- Send an email to the person 2 days before their appointment
- Text them the morning of their appointment
- Build something into the CRM of the front desk that reminds them to call people the day before an appointment
- send a pre-generated google directions result to the patient N minutes before the appointment
I could go on for hours here. The job of a developer, at least in the startup world, is to understand the objective of their team and contribute to figuring out ways to reach their objective. It is not just to code up tickets that are put in front of them.
Interesting that this often doesn’t go both ways, in startup culture. I mean in terms of the non technical team members picking up enough technical skill to better understand the technical side.
But I, as an engineer, don't know accounting, or how to setup a healthcare plan, or the intricacies of VC funding documents, etc. Thinking about how people use what you are building and how to make it better seems like table stakes for engineers in the startup world.
Thinking about the product and users is the job of engineers. So is coding a solution. And so is not coding a solution when there is a better option.
I guess if you get to a later stage startup, where you are working on very specific technical problems, you might be forgiven if you don't know what it means to the larger organization, but I can't imagine working in that environment and being happy. A fancy algorithm is cool I guess, but if I don't know how it's moving the business forward it's basically meaningless to me.
I would imagine the Objective is something like "Maximize the number of people we can help at our clinic". And a key result would be "The number of no-shows for appointments is below 5%".
It then follows that the product development teams (product and engineers) would get together and say something like "Great, we can think up 14 projects that might help us reduce the number of no shows. Here they are in order of easiest and/or highest likelihood to succeed to hardest and/or least likely to succeed".
- Send an email to the person 2 days before their appointment
- Text them the morning of their appointment
- Build something into the CRM of the front desk that reminds them to call people the day before an appointment
- send a pre-generated google directions result to the patient N minutes before the appointment
I could go on for hours here. The job of a developer, at least in the startup world, is to understand the objective of their team and contribute to figuring out ways to reach their objective. It is not just to code up tickets that are put in front of them.