🐶 Dogfooding: walking the walk
JC's Newsletter #215
Dear friends,
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This post was inspired by Sebastien de Larquier at Alan and I thought it was interesting to reshare it.
At Alan, we don't just talk the talk – we walk the walk.
Dogfooding is all about living our mission by using our own products and services.
It's not just about testing; it's about genuinely benefiting from what we've built and understanding firsthand where improvements can be made.
Our mission at Alan to be your true health partner, preventing issues, providing insurance coverage, and caring for you daily.
💰 You had a claim? We’re reimbursing you fast.
👓 Need new glasses or contacts? We've got you covered.
🧘 Struggling with back pain from too much desk time? Check out our targeted back pain program.
💪 Looking to build a healthier workplace culture? We help companies organize wellness trainings and initiatives.
But all of this needs to work perfectly, and if it doesn’t work for you, it won’t work for our members. That’s where dogfooding comes in.
This is one of the reasons why I use the Alan app every day for my back pain exercises, for my mental health, and sometimes to explore new spaces.
I also use the admin part of the product once a week to see how useful it is for me in order to help steer the health and well-being of Alaners.
It is also crucial to create internal tools so that this feedback loop can enrich the essence of our product and allow everyone to act quickly. We also have what we call "Quick Wins Days" which help us to address all the minor issues in stride.
Let's all embrace our role as Alan's most engaged members. By dogfooding our products and services, we can continue innovating to build the best health offerings and a healthier humanity!
Some good articles I have read this week
👉Twitter Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas)
Many highly creative & productive people don’t enjoy & often avoid talking about, writing updates, and doing roadshows on what they’ve recently built because they are already thinking about what’s next and the dozen things that could still be improved & made awesome and they mistakenly assume that the impact of their work & unique contributions is obvious, not realizing that is very difficult for others in the company to link their unique insights & actions to impact because impact is often a lagging indicator that unfortunately gets tied to the most recent tactical actions rather than genius past moves due to the manner in which status updates, QBRs, and performance reviews are structured in almost every company.
➡️ Learn to communicate about your ideas ➡️ make it easy with voice to text
👉Twitter Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas)
As a PM, following recipes will only get you so far. Build your own approach for dealing with problem sand opportunities
👉How Does Bilt Rewards Make Money? Analyzing Its Business Model (Productmint)
Good deep dive on this interesting model on their rewards
They are smart about taking a cut everywhere
👉EssilorLuxottica to expand into the hearing solutions market with a new disruptive technology at the intersection of sight and sound (EssilorLuxottica)
Very interesting to see how the technology is evolving in the field and how it could impact us in terms of experience.
“pair hearing solutions and prescription glasses into one groundbreaking product”
Not shipped yet
👉The Rise of Open-Sourced R&D, How Communal Resourcefulness Will Protect Us, & Wild Data Provocations (implications.com)
Having taste and leveraging AI is our ultimate defence against being replaced by AI.
👉 Ambience Healthcare, which is building an AI operating system for healthcare, raised $70 million in Series B funding co-led by Kleiner Perkins and OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Optum Ventures and others.
👉Nvidia Jensen Huang: Speech at NTU graduation - 3 stories and 3 insights: Run vigorously towards your dreams (Rosy Arts Blog)
How NVIDIA preserved for a very long time before taking off!
“ endure the pain and suffering that is always needed to realize a vision”
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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!