the shift and when we. Moved from feature factory towards empowered product. It's a, it's a journey. It wasn't an overnight switch, and it started Angela in one specific area where we did have pretty good understanding of instrumentation.

We had pretty good metrics. We knew how to measure what we were doing, and we had enough velocity of information that we could run true experiments, we could do AB tests. So when we were starting in that space, what we were doing is we were setting up each incremental release as an AB test where you could validate empirically from the, the product data.

One of them was working better than the other, and that was critical for us to be able to go through that step. Now, how did the product organization go about finding those next sets of ideas? Ideas come from everywhere, right? A a little bit of my view often is ideas are cheap, execution is hard. So we took ideas from anyone who had [00:33:00] them.

We started working towards, I believe, I think Theresa Torres does a really good job describing what I think of as a pod triad, iteratively working together, doing customer discovery. I'll note our users are primary care physicians. If you think somebody doesn't have time, meet a primary care physician who's seeing members in a, in a rural clinic, they have less time than anyone you've ever met in your life.

So it's not like we were able to go and sit there for hours and do long discovery sessions with them. So we found alternative ways to do that. One, we got lots of user feedback where we could, so when we had opportunities to talk to our users and physicians, we did two, we had a lot of internal team members, right?

We ran a clinical practice ourself, so we went and worked within our clinical practice. And very fortunately, those leaders were willing to sit with us and work with us and let us try and iterate through and get discovery with them. And then lastly, we worked with our, our customer success teams who were out there talking to the physicians, providing a [00:34:00] lot of feedback.

We talked to our internal clinical teams. I have had the pleasure of having three remarkable, uh, chief medical officers that I've gotten to work with over my time at Clover. Each of them very experienced in primary care, knowing what can work there. So we took all those ideas and what we tried to really figure out, how do you get all of that together with that pod triad, you need the product person.

You need the design leader. You need the engineering and data science partners in there. You need the clinical partners. You gotta get them working together to then make informed decisions of what hypotheses are you testing in which order, and then letting the numbers choose. We have to become unopinionated because the thing that we're trying to do is clear there's an outcome.

So although I might think something's gonna work, I am happy to be wrong. I just want to test the hypothesis. I wanna see the data, and then we wanna say, okay, that worked. [00:35:00] Do we understand why? Although that last part's really hard, and that's where often this fails is you launch an AB test, everyone's excited that you got a result, and you're like, okay, why can you take that learning and apply it to the next thing you're gonna build?

Sometimes it's obvious. A lot of times it's not clear what happened and caused that. So then decomposing that experiment, making sure you know those things really becomes powerful. So for us, all the way, when we started, we had a clear metric. We had clear goals that we could measure. We had a clear process to measure those goals, and we were ruthlessly transparent and honest.

If we failed, we all celebrated that we tried it and we put it to bed and we moved on. Let's make sure we learn. Let's not do it again. If we were successful, great. Let's make sure we know why it worked. How does that reprioritize everything below us? It goes to a bit of the challenge of a feature factor or waterfall processes.

I don't know the [00:36:00] most impactful things my team is going to ship this year. So if you ask me what we're gonna ship in Q4, I have a lot of great ideas. The whole team does. But I want it to be informed based on the learnings that we get of what does work during the course of the year. So we do have a roadmap.

We do organize around some of those bets and hypotheses, but we are willing to trade it as we learn new things that help improve the overall outcome for our membership. So if I can identify that diabetes could be treated three and a half years earlier instead of three, well what are we doing to do more of that in more places and, and being honest with ourselves of what really is happening there.

Kevin, 

Omar Mousa: can you tell us, you know, healthcare product manager is. I don't wanna say like completely unique from other product managers, but there's some nuance. Can you talk to us about what a empowered product manager could look like or what does empowerment look [00:37:00] like for a healthcare product manager?

Kevin Holub: There's the romanticized version of this that we read about on blogs. You get to be the CEO of your product and you get to go do anything you want and make. There is no company in the world that truly does that, and if you do, you've got absolute chaos, right? That's just not actually what empowered product mean.

Empowered product doesn't mean you get to sit there and do anything you want. What empowered product means is you have a clear objective against which you're working. You have the team and the resources that are set up to move that outcome, and you have a set of guardrails within which you can operate.

To me, that's what we focus on when we say empowerment. Empowerment is let's set the structure up so that you know how to operate and where your bounds are, what your goal is, and then go work ruthlessly against that goal. That to [00:38:00] me, is what empowered product is. Now, in order to be effective at that, in my mind, it's really about thinking hard, about knowing who your users are, knowing what your business is, and knowing the intersection of those two.

When we build product, we need to ship things that our users love and want to use that make a difference in our business outcomes. So if I ship things that make a difference in our business outcomes, but our users won't use it, I'm not gonna be a successful product. If I ship something that our users love, they absolutely love this, but it makes no difference in our business outcomes.

Again, it doesn't help the business move forward. So the goal in my mind, for our product managers and for product managers who wanna work in empowered organizations in healthcare, you need to be able to operate in those areas. Do you understand your users? It's hard to know what a doctor thinks. I've worked in healthcare for a long time.

[00:39:00] I don't pretend at all to do that. I know better than to think I, I know what being a doctor is, but I do know some things about what doctors do, right? I have lived experiences, I have growth that I've had in those spaces. So knowing where your balances are and what your users are, knowing where you need to interview people, knowing when it's your users versus your expert user, right?

A doctor versus your doctors. And then on the other side, you understand the business components. Healthcare economics are a little bit complex. It's not, uh, a SaaS software product that you're scaling with an LTV CAC ratio and gross margin in it, you know? The models that many people are familiar with. So I think that becomes the other place of when shipping product in an empowered product organization, you need to know what's gonna drive value in the healthcare ecosystem.

That's hard, right? If you're in the, we talked a little bit around some of the different organizations that counterparts supports between payers, between risk-bearing [00:40:00] provider groups. I'll note they have different business models. Some of the things we do are gonna disproportionately impact one and not the other.

But how do we think about those trade-offs? What is the differences between those? A big one for us is what is the timeline that the economic benefit of those changes will ultimately reach the user that you're serving in risk bearing provider groups? That could be years CMS, right? I, we talked about the star rating results from measurement year or from star year 25.

That's where Clover was able to achieve industry leading results. For those that know the healthcare space well enough know that was actually measurement year 23, meaning visits and members who are in our plan from 2023, and that will impact our payment year in 2026. So that means anything I do today, any feature I ship in my product org today that it moves, HE DDIs will have absolutely zero economic benefit until 2020.

Let's see, we're in 25, so now 2028, that's what my current [00:41:00] timeline for HE DDIs payoff is. Well, how do you prioritize that against hospitalization, readmission reduction? Well, that's gonna happen. Hopefully, if we do it well, we're gonna reduce hospitalizations tomorrow. Well, there's a lot that goes in there.

Well, that's if you're an empowered product manager, unfortunately, my ask to you is you need to understand that a little bit. Now, the balance is again. In a well organized team, hopefully not everyone needs to know all of the context for all of those decisions, and that's where the false idea of CEO of the product comes in.

At some point, I need people to be at that level, but in a lot of places, hey, let me set up the goals, the structures, the confines for you. So a good example is we have a pod that works on a lot of our stars and HEDIS measures. They're not accountable to the financial impact of those changes four years from now.

It's just the math is too hard. Instead we've set up local goals for them. That makes sense. And what we've done [00:42:00] at the leadership level and the company level is we've set our investment strategy that we're gonna put this amount of investment in those areas. So that's my job and that's the job of leadership and product leadership is to work with your company to set your objectives and priorities and then break those down so that empowered product teams truly can execute and operate against those.

So I think for an empowered product manager. A lot of the work is figuring out the 80 20, figuring out your user and your business in your area, your domain. Right. If I'm that pm she, she's working really hard on HEDIS and Star's work and I think she probably does know, uh, she's wonderful. She knows a lot of this, but also she's probably not gonna be the person that knows everything about what is the risk adjustment cycle and how does total cost of care and Medex work and how does, uh, physician user experience optimize for all of these different workflows and how does clinical data flow in all of these areas and how there are just so many different domains.[00:43:00] 

A big part of, I think what becomes successful for early stage or mid stage product managers is becoming knowledgeable in the domain that you are set up and in an empowered product organization. Hopefully that's one area and you can really succeed in that. The failure mode often is trying to do everything.

I think that's often where the failure comes through, and that's. Both on leadership level, that's a failure at the leadership level. If we don't do a good job setting that for our teams and then for individual product managers, the failure is trying to be the expert on everything all at once. 

Angela Suthrave: I like the way that you frame that, and I think you've hit it a little bit because there is this tension between your short term investments and then making sure that you're focused on your longer term initiatives and things that just take a little bit longer to build.

One of the things I know we talked about is the McKinsey three Horizons framework for being able to manage that. Can you break that down for us and how [00:44:00] you think about it and how you use it? 

Kevin Holub: A challenge often is in those different timelines. So the McKinsey three Horizons framework is a interesting strategic framework that McKinsey has put out there that I think is really helpful for managing and thinking about your balance of what horizon of work are you impacting.

So what they mean by horizon is timeline. So. The first horizon are things that are gonna impact in the short term, have, you know, six, 12 month type impact. The second is in that medium term, what's one to three years away. And then the third horizon is what's, what's beyond that? What are the things that we potentially couldn't, couldn't think of now, but really are probably happening?

So if I apply that roughly just as an example today, and I think about generative AI and large language models and where things are going in that space, it's a really helpful framework to say, well, how are we taking those investments and how do we think about them in the horizon? One things that are gonna impact in the next six to 12 months or so, or, or anything shorter than that.[00:45:00] 

That's where I really want to lean on and I trust my, my product teams and organizations. They should be incorporating the thought of where those technologies are today and what can they do for our users and, and workflow today. I don't need everybody in the organization also at the same time working on horizon two and Horizon three.

Horizon two. For something like large language models, they're getting a lot better at doing a lot of things. Agents are definitely here today, and they're continuing to get more sophisticated in healthcare. A big piece of that is how are agents incorporating into the workflow of clinical practices? Well, that becomes a bit more of a horizon two framework, right?

Those aren't things that are necessarily gonna work today in my products and features that I shipped. They're things I need to be thinking about in the next little bit. I think most good product managers should be living 80% in Horizon T one, maybe 20% in Horizon two. You need to be thinking about those.

And then ultimately, there's horizon three using generative AI and large language models. At some point, we're gonna hit a GI. Well, [00:46:00] when we hit that, how sophisticated will those models get? My current hypothesis is at some point they're gonna get as smart as humans on all domains. Horizon three then is, well, what happens when Dr.

Google is a real thing? That's horizon three. That's years away. As an organization, we definitely, we need to be thinking about all of those. So what we think about in the the Three Horizons framework is where in the organization are we spending what amount of time on each horizon pods and what they're working on is largely in Horizon one, with a little bit to horizon two, because as we build product, we don't wanna build something that's gonna become useless 12 months from now, because technology's gonna disrupt and change it.

We wanna make sure that what we're building is forward compatible, but I don't need them saying, well, is this feature useless? If at some point Open AI develops a GI and replaces doctors, that's just too far away for us to strategically be incorporating [00:47:00] into our roadmaps. However, as a company, we definitely need to be doing that.

So what we've done, and we're a little bit larger than many startups at this point. We're a publicly traded healthcare company. I've got the benefit of a large enough organization. So at the leadership level, what we've done is we've said, what percentage allocation of our investments do we wanna make at those levels?

We have a team that is working on horizon three things. We are focused on, well, what does happen and what could our user experience look like if we have these truly disruptive changes that are gonna come over the next couple of years, start to play out. And what they're trying to do is take little bets, little hypotheses, run experiments so that we can learn and then incorporate that into the product and the roadmap and the strategy so that we're getting ready for where those things are going.

And so we think about those different horizons, and that then comes back to how the pods are organized in their goals and where they're trying to focus. Most of that work typically is horizon one. [00:48:00] I think many of us as product, we, we love fun spending time on those hypotheticals in the future and where things are going.

It's fun to spend your time in horizon two and Horizon three for sure, but often they're not ready for mainstream. They're not the right, and so it, it's a tension that we wanna make sure we're thinking about investing in learning those pieces and incorporating them appropriately into our, our product roadmap and, and funding levels.

