Advocating for Impact: Building a Case for Strategic Initiatives

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the Strategy Gap, a show for leaders who want to bridge the gap between strategy creation and strategy execution. I'm Jonathan Morgan and along with Joe Krause, each episode we have conversations with strategy and operational leaders on key issues in strategic planning and strategy execution. If you're looking to actually accomplish your goals, this is the show for you. Welcome everybody, to another episode of the Strategy Gap. Joining us today is Mark Muston. Mark currently leads strategic initiatives at Modern Health, a global mental health care platform, working primarily with employers. He's been at Modern Health for five years and previously has led multiple functions across provider operations and global expansion. Prior to Modern Health, he spent eight years at Citigroup as a commodities trader responsible for building out and growing global trading businesses based in New York, London and Singapore.

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:53]:

Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Muston [00:00:55]:

Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here?

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:57]:

Yeah, absolutely. So I gave a quick snippet in your background but would love to kick it off. Just tell our listeners a bit about your role in Modern Health as a larger company.

Mark Muston [00:01:04]:

Modern Health's I've been there, I think coming up in five years now, which has been a really fun journey and crazy. So quick. So Modern Health's been around for, I think, what do we know about seven years as a company primarily focuses with employers and the idea is to be a mental health kind of insurance platform that covers a variety of things for folks in healthcare that's like an employee assistance program replacement or an EAP replacement, as well as also just like a kind of a next gen solution for all things mental health. And so within that, my current role we lead, I lead strategic initiatives, which is a small but mighty team focused on really the way we kind of think about it is what are these like company level problems that don't have a natural department focus or a natural department owner. And so kind of this, the simple rule of thumb we use is if there's not one department that's 50% or more of the work, or if there's like three plus departments involved in a heavy way that tends to be kind of like our early signal for, for something, for our team versus something to be led, you know, out of our product team or out of our operations team or something similar.

Jonathan Morgan [00:02:02]:

Perfect. Well, certainly we get a lot of guests from a variety of different backgrounds and that take different paths through their career. I think you're the first person that we've had move from commodities trading into a strategy role. So talk to us a bit about that transition, what sparked it and how has it been so Far I was.

Mark Muston [00:02:18]:

Smiling thinking of, I remember like interviewing with our head of clinical and I was trying to pull examples from my time in commodities trading and trying to correlate iron ore supply demand curves to healthcare is something that will probably be one of my biggest stretches I've tried to make in an interview. Yeah, so I think for myself, what I really enjoyed about my time at Citi, for those who don't know, Citigroup is one of the largest players probably, I don't know if they still are probably top three, if not still number one in foreign exchange and kind of global side of trading and global side of markets. And so at the time I joined, we were kind of like not ranked on the commodity side, you know, somewhere in that 15th, 20th, whatever it was, but we were number one in foreign exchange and kind of like the global side and commodities at their core, a very global business. So it was really fun was joining that company as effectively like a series, a series B within a larger organization, joined a team of probably 30 or 40 people at the time. And that grew to kind of 300 during my time there. And so a lot of what I really enjoyed, and I didn't know this until later in that experience was what I really enjoyed was kind of building the businesses up. So I started in New York, kind of did a variety of things, sort of like a generalist role, and then moved to London to build out like at the time what was a money losing derivatives business. And so to go there and kind of help build that out, grow that team, grow that business, and then to do that again in Singapore for an established business that was number 10 making X and should be making 3X and should be top 3.

Mark Muston [00:03:46]:

So that was like a really. And I think what I took away from that experience is I kind of hit a point where I joked I kept moving east and at a certain point I had to come back to the U.S. that was the only other place to go east and was ready for a change, ready to kind of to park finance for a bit. And so when I was looking for that next thing, what I really reflected on was how much fun it was to kind of think through building and growing these businesses more so than it was trading headlines, managing risk pricing, derivative structures and all that kind of true trading stuff. And so that very serendipitously timed up with Modern Health, which at the time was 15 or 20 people and had ambitions and prospects and clients that wanted them to be a global operator in a global company. And so it really was a good Time to kind of take that skill set and bring that to modern health of how do you build globally, how do you build supply demand? As you can imagine, I probably know more than anyone needs to know in healthcare about supply demand curves and modeling and risk management. And so taking all that was really fun. And so that was kind of my first foray into modern health.

