Executing what matters

The startup ecosystem —like any other community—has its own set of values, and one of the most prominent is the emphasis on execution.

You can witness this in maxims like “90 percent of success is execution” or even the singular-minded “execute, execute, execute.”

While the focus on execution is good—entrepreneurs should be biased toward action, after all—I believe that there needs to be a greater discussion on what founders should be executing.

Hustling for the sake of hustling, sans consideration of the broader picture, is the sure train to frustration, if not burnout.

I speak as someone who has focused executing on the wrong things, and even today, is still learning how to focus on what will make the most impact.

I humbly share my lessons in the hope that it may help you avoid the same pitfalls.

What I’ve witnessed across Southeast Asia, as the founder of my Singaporean-headquartered health-technology startup, mClinica, is that the pressure to execute has pushed entrepreneurs (myself included!) to focus on tasks with clearly defined start and end points. These are the things that you could sensibly move from “in progress” to “complete” on your Trello board, such as releasing your minimum viable product, signing a particular client, or hiring for a newly opened position.

Don’t get me wrong: These kinds of linear tasks are crucial to any startup. But I think what elevates a company from its peers is not how well it executes these routine business tasks, but in how well it thrives in the much hazier world of its end-users.

Ironically, I believe that how a company builds rapport and relationships with its end-users will ultimately define its success or failure, but we founders often tend to avoid this sphere precisely because it is far more difficult to gauge how well we are executing.

When I first founded mClinica, I tended to do these kinds of tasks more than anything else. Since we were still building our product back then, it was easy to immerse myself in the details of product design and development.

It seemed like all it would take to achieve our mission of transforming healthcare across Southeast Asia was moving task cards from the left side of our productivity software to the right side.

Everything would fall into place so long as we efficiently built our features according to our product roadmap.

I only realized the folly of this approach when we painstakingly spent time building a feature that our end-users, the pharmacists, ultimately found no use for.

As a company philosophy, we now devote a significant amount of our resources to executing a plan that focuses on understanding, empathizing, and relationship-building with our end-users.

The operative word there is company philosophy.

Any firm where only the founders or senior leadership are interacting with end-users is bound for serious trouble, just as I experienced when I encouraged our developers to build a feature that had no value to our end-users.

You cannot cascade understanding or empathy or relationships from the top-down. You must achieve these goals across your company, and it’s one I’ve tried to design into the very fabric of how we operate, and I recommend other firms in the Philippines and Southeast Asia do so as well.

As an example, at mClinica we created the position “pharmacy community associate.” We filled this position with Nicole Tayawa, who spends her time interacting with other pharmacists across the country.

What she learns from them face-to-face shapes how we design and develop SwipeRx, our flagship platform for pharmacy professionals across Southeast that now counts more than 60,000 users.

The value of this intelligence, these insights, cannot be overstated enough.

Through her early interactions, for instance, Nicole learned that Filipino pharmacists in remote provinces will trek up to four hours each way—or what would equate to a full eight hour shift—just to reach a city where they can take the continuing professional development (CPD) required for their pharmacy license.

Then there was also the issue of cost, as pharmacist Lara Angelica Tan shared in one of the on-record conversations with Nicole, alongside mClinica teammates Genelyn Paguibitan (multimedia designer), Edrick Ramoran (pharmacist data analyst), and Diana Dalisay Orolfo (pharmacy community executive).

“We know that in the Philippines, the compensation for pharmacy professionals is not that high, but the price of earning CPD units is high. Sometimes we have to pay thousands just to earn five, six units. So it’s tough, it’s hard to earn the units just to renew your license,” said Tan.

The stress, hassle, and cost of CPD units to Tan and other pharmacists around the Philippines like her was enormous, yet we did not learn about it until Nicole sat down with them face-to-face and spoke to them openly, less as a company representative and more as a caring person who wanted to learn, understand, and empathize with their problems.

Based on Nicole’s information, we built free CPD modules right into SwipeRx.

Now the thousands of pharmacists who formerly had to take time away from their community pharmacy to journey to the nearest city could now take their CPD anytime, anywhere, from the comfort of their mobile phone.

Since we built this feature from what we directly observed of our end-users in the field, the adoption into SwipeRx’s CPD has been incredible.

Pharmacy professionals are leading the charge in using both SwipeRx in general and the CPD feature in particular— some of our power users are our biggest ambassadors—and we’ve already seen official recognition: SwipeRx’s CPD is the only portal accredited by the Professional Regulation Committee (PRC) in the Philippines.

As Tan herself said, “SwipeRx has this CPD feature where you just read, understand, and answer questions, and if you pass, tada, you have your units. For free. You just need to put in the time.”

I share mClinica’s experience with SwipeRx’s CPD of course out of pride in what my team has achieved in just a few short months since the feature’s launch, but also because I want other founders in the Philippines to achieve the same.

Spending so much time on something as abstract as understanding and relationship-building with your end-users can seem like a chore, especially when you have so many pressing tasks to complete, but it is what will ultimately drive the greatest growth of your product.

For when you’re listening to your end-users, and I mean truly listening to their needs, wants, and pain points, you can transform yourself from a company delivering a product to a collaborator in innovation. —CONTRIBUTED