Having acquired product development experience in various industries such as telecom, automotive, IT and recently health tech, I proudly declare that this project was one of the most exciting and challenging ones. The goal of the project is to bring together clicktotherapy’s* customers with the most suitable psychologists, using AI and NLP technology. I won’t elaborate on the scientific aspect of the project, no matter how alluring it is, but I will focus on the collaboration and the team since, I strongly believe, it is the most critical success factor. The team was composed of a bunch of really great professionals and also people who taught me how to make work hours not only effective but also pleasant. Some worth sharing lessons I’ve learned regarding attitude:
Don’t show off and embrace responsibility. All the project team members have a really sexy profession (eg: data scientist, AI expert, psychologist, CX architect and the list goes on) which could make you consider yourself as more important than the other members (grabbing the opportunity to satisfy your narcissistic need, as our psychologists would comment). However, although it is critical to understand that your contribution to the project is very important (as well as equally important to the contribution of the others), the responsibility of the whole should be embraced by each member with pride. Paraphrasing the quote of N. Kazantzakis “Love the responsibility, Say: I, on my own, have the responsibility to save the project. If it fails, it is my fault”.
Show genuine interest in the expertise of others. When you understand what their concerns and goals are, then you can understand why they have their specific point of view. After having understood that, you are able to appreciate the new perspective and it won’t be another different opinion that you have to address (another reason for conflict), but another perspective that you will be after. Have you ever spent your lunch break listening to your colleague describing why and how exciting her job is? Do it and you will be surprised.
All the team members should be aligned with the vision and project scope. Undoubtedly, it is extremely important for everyone to be aligned with the big picture, but this picture should be broken down to what makes sense to each member of the team. For instance, in our case, data scientist is interested in training ratio and accuracy ratio, the psychologist in therapeutic relationship between therapist and user, the “Voice of the customer” guy in less interactions and myself in conversion rate (apologies for the cynicism). That way, the whole team is aligned with the vision in a pragmatic, engaging and measurable way. Extra emphasis should be put on the translation of the vision into the right metric for each member — nothing would be more frightening than a psychologist who would be concerned about conversion rate…
Always grateful to this amazing team who taught me how exciting it is to work together to deliver an awesome product!
By Panagiotis Charamis, Founder of ClicktoTherapy
*Clicktotherapy’s mission is to provide a fully integrated service mix to improve people’s mental health & wellness. It is designed to deliver end to end experience for the user, from stating the request, being matched with the most suited psychologist (ClicktoTherapy’s partner), booking online to having the actual video session.