Mark Muston [00:04:44]:

And then over the years that role has transitioned from more operational nature of growing that business to more of these kind of what are these big company level problems. So certainly not the conventional path, but I've always been surprised by how much overlap there is of two sided marketplaces or supply demand have a lot of similarities at their core, whether it's finance and commodities or it's healthcare and therapists or coaches.

Joe Krause [00:05:09]:

It's interesting because you mentioned a lot of people get to a point where they're like, you know, I've had really good time at this particular organization, but it's time to go. And then you start to think about what's next and you think about what you liked about the role you were currently in and try to then piece that into what would be the next thing. But I think of your experiences as well. If you go like on LinkedIn and you search for a strategy, that role is a very. I know you didn't start there, but if, let's say somebody was transitioning, I mean that means so many different things to different people. Sometimes it's the big three consulting firms where they're thinking big picture picture. Sometimes it's to your point getting your hands dirty on the execution side. So how did you kind of zero in on exactly the piece of what you like to do and scanning all the possibilities that were out there, you switched sectors, you switched pretty much everything to then focus on what you liked about your previous role.

Joe Krause [00:05:56]:

How did you narrow down the list of possibilities to get to something that was a good fit and you're happy with? Because I think the people struggle with that. A lot of our listeners do, yeah, 100%.

Mark Muston [00:06:04]:

And I think I've been really fortunate. Like the leadership team has been great at Modern Health. Like, you know, they took a big chance on the non traditional background when they hired me. It also happened to be a company that was kind of at that right stage for me. So I think there was a couple things that helped me narrow the funnel personally and I think a little bit also was feeling like I had the right people and I could solve it over time. So in the first part, what I wanted to narrow the funnel on was I think I've said this to a few friends of like, you know, when I joined finance, it was really, really intellectually stimulating. I loved the fast paced nature, like a former athlete, very competitive, there's a scoreboard, all that stuff. And you work with really, really smart people.

Mark Muston [00:06:39]:

Like we. I literally remember at one point in London building pricing tools with like a literal rocket scientist. And you're like, this is really fun. It's fun to be kind of the dumbest person in the room and just constantly challenged in that way. That was really, really fulfilling. But what was lacking is helping a hedge fund make more money, helping a large bank make more money. You convince yourself there's like ulterior motives and it helps. And whatever you're helping the pension fund that is invested in Citi or invested in that hedge fund.

Mark Muston [00:07:04]:

But for me, I wanted to be closer to the impact and I think someone who has always struggled with like work, life, balance. I told myself I'd do the soup kitchen every Saturday. I wasn't doing it, you know, I was pouring all my energy into my work. So when I looked for that pivot, what was really important to me was I want to go somewhere where the mission of that company fulfills this need to kind of give back or have higher purpose or whatever that may be. So for me, that helped narrow the funnel of I want to do something that is more directly helping people. It doesn't mean I'm going to go become a doctor, become whatever, but I wanted to work for a company that I believed me showing up to work was like creating my positive good. And so I didn't have this kind of cognitive dissonance in my head of having a work life and then having this sense of feeling fulfilled that I wasn't meeting. So that for me was really important and that naturally kind of narrowed the focus into healthcare was one of the ones on top of that list.

Mark Muston [00:07:52]:

As a former athlete, I always thought mental health was like the area I never quite cracked as an athlete. Like I struggled with that and I think that held me back in some ways. And it was an area I just never really had the exposure to learn. So this combination of this is a type of company where I can give back. I feel really good about pouring my whole self into this mission. And additionally, this is a space that I've always been really interested in personally and just have never had the right folks in my network or the right exposures to really appreciate it. That to me helped me feel good. Where you have sort of like, maybe this is the finance side of me, like, I'm always thinking of like pros and cons and downside risk and hedging.

Mark Muston [00:08:28]:

And my thought was, even if this doesn't end up to be the right role, I'm going to do something that I feel like helps and that's really important. And I'm going to learn about a space I've always wanted to learn about. So and I'm going to get exposure into a startup. And those all three were really important to me. So I think those are kind of what helped me start to narrow that funnel. And then I think the other one is, and I'm very guilty of this as a finance person and just like a details person in general, like analysis paralysis. So I also wanted to try and force myself of if I trust the leaders and I trust the people. And at the time our, you know, our founder and CEO Allison Watson and Tim Savage who ran ops, and Myra Altman at the time ran our clinical.

Mark Muston [00:09:02]:

All folks that like I really trusted, really thought I could work well with. And so I forced myself to say like, this is about as good as I'm going to get. I could definitely do analysis paralysis, go to look at five other companies, build the spreadsheet, do whatever. But if I love the mission, I love what I'm learning about and I trust the people, the role can kind of take its shape as it comes. And that also was very unique to my experience of I wanted to start and get my hands as dirty as possible. So I wanted to start in operations, get in the thick of it because it was a role transition, a career transition. And so that was also part of it. I knew I'd have to have that my role would change because I knew where I was starting wasn't the long term goal, but was the exact right exposure for a career pivot to feel like confident in that kind of startup space.

Mark Muston [00:09:44]:

So I think it was very fortunate that the team's been great and we've been able to navigate that and find the right things. And I think that it's possible that wouldn't have worked out. But what made me feel really good was I kind of narrowed the funnel enough and then I had the people I trusted to take that leap of faith. And I think that kept me from kind of sitting on the sidelines another three months and humming and hawing on what that right perfect company is.

Jonathan Morgan [00:10:06]:

Great information there and I think definitely want to spend some time in a minute on the aspects of the role. We'll dig into that.

Mark Muston [00:10:12]:

But.

Jonathan Morgan [00:10:12]:

But one Thing we talk about pretty often on the show and certainly is important in strategy is that importance of leadership, the importance of having a strong mission and vision. But we think about it more on the side of, hey, this is how you're going to get your people going towards the right direction and engage in their strategies, initiatives, whatever the case may be a unique conversation on the hiring aspect and one thing we'll definitely have to involve in other conversations. I want to dig into a bit more. How has that impact, all those reasons you just talked about for joining the organization? How has that resonated with you, you as you've continued your time as the organization? How are you passing along those same principles you just mentioned to the rest of your team or to the rest of the organization? I'm sure it has some impact on your time in the organization.

Mark Muston [00:10:52]:

I think there's like some very kind of like obvious ones and the more subtle ones, I think the obvious ones are, I think healthcare can be a space, for example, where you hire for resume. A lot of times, oh, you need to have this background and the clinical side that's obviously very relevant for a very good reason. But like we need someone who's done product or ops in a healthcare setting or we need someone who's done whatever like sales for a healthcare organization. I think the most kind of direct one for me was realizing how much translated from my past experiences, also realizing that that learning curve, sure I started behind, you know, the folks who started from a health care background, but that was not two years of catch up. That was six months of catch up, you know, or three to nine months, depending on the thing. And so that was something I think I've taken of. I've really encouraged both in my hiring and teams I partner with and folks I work with of like making sure that we're. I think it was actually I was reading this the other day of, I think Carta's their founder and I put out a thing about hiring that's still kind of relevant, probably eight years old now.

Mark Muston [00:11:51]:

And it talks about this idea of hiring for ambition versus hiring for resume. And I think that he articulated really well of kind of my findings, which is, yeah, if you find the right motivated person. And I think I've sort of learned this in hindsight, like if I can get excited about iron ore, that is literally dirt. If I can get excited about like growing a business, trading dirt, and then I can also get excited about like growing a global business of therapists and coaches. I think it speaks to these. You don't need this rigid resume as much as you need this intrinsic motivation and this curiosity and this problem solving. So that's where I think more overtly is like encouraging folks to kind of look for the best people and not get caught up on resume. And then I think more subtly I think it's also just the value of and this is something we're a mental health organization, we talk about this concept a lot of like understanding cultural humility, understanding folks lived experiences, understanding where they come from.

Mark Muston [00:12:42]:

And I think that's something that I've always noticed is like my have a different perspective for my own reasons and everyone has their own unique perspective. But my perspective as like a finance background and like a supply demand modeling person coming into these conversations does provide a new angle to kind of the traditional healthcare background. And so I think that's also where kind of related if Donut just hired for resume. But there's a huge value if we can create like a welcome open safe space to have these discussions and folks to bring in these what we think are very random references or very random kind of past experiences. But it all creates what it's done for modern is it's helped us to create like a truly unique global business and to think about these things because we have those perspectives in the room.

Joe Krause [00:13:24]:

It's an interesting topic because I mean we're hiring for a position currently at Achieve it and some positions we put up we'll get a thousand resumes, others will get a 50. And the idea of not hiring for resume sounds great until you get a thousand resumes. And so I guess the real big thing that I think we struggle with is referrals are great sometimes because I mean ultimately when you are hiring for the people that maybe aren't a great fit, is it typically coming through a referral network? Is it the best way to like I vouch for this person, I think you should take a look at their resume or is there a way that you've used workable or the thousand other resume systems to kind of scan for diamonds in the rough? I mean it's hard to understand ambition without talking to somebody. So if you don't get to the resume, you don't get to talk to them so you understand the conundrum. Have you found any tips or tricks to sift through to find maybe less traditional candidates to really gauge for ambition so that you can get the best talent on your team?

Mark Muston [00:14:14]:

Yeah, this is an area that I think unfortunately things like LinkedIn has an easy way to apply or greenhouse is an Easy way to apply. Like the technological advantages that make it easier as a person applying make it harder as a hiring manager, to your point, because you get a thousand openings or a thousand applicants in 24 hours or 48 hours. So this is area that I think I've learned a couple things and there's a couple things we do, but it's definitely not. I don't think we've solved it, if that makes sense. I think it's an ever evolving beast. The first one is I definitely take note of folks who do the work to get the referral or to reach out. And referral's obviously great. I think generally speaking, if someone knows someone, and my rule is if there's a referral and they vouch for them, I'll take the call regardless because they see something that is worth 30 minutes.

Mark Muston [00:14:57]:

So that's always good. But outside of the referral, I definitely take notice of folks that'll chase down and they'll reach out to me for a role in a different organization if they show that ambition. I think that does tell me a lot of their work ethic and their hunger is if they're driven enough to reach out to seven different people at Modern Health and to follow up with them, that can be a good signal. And so I usually take the 30 seconds to look at their LinkedIn resume and kind of give them a benefit of the doubt if it looks good. And then on the resumes themselves, one of the things, and I think this is more specific to my current team, it's a little easier to do this than for example, like a generalist ops role or kind of like a more junior entry level role. But for my current team, a lot of what we're really trying to do is build narratives and build like data driven stories that we can sell internally to go build things. And so as part of that, I'm looking at their resume to see can they concretely sell what they've done. And it's not to say that that's the most important thing, but if you see one of those resumes, that's a lot of information, but not a lot of outcomes.

Mark Muston [00:15:55]:

That can usually be a sign of maybe they're not good at kind of condensing things down into the elevator pitch or condensing things down that real ROI story. And for my team right now that's hugely important. I think sales is kind of like the underappreciated role of anyone in these sort of strategic initiatives or biz ops or program management types of roles. So that's one that I look at specifically is are they selling themselves well through that resume? Are they using data where they can? And also are they creating like a compelling narrative that's easy to follow? And so that probably doesn't get you from a thousand down to ten, but I find a lot of times that can cut half of them out pretty quick and then it gets you at least kind of on your way.

Jonathan Morgan [00:16:32]:

Yeah, I imagine a lot of our listeners are shaking their heads through a lot of this in agreeance that, yeah, this is just like me. I was the person who just kind of figured things out. I like building things. And you land in the strategy role or operational role. I don't think people tend to fall into those just purely by accident. They're the ones that are always raising their hand for projects and it just naturally creates this role. Certainly as you get in larger organizations there's more defined processes. But on those smaller organizations where we're trying to figure out how do we get things done, how do we align all these resources across the organization? It's a natural fit for someone that is a hand raiser, a doer is going to figure everything out and just problem solve to build that solution.

Jonathan Morgan [00:17:12]:

I think naturally that next problem and we're kind of, we almost skipped a step because we're talking about hiring. The next problem people run into is I can't do this all by myself or we have a small team. We can't, we can't actually track all these initiatives or complete our strategy across our team. It's too disconnected. It's too much for one person, too much for a couple people to handle. I think in our last conversation you've talked about how you've been able to advocate for your team. And that's certainly a struggle for a lot of organizations and individuals and strategy and operational roles. It's a cost center.

Jonathan Morgan [00:17:43]:

Right. It's not somebody that's generating revenue. So they're not always the next one up for hiring people. What have you done throughout your career, either previously or at Modern Health to really advocate for your team, show the value you're creating so you can continue to grow that function or what impact you're having to the organization?

Mark Muston [00:18:02]:

I think this is probably a lesson I've had to learn the hard way in kind of the more painful way at Modern Health. So previously, very quickly, as a trader at a bank, you're sort of like the salesperson in the sense of, at a tech company of hey, I need this to close this deal. You kind of get to jump to the front of the line. I think it was even more so at that time for me at Citi. Like, hey, we know this is a business that's losing money or not making money, that can be making 10, 20 million a year. And bottom line. So if a trader says they need something, here's your pm, here's your engineers, go build it. And so I think what I got away with there, which was great for building a business, bad for learning a skill, is I got away with kind of whatever we needed.

Mark Muston [00:18:43]:

I didn't always have to rationalize or justify to the same extent. It was, hey, I need this engineer to come work with me on this pricing tool. Within two weeks, that engineer is sitting at my desk, and we're like, going through it together. And so I think that was something. And so when I got to Modern early on, managing and building a team within operations, I sort of got to do that again. And certainly you're still justifying headcount expansion. You're justifying kind of what you need. But I always had the tool.

Mark Muston [00:19:07]:

If I had a dozen or two dozen folks on my team, then I could always kind of go to those key players and say, hey, I want to do this. I don't have the bandwidth or the resourcing. Can you, like, pivot on what you're doing to help me with this, or can this be an OKR for you? So you kind of had that. I always had that sort of resourcing and then moving into this new role over the last few years. On the strategic initiative side, we are a very small team. We don't do matrix reporting at Modern Health. And that was a really rude awakening to get to this point where I'm trying to go to teams that have, frankly, no accountability to me, to PMs or to Ops leaders or to clinical folks. And I'm trying to get them to focus on these things we need to do.

Mark Muston [00:19:43]:

Everything has to be this combination of, like, does it align with the core goals of our leadership or our architects? Does it align with their core role within those departments, their intrinsic motivations? And so that was frankly, very frustrating early on of I could see this vision. I'd never been forced to articulate it or to rationalize it in the same way. And so I sort of got kind of hit a wall where whether I saw that there's value in this or we needed to solve this problem, whether reactively or proactively, but I wasn't getting kind of the unwavering support I was used to. And I didn't have those resources in my expenditure the way I was used to. And so I think candidly it was a hard, hard learned lesson. But I think ultimately coming out of it and kind of seeing through it on the other side now, what I really started to realize was this is a huge, great skill. Whether you have a big team or not, it's a great skill to learn. So I'm very happy to have kind of gone through that.

Mark Muston [00:20:32]:

And what I focused on now is understanding first and foremost. There's a couple of sayings that I always say to myself or I write on a whiteboard is first one is like, is this new or is this new to me? So like, is this problem a new problem or is this just something I just found out about that's been going on and that's helpful to understand, like tying that into kind of the next question is like, is this a mark priority or is this a business priority? And that's understanding, like, is this something that the leadership team feels very strongly we need to solve or is this kind of on their nice to have list? And the importance of those questions are just trying to take myself out of it, take my own perspectives out of it and say, is this something that I'm going to face headwinds or tailwinds in the sense of if I go to say, hey, we need to staff this project, I need this resourcing from product engineering, clinical operations, if I know this is a business priority or not, if I know this has been going on or not, that helps me get in the right mind frame of understanding. What's the significance of my ask? Am I asking to solve a problem that leadership really wants solved and they've just been hoping someone will step up? Or am I asking to solve a problem that no one's aware of? And frankly, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't, but it's just not a priority. And I think that was a really, really stark reality of I got to do what I thought was a priority when I had more resources. Now I have to really take myself out, see that broader picture of the business and understand kind of is this something that has tailwinds to it? And if not, I either need to create a narrative that justifies now is the time to solve this problem that folks weren't aware of, or I need to understand maybe now is not the right time to solve that problem and there's just something more pressing or more important going on. So I think that's been kind of the first part of just understanding when you see something, is now the time, is it the right thing to push for? And then the second part is how do you push for that? No surprise, coming from a finance background and also being at a startup that we're primarily B2B business. Revenue and retention are like top things. So my natural instinct is if we can quantify financially, that's great.

Mark Muston [00:22:26]:

The company loves to think about things as anyone would in terms of revenue or retention. So if there's a way, we need to find a way do the hard work to determine what we think the quantifiable financial impact is. If we build this, do we increase net new ARR, do we increase retention? If it's something related to efficiency, does that save on cogs or opex? And so thinking about those financially and if we can't think about them financially, thinking about it from some other quantifiable metric. So is that we think member NPS goes up by 5 or we think the OPS team spends a cumulative 10 hours a week less or a hundred hours a week less or whatever that unit is. And so I think that was like the second part of forced me. One, is this the right project? And then two, then once I'd realized is yes, this is or there's tailwinds to this, I should push for this. Then the second part is how do I quantify so folks know there's a scoreboard. And I think that's my past experience kind of naturally brought me that part but forced me to a lot of times take a week or a month to do the hard work to figure out how to quantify something like this.

Mark Muston [00:23:25]:

Hey, if we think there's, if we think this new care delivery method unlocks new revenue, I have to own going and talking to go to market and figuring out what that revenue is. Ideally that's something I co collaborate with our go to market team, our sales leads or a rev ops team. So when I bring that to the leadership level, there's not just me in a vacuum building this model. It's hey, there's consensus if we think this is reasonable. So I think that was probably the starkest kind of side of it of just being forced. And I guess one analogy I almost think about to tie it all up, I almost think about this in the sense of our role is to treat the leadership team as VCs. So we go to them and if it's a proactive request and say if you give us X we will deliver Y and we sort of build that and grow that and start to show Those results. And that's sort of how you compound and build and as a team has grown and expanded more initiatives.

Mark Muston [00:24:16]:

That's sort of how we've done it. We've kind of gone out, proven the quantifiable benefit of taking on this one thing, and then we come back six months or a year later, take on that second thing with a similar kind of almost like going back to that VC for another round and saying, hey, we've proven success. We've agreed on the outcomes, we've delivered those. We want to pitch you on this new idea and we think you might be interested in solving this new business problem. So it's kind of an interesting way to think about it, but I think I found it helpful to see all those sides by kind of putting folks in that way.

Joe Krause [00:24:46]:

There's a lot to unpack there. But I think one of the original points you made was fascinating around. I think it's good, it's a good lesson for people joining an organization because sometimes you might come in in a leadership position and you're coming like, what are you guys doing around here? You haven't done anything. All these problems. And that's to your point, is it a new problem or is it new? To me, that's a good kind of lens for people because most of the time, unless it's completely people are grossly negligent at their job there. A lot of times the problem has been, there's been at least an attempt at potentially taking it and that new person could potentially solve it. But it's a way you approach it. I think that's big.

Joe Krause [00:25:17]:

And then the second part you mentioned, which I think a lot of people struggle with, and it's one of the main questions I get when I'm working with clients is like, what's the best kind of planning framework in order to people aligned and all that. And you mentioned okrs. I have my personal opinions. I'll keep to myself for today. But as far as okrs, do you feel that they are an effective way of getting your team to really connect their work to some real outcome? And if so, have you figured out the way to kind of balance the powers of okr, but also making it simple? Because I'm sure, you know, if you start going down the OKR rabbit hole, all of a sudden with weightings and all that, it starts getting complicated quick. So have you found a way to kind of leverage the good parts of okrs and maybe jettison off the stuff that isn't so great to align people to Results.

Mark Muston [00:25:56]:

I think every business struggles with that. I think startups have pros and cons. Like I think in some ways, in some parts of it, we struggle more just being newer, going through planning less times in an established company. But I think the benefit that we get that we probably don't always appreciate is we're more nimble, you know, we're less set in our ways. It's easier to iterate and evolve okrs. I think we probably would share some sentiments Joe, reading through the lines there, I think where we've tried to focus is it's important for any company to have these are our priorities. And I think we've done a good job at modern of always having these are our priorities. I think we've tried various degrees of granularity of how directly, explicitly how detailed do you tie projects into these kind of key results? And so like how much is that spiderweb or that kind of like decision tree looking flow, how far down does it go? I think that's a slippery slope of sometimes it's very helpful, sometimes it just becomes a lot of work and hard to follow.

Mark Muston [00:26:49]:

But I think what's really important for us is we typically do it at this stage on an annual planning cycle and we'll revisit that every six months. But we'll say this is what's most important to the business. And I think what I always try and keep in mind for ourselves is if we can ladder to those most important things in a direct way, that's a really good signal, that's a really good motivator. It's a good way to get buy in for the business of hey, I know maybe this project wasn't on the list, but this problem's on the list or this topic's on the list. I think this is a way to address that key theme. And so simplistically for a business, if you're, you know, at some point it's we want to grow revenue, it's like, okay, what are we doing? Maybe we haven't talked about this concept before, but we believe this unlocks 5 million, 10 million in net new revenue. And we're an early stage startup and that's big. So we can at least draw that line explicitly to saying, hey, maybe this project is new or maybe this project's a little bit out there, but there's no question that we're going after the top three are the headline which is revenue or for us as a healthcare organization, you think about member experience and patient journeys.

Mark Muston [00:27:49]:

And so hey, we know that we want to work on our clinical care flows. Maybe this way of doing it might be new, but there's a very direct linear connection of this project will increase whatever member outcomes or member NPS or whatever it is that metric may be. And so I think that's one where Joe, I think it can be really tricky, but I think we've tried to always keep it simple where we can of if we're not drawing a direct connection into one of those top company priorities. That kind of goes back to the comment earlier. Like the headwinds and tailwinds we need one of two things has to happen. We have to acknowledge that like there's going to be a lot of headwinds. This is not a company priority and maybe now is not the right time to solve this or it's not the most important problem. Or two, there are times we say hey, this is still worth solving or it's still important or it's a good ROI or it's good investment.

Mark Muston [00:28:36]:

But then we have to understand that we are going to face that headwind. And so we have to just acknowledge that head on and say how are we going to build a pitch for this or a narrative for this that we think objectively rationalizes that we should still staff this or do this even though it's not top three? I think that's candidly, I've been on both sides of that. I think there's a times to push and there's times to also kind of take yourself out of it and make your piece of this isn't the biggest thing for the business. There's a ton of things we can do versus that other scenario of I do think this is worth advocating for even if it's not top three, because maybe it's a quick fix or maybe it has a really important outcome that's coming up next. It's number four on the list instead of top three or whatever it may be.

Jonathan Morgan [00:29:17]:

Yeah. And while we're quickly approaching the end of our time, I did have one other piece I wanted to get into related to this conversation. I think on the financial and ROI side, I think most people would argue that yes, this is very helpful. However, I think two problems that companies often will face with that is they'll either get analysis paralysis, they're constantly trying to reevaluate what's the best option, or they only end up picking the big ROI ones and then it's so hard to adjust anything on that or change their targets or they get 75% of the way through and it's taken five times as long. Personally, like I prefer a lot of times to start with small things, you're kind of building that snowball, that momentum, getting people going, and then you can kind of get into those. But there certainly is a balance that has to happen between these small quick win projects and the big ROI generating initiatives. How have you balanced those two? Because you can't just do one or the other or else you're going to ultimately miss on one side of that.

Mark Muston [00:30:10]:

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think this also comes down a lot to like leadership style and company culture. I think there's companies that, whether they're earlier stage and have less to lose or just have kind of more of a cowboy bravado kind of founder or leadership team. Some companies lean into the big and bold and some companies lean into the iterative. And I think that really comes down to kind of the culture, the space you're in. And so I think for a variety of reasons, you know, healthcare is not typically, once you're an established healthcare player like we are, it's, it's not common. You don't want to be doing big, bold, drastic, risky things. Right.

Mark Muston [00:30:43]:

These are people's health on the line. So you tend to take a more kind of iterative, calculated approach. And so I think understanding first and foremost is to your point about you can't do both is what is kind of the natural muscle of the company? Where do leaders or builders like to operate in? Is it in that iterative or is it in that we like the one big bold bed of X 2030, we're going to do this and this. And so I think for ourselves, one of the things with health care being really, really thoughtful about patient experience. And again, these are people's lives and we be very methodical in how we take that approach. And so we've tended to kind of stack on iterative wins to get to these big, big things, if that makes sense. So one of the things that I think about is like the concept or the problem might be very big. It might require like a very notable change or a big change.