Omar Mousa: Kevin, earlier you talked about the HEDIS benchmarks or the HEDIS measures and how that's like kind of a two to three year game, right? Like you don't really realize the outcome of that investment until two to three years later. The Three Horizon McKinsey framework also has like a short, long, middle, long term sort of work horizon.

How are you thinking about measuring the outputs of these things and given your. I initially thought maybe it's like you go one and then you're on phase two, then you're on phase three. It seems like you're kind of [00:49:00] dabbling a little bit in all of them. How do you know that that work is like impactful?

You know, even in the third bucket where it's like pretty nebulous. 

Kevin Holub: So I think they both have different timelines, but I do think about them a little bit differently. For instance, HEDIS and Stars, there's a long payback period, but really it's a financial modeling exercise to discount those future things to today.

Because in that case, in in that, really that's a payment mechanism that takes a few years to happen. What we are shipping as features do impact real people today and getting better preventative care. So that's what we focus on, is we do break that more complicated payment piece down and we say, okay, these teams are focused on areas that we can measure in current year.

The three Horizons framing and the multi-year framing on that. It's, it's something that we try to not break down in the [00:50:00] same way, right? The HEDIS measures, we could break down those different windows. We could set local goals. We could set, Hey, if, if we move HEDIS this year in this way, I know two to three years what that's gonna look like.

It's not perfect. There is a lot of complex modeling. For instance, H DDIs is not a, it's not an absolute, if I get a certain percentage, what matters is the curve. I'm all of HEDIS is essentially graded against a curve against every other health plan in the country. So my performance is relative to everybody else.

So I actually don't know what everybody else is necessarily gonna get from a performance perspective. So instead we break that problem down into local goals and local metrics. We know where we want to be from our performance goals, and we know what's attainable. So let's go make sure that our teams are set up against those goals.

On the Three Horizons framework, I don't know what Horizon three is going to look like. I. I consider myself knowledgeable about, uh, generative AI and large language models and where the industry is going. And I'm excited by it. I [00:51:00] play with all the tools and have all the fun, but I, I don't know if I could predict when we're gonna get to a GI and when that will ultimately get to the point of replacing doctors or something like that.

And, and I'll note, I don't think that's actually going to happen in any realistic, even horizon three timeline, right? I think it's going to, my opinion is it's gonna change the way doctors operate more than it's gonna replace them. But what we do is we set percentage of investment goals on that side because the outcome is learning, right?

When you're investing in Horizon three activities, our goal is to learn and make sure we're getting those learnings across the organization. So the teams might be working on new LLM frameworks and tools and technologies. They might be working on other investments that we think are really disruptive.

The goal is for them to be able to learn it enough that we can break it down, that our pods could start using in horizon one and horizon two, those concepts and ideas to [00:52:00] build a better product experience for our users and our business. 

Angela Suthrave: Thanks for sharing that, Kevin. One of the things that we'd love to talk to a little bit about is also, you know, how you go from being a startup senior PM to a startup VP of product.

We'd love to publicly 

Omar Mousa: traded. 

Angela Suthrave: Yeah, exactly. You're kind of a big deal. 

Omar Mousa: I go that far. 

Angela Suthrave: Can you tell us a little bit about your career trajectory, and if someone is listening, you know, maybe they're a independent contributor in product, what would you say to them? 

Kevin Holub: There are a couple of things that I've had extreme fortune and luck in, and I think that that is true for anyone who's been able to ride a career growth like I've been able to.

You've gotta meet the confluence of your personal growth. The company's growth and the product growth all at the right time. So first, be nice and kind to yourself [00:53:00] that you are not the only thing that contributes to what this happens, how this goes. I'm extremely fortunate. I joined Clover at the right moment for my personal growth to match the growth of the company, to match the growth of the product, to match the growth and maturity of the organization, where as I kept maturing and growing professionally, the company needed someone in that next level, and they identified and said, Hey Kevin, you are right for this.

Let's do this. I've also been fortunate that I had ultimately a very senior leader in Andrew Toy, who's now our CEO, who understood product, who was able to help go through that progression and make sure that I always had those opportunities in front of me. So the first thing is knowing that there are things you can control.

There are things you cannot. My career growth joined as a senior PM was a new product. I started as the product manager for our data science and our data platform, and [00:54:00] have grown to expand my skillset a lot that I, I do currently lead our user research team, our design team, our application support, and lead our analytics.

That growth has come not because I knew all of those things when I joined, but I was able to learn those as I went. I refined those skills and knowledge and I was able to incorporate them into my ability as a product manager and a leader. So if you are a current ic, if you're looking to have that growth to get to the senior leadership level, the first is trying to find a fit in a company that will have that growth.

Now, good luck, you and every other product manager and every VC in the market is trying to find that. It's not easy. You, you're just, that's what I mean. There's some luck component there. But the other piece is it takes time. I've been at Clover for six years. In hindsight, everyone would look back and be like, wow, look how fast that growth [00:55:00] is.

It's obvious you should have stayed there. I tried to leave Clover so many times. I almost quit so many times. I've been fortunate that I have had great bosses. Andrew, uh, our Chief People Officer, Rachel is amazing, have talked me out of that a few times because ultimately the second part that I'd reassure everyone who's going through those progressions, just like there are compounded returns in investments and there are compounded returns in how you do things.

You're learning compounds. I couldn't possibly be knowledgeable about H IDIs, about total cost of care, about Medicare reimbursement and how bid works and how risk bearing provider work groups work and analytics and product and AI and technology. If I had switched five times over the last five years, I only get that benefit because I'm incrementally building my knowledge on top of my previous knowledge base.

So when I get 2% smarter this year, I'm 2% smarter than I was on a compounded basis for six years. So I [00:56:00] think the other part is it looks bleak. You're gonna wanna quit, you're gonna wanna leave. It's human look, and at some point it's toxic, it's wrong. Do those things. Don't be afraid to do those things and change, but know the more often you change, the more often you reset your baseline, you lose the benefit of compounding and you have to go through a bunch of things again.

Just like setting up a new product takes some time to like go ask your engineering team how long it takes to spin up a dev environment and get a dev environment going, and get your environments working and get your analytics working and get your system running and publish to the DNS and make sure CloudFlare remember to update all your systems like there's a startup time.

Well, think about that for your product career. When you go to new company, although Angela, you've just switched jobs. You know this right now. It's so hard to get up to speed. You spend six to 12 months getting to, I'm not drowning. To be able to get to the learning phase, to be able to contribute at that next level for a company, remember [00:57:00] you've gotta provide benefit back to that company at that next level.

You've gotta get that benefit in time. So it's hard. I think the benefit often is in compounding. I love Angela Duckworth and Grit and the way that she talks about this. There's a bit of that and I'll admit. A lot of luck that if you're gritty and you stay at the right company, it ultimately is successful.

And not that you stayed at the right company and you are gritty, and ultimately the company failed. Although you can get a lot of learnings outta those failures. But it's hard then to have as much career progression necessarily in those scenarios. So I think there's a, there's a tough balance there, and I'm very empathetic to all of my peers and friends.

I've got tons of friends that if I look back six years ago, we were all equal. I don't think I'm disproportionately better than many of them or any of them. I fit the right company at the right time where my skill sets grew at the right way to get me to the right opportunity. I'm proud of what I did, but I know I could have been the same, you know, switching jobs every couple of years and been unfortunate that my startups kept failing.[00:58:00] 

So I kind of hitched to the right wagon and got to ride that rocket ship. And I invested in myself. I grew, I learned the things I needed to do and got better, uh, over that time as well. 

Omar Mousa: I was clapping, I was on mute, but I was clapping. I. For parts of that. I especially laughed and you were like, I tried to quit so many times.

'cause I, I just, I recall moments where, when I was an ICPM at a really fast growing startup, it'd be Friday and like, I'd, I'd spitefully submit an application to another company on, it'd be like 9:00 PM on a Friday, and I just wrapped up work and I'm like, lemme just put some apps in somewhere. And by Monday, like Clarity had kind of like settled in.

I'm like, no, no, no. I, I, I, I can do this again. It's, and that went on for a while before it was like not drowning as you would phrased it. It's very 

Kevin Holub: real. And it's, it's human. It's okay. Right. I also, I know I talk to my team about this all the time. It's not your job as the individual or the the employee [00:59:00] to be committed that your opportunity is in front of you.

Mm-hmm. It's the company's job to make sure there's an opportunity in front of you that matches your growth and your opportunities and all of that. 

Omar Mousa: Also, 

Kevin Holub: you've 

Omar Mousa: gotta be there for that opportunity to exist. Right, right. You said something really cool and then you kind of preempted the question, but I'm gonna ask it anyways.

You said you found a company to, and you matched its growth and trajectory, so you kind of grew with the company for the ICPs who were listening to this. If you were to give advice on how to kind of gauge or identify these companies, what are the signals or the things to look for? 

Kevin Holub: As I think about the opportunities, the signals that you're looking for is the stage of the company, is the maturity of the organization that exists there.

And what you're trying to find is somewhere that two or three years from now will grow to some degree that they're gonna need more senior roles. [01:00:00] Right. Product is tough. We're a pretty flat hierarchy, especially the last couple of years there's been. The re recalling of orgs that have grown with managers and managers and managers of managers, that that's not effective.

There are other ways to operate. I think that's a lot of where Marty Kagan and the product model really fit in is organizing your iPods and teams means you need less of these managers handing down requirements and teams are able to go execute well. That means there's just fewer layers of leadership opportunity that exist at most companies.

So you need to find a company that's going to have that growth stage step where you could be that person. So there are two styles of that that I end up seeing a lot of people considering and I've considered is one where they're hiring a senior PM or a pm where your hope is you can become the VP in a little bit, but they don't have one.

That can be a path. You can definitely do that if you're doing that. What I'd make sure you're thinking about is what's the timeline that they're going to need that vp and will you be able [01:01:00] to demonstrate in the short period of time, not your command as a senior PM. What a senior PM does and what a VP do are different roles.

You're going to have to be able to show that you can do the VP role. So you're going to need to be able to demonstrate that to that company. Well, the alternative path also challenging. You join a senior pm, you've got a great product leadership and others, how long will those product leadership people be in their roles?

They could progress, right? Although this has happened for me, I've gotten more and more senior. I was a director at one point, and then I got promoted and promoted and well, now I've hired directors. So one way is I grew, so at a startup, your VP or your product leader could grow and there could be new room under them, or at some point they'll leave and then you would be eligible to get their role.

So those are the two things like as far as I can tell, that you could possibly get to those types of growth paths. So what you're looking for typically is a, I think a mid stage company, right? If you're going really early [01:02:00] stage, your only job in product is product market fit. Can you run shit tons of experiments to see if something sticks?

That's a really important skill set. You need that at every company, at every scale, but that's early stage what you're gonna look for. I think most people looking for that type of career progression. Usually you're senior PMs. You wanna find an organization that has product, that has some systems in place where either there's opportunity for you to become the leader over time because there's not someone there, or there's a path for you to follow a leader and ultimately replace a leader, uh, who's in that current seat.

Angela Suthrave: Uh, Kevin, you know, if I am a individual contributor, I'm at a startup, we are a feature factory, what do I do? Because I do wanna become a leader. Maybe I'm a little bit impatient, you know, I wanna get things going. I want to sort of approve my worth. What are your recommendations? 

Kevin Holub: The first, first recommendation is make sure you align with your senior leadership, usually your CEO around.[01:03:00] 

Are you ready as an organization to start moving into that model? Because you can do it yourself. You can live within a feature factory and try to optimize yourself, but what will happen is you'll run into roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. The the first step is do try to align with senior leadership.

Hey, can we find a place that we could test this new way of working? That you have a clear goal that your business leader is excited to see moving. There's gonna be somewhere, right? If you're at a consumer digital health company, it's gonna be on customer acquisition. You've kind of gotten past that hump.

You're a later stage company. You no longer have product market fit questions. It's can you optimize it? Great. Go to that spot. If you're at a value-based care organization, can you figure out something in your data systems to be more efficient or find a place where there's a clear goal that the business wants to move something forward on, and propose operating in that space as the place that you're gonna start.

You get the [01:04:00] CEO level buy-in or your senior leadership, if they can get that buy-in for you and then set a goal. What are we trying to do? It can't be a nebulous thing. There really need to be some numbers because if it's nebulous, it's hard to prove it's working or not. So find a goal, find a metric, find a place that you could start optimizing, and then start organizing your work around that way of thinking.

What is the metric? Make sure you understand how the things move. What are the levers that move that metric? And then start building a backlog of bets that you can quickly and iteratively test. If you start building a six month roadmap, you're done. You're never gonna get the time and the buy-in from the organization to go for six months when you're a feature factory on one idea, what can you ship this week even better?

What can you ship today that you can measure? Start small. Don't say, I'm gonna restructure the entire [01:05:00] platform to do this new thing. Start with, here's an idea, we're gonna test it, we're gonna learn from it, and we're gonna show the results. Well, now the hard part is you've gotta now have 10 more of those ideas ready because tomorrow you're gonna do it again and then again, and again and again.

And you're gotta build the intuition of the organization. You're gonna build the results. So your goal, if you are a senior pm, you're joining that company. You wanna be the rocket ship, you wanna be the catalyst for growth. What the company needs is a product organization that can operate as a product organization where the CEO doesn't have to be the feature factory.

Your job is to show you can help the organization do it. The way to help do it is by proving in your domain that you're working on, you can achieve those results and that you can set the system up as you're going, that other teams can start replicating that model. That is really that key. And so my recommendation, and this is how we did it, this is how as a product leader, I helped get our organization there.[01:06:00] 

Back to the trying to quit. I went to Andrew, I said, Hey, I think I'm done here. Like, I just don't know how to, like, you don't need me anymore. And he was right. He, he was right. I don't need to be there. He had all the ideas, if you just wanted executors, let me build a team of executors and, and keep running that way.

But his goal was to scale the team and to grow the org to build what now is counterpart. And he said, no, no, no. I need, I need a product function that can run like a mature product function. So we started, we picked a number, we started operating that way. We were aligned. Although I don't recommend going to your boss and saying, I'm gonna quit if you don't do this.

That doesn't actually work. Ultimatums are bad. But finding the framing good dis you get that buy-in. Yeah, get that buy-in, uh, get the support and it takes time. I'll note for me, I was three years in before we even got to that point. I had built a lot of credibility and trust within the organization. They saw the results we could deliver and we were empowered then with a small, small, small, small place.[01:07:00] 

But we proved it. And then we proved it. And then for me, as any ICPM does go through that growth, I was be able, I was set up then to be able to take that model, replicate and scale it. That became my new role as product. Because again, being a really good senior, ICPM is not the same skillset as being a director's, not the same skillset as being a vp.

So how did I apply and grow into the next step of getting other people to be able to replicate those skills and build that model? How did I set up the team to go and do those things? 'cause in an empowered product organization. I can't do it myself anymore. The goal is each of those teams are set up to do it.

And so it's an IC going through that progression. That's really the key. 

Omar Mousa: Kevin, so this is all very exciting. Got a lot of information here. What's next for Counterpart? What should the audience be on the lookout for 

Kevin Holub: counterparts growing? We've got a lot of growth. It's an exciting time for us as a product and a team and an organization.

Our public results, again, continue to underscore the [01:08:00] performance of our product, which is leading a lot of on the go to market side, a lot of people to come to us, asking for, uh, ways to apply what our technology does. So I think next for us, as you're gonna see more and more hopefully announcements of new customers and new pilots and new programs continuing to spin up and more members that we can ultimately support in our mission to improve every life.

So that's, that's what we are excited for from a product and technology perspective. We talked a little bit around, there's three horizons and where gen AI and large language models are in machine learning. We're a machine learning native company. We built a lot of machine learning and ai. And so from a product perspective, we're focused a lot on how do we make those tools work effectively for primary care practices?

How do we make those work effectively for patient care? We focus a lot on safety. We focus a lot on doing those in ways that are explainable, understandable, and truly can deliver impact. But there's a lot there and, and we're leveraging a lot of that technology internally, and it's really exciting for us to keep seeing what can happen on that front.

So on the business [01:09:00] side, a lot more growth, a lot of opportunity for us to keep going in those sides. From a product perspective, I'm very excited about continuing to incorporate artificial intelligence, gen ai, and other technologies into the workflow in ways that truly improve. Primary care efficiency, improve the joy of medicine.

Doctors are often dealing with a really shitty environment of technology. How do we make that not shitty for them and make them really feel the passion again of that human connection of what doctors are just incredible at, which is truly helping us stay healthy and get healthy when we have a problem.

And how do we as a technology company support them?

Angela Suthrave: Kevin, we've reached the concept closing call, and so these are meant to be sort of quick fire. The first question is, are there any frameworks, methods, or processes you've found to be especially useful that others might find useful as well? [01:10:00] 

Kevin Holub: I think Tres DOI has an awesome framework called LNO. It's a way to think about how much time and how much effort you're putting into different work that you're doing as an individual.

I still use this framework myself as a VP and leader, I think CPMs benefit a lot out of thinking of this. I think that leads naturally into empowered product organizations thinking about now, next, and later, and how you think about those different frameworks and when you're investing in different areas, how much time and effort that you put in is leverage work.

How much time and effort do you put in that's neutral work and how much time is overhead? Make sure you're investing your personal time appropriately in the areas that are leveraged, neutral, or overhead. I love that framework. 

Omar Mousa: What is a tool that is highly valuable to you that you think others may not be using?

Kevin Holub: I am an ARC fanboy. I truly love ARC as a browser. I think it's awesome. I just think the UX is really slick and easy. There's a bunch of things that it does really well as a lot of PMs and other team members have. You've got all these different [01:11:00] profiles and you gotta log into all these different things.

It allows you to have different profiles and do those things so you could switch through it. And it doesn't keep state from Okta from one browser to the other. It's, it's cool. It's got some cool stuff in there. So I'm a big fan of arc. I also, I'm an analytics person. I love numbers. I'm a, I'm a pretty big fan of Mode Analytics.

It's a cool tool for like iterative BI type stuff. You wanna do some SQL exploration, you wanna visualize it pretty quickly. It works well there. It's not a true enterprise, uh, business intelligence solution. They might say it is, but I don't think it is. But it's a, it's another cool one that I, I find useful.

Angela Suthrave: Are there any concepts in healthcare that excite you at the moment? 

Kevin Holub: I am. Deeply passionate about value-based care. I think that's what we are working on. I believe that truly is a, a powerful way to keep moving the healthcare system forward and improving overall business results. I do love IRAs as a model.

I think we have a problem in the US about how healthcare works and you're connected to your employer. Icra is a interesting model to move away from that specifically because it can hopefully help change the way that we as organizations speaking about investing in [01:12:00] preventative care. As a health payer, I can only do that if I'm gonna be around as your payer in three years to get the benefit IRAs allow that timeline to change potentially.

So I'm excited about that opportunity. 

Omar Mousa: Do you think product management is a science or an art 

Kevin Holub: as everyone's always gonna say? It's both. I think it depends really though, on what type of product you're building and in which stage. If you are Google search optimization, it, it better be science. You better be applying rigorous AB testing and processes and growth analytics, right?

If you're in growth side, like there are places, if you're a pre-product market fit, it's all art. You're guessing, you're throwing. Throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping something sticks. So I think it's both. But the important job as a PM is to think about when you're leveraging which of those skills.

Angela Suthrave: And lastly, where can people get in touch with you? And do you have any shameless plugs? 

Kevin Holub: If, uh, anyone is interested in product, we are hiring on the counterpart team. So please do apply. Uh, we've got product managers leader roles, we've got engineering, data science bunch. We're continuing to grow. [01:13:00] So always a shameless plug.

Please reach out in our, our careers team and, and, and talent team are wonderful. They'll help with that. I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me. I'm Kevin Holub, uh, at LinkedIn. I'm a, I'm a lurker on XII follow a lot, but I'm always terrified to jump into the fray there. So, uh, you'll see me every once in a while with a repost, but nothing more than that really.

Angela Suthrave: Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today. This was wonderful. 

Kevin Holub: Thank you, Angela and Omar. This was great.

Omar Mousa: Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave us a rating and a review on your podcast app of choice, and make sure to click the follow button so you never miss a new episode. This episode was produced and edited by Marvin Yuey with research help from ADT re, where Angela and Omar, and you've been listening to Concept to Care.

 

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