On his blog Both Sides of the Table, Mark Suster of GