Abstract: 

The lean startup methodology is one of the most popular product development paradigms. It ¯emphasizes the concept of product-market fit and quick build-measure-learn iterations to reduce the uncertainty about how the market will react to the product. In most traditional software products, there is no uncertainty around the ability to build the product as specified: software engineering is deterministic. But nowadays, more and more products are heavily dependent on machine learning and AI components. This adds a second source of uncertainty to the product development process: we can’t guarantee model performance in advance.

This added uncertainty raises new product development challenges. For example, what are the acceptance criteria for a machine learning model? What is the Definition of Done? If a modeling effort is unsuccessful, should it lead to a product pivot? The goal of this talk is to provide a unifying framework to tackle these challenges. We introduce the concept of product-data fit and describe how modeling iterations should interact with the product development cycle. We emphasize the flow of validated learning from the product side to the data side and vice versa, and how product development drives the choice of modeling metrics. We discuss several use cases, highlighting guiding questions and principles to help achieve product-data fit and product-market fit while avoiding common pitfalls. We also illustrate how this approach can shorten time to market and help achieve financial business goals of AI driven products.

Bio: 

Afik Gal is a healthcare executive, physician, Duke MBA and an entrepreneur with over 13 years of cross functional experience (technology, clinical and business) in healthcare analytics and digital health. Afik is currently a VP for technology innovation at eviCore healthcare after previously leading product andBizDev at QPIDHealth(acquired by eviCore). Prior to joining QPID, Afik led PWC’s healthcare innovation lab where he focused on business model innovation and matching technologies with payers, providers and pharma needs. As an entrepreneur Afik founded a boutique consulting firm which helped hospitals and tech vendors innovate their products and business models (client included Amdocs, SAP, Orbotech, Wix,NetApp). Afik also founded a clinical analytics startup and consulted multiple other  digital healthcare companies.