Mark Muston [00:31:29]:

But a lot of the time we'll spend early on is breaking that down into small things. So what's an mvp? How do we test that hypothesis to justify the next level of investment? And then how do we scale that from one small cohort of users to a client type or client base? And then how do we kind of grow both who we're impacting or how wide of an impact we're having as well as the level of investment we're having. And so that's an area, I think, to put that more tangibly, that could be, for example, we'll take unscalable manual processes and use those as a way to test the hypothesis. So rather than do a six month product build to change a care delivery method or a care journey, instead we're going to take like, we're going to create like a more manual process. Or our operations team will like work with members who reach out to our help desk and like manually walk them through this experience. Or we'll get a clinician on the phone to manually do that. It's not very scalable, it's not very sexy. It's kind of the antithesis of building a tech company.

Mark Muston [00:32:24]:

But what it allows us to do is to say, hey, we know that this in its current form is not scalable, but we have a hypothesis that if it's wrong, like that's a big bet. Let's test that in kind of safer, more appropriate waters. As we get validation that hypothesis is working, then we build v1 of that product feature to kind of create step one. And then as we value that more, then we build v2. And so oftentimes it's kind of that three or four steps to get to that big vision. And it's less of this heads down for 12 months. And then a kind of Apple style, we release the iPhone every year. It's less of that and it's more of how do we get to that same goal but do it kind of a quarter or a half at a time.

Mark Muston [00:33:02]:

And that just naturally fits well with integer of nature, naturally fits well with the healthcare space. And also I think we found to be really fruitful to make sure that we're being really smart about kind of constantly checking in on these hypotheses and beliefs to prevent those, as any startup or newer company would have. I think modern health less of a startup at this point. But still we're all resource constrained for what we want to build. So how do we avoid those? We made a big bet and 18 months later we were 30 degrees off and missed the landing.

Joe Krause [00:33:29]:

Reminds me of the ill, the old adage of ready, fire, aim, right? So make small bets and then figure out where you're going to go from there. So I appreciate that. But as we draw to a close, we typically, actually typically we always ask the same question to our guests because it's insightful to understand kind of the people's perspective on it. And speaking about specifically maybe your time starting at modern health. If you can go back in time and go back to you on day one, appear to yourself and give yourself a bit of advice that would have made your transition in your first few years even easier or better or different. What would that advice sound like for yourself?

Mark Muston [00:34:03]:

There's a lot I'm sure you know. As a pretty self critical person, I think I, I'd coach myself pretty hard. I still do. I think probably the most impactful is everyone's seen the Eisenhower matrix and the kind of what's urgent versus what's important and thinking about that and that would be kind of the core of it and really what it comes down to is there's this temptation to solve things because you can and sometimes you get so caught up in crossing off the list or solving the thing or kind of completing things that you kind of miss the forest from the trees. And so certainly something I struggled with even more in my younger days and I think as with age and gray hair, as I'm learning more and more but I think that would be something early on of there's a lot of things you can fix and some of those things are going to move the needle 10% and some of those things are going to move the needle 0.1%. And I think forcing myself to take a step back and say it's better to live with the small things that are annoying or I know I could fix if it gives me the extra 10 hours a week to focus on the one or two things that really, really move the needle. And I think that's something I'm still always tempted as any kind of, I don't know, competitive, aggressive, problem solver. But I think it's something I've constantly trying to remind myself now and I definitely think would have helped me early on is you're never going to solve it all.

Mark Muston [00:35:15]:

A football coach who used to always say don't confuse activity for achievement and I don't know why that one always stuck with me of you can get on a treadmill and you feel like you've done a lot and you've gone nowhere or you can really pick those two things that matter and just pour yourself into those. And so I think that's something true of anyone in these kind of roles. Blocking out the noise, seeing the forest, all that stuff. But particularly for myself, kind of coming in ambitious and hungry but maybe not as laser focused as I should have been.

Jonathan Morgan [00:35:42]:

Love it. I think that's great advice that everybody needs to constant reminder of including myself, so I will be jotting that down to make sure I'm not falling into that trap. But, Mark, we appreciate your time today, and I know our listeners will have appreciated your insights as well.

Mark Muston [00:35:56]:

Thanks so much for having me. This was fun.Jonathan Morgan [00:00:00]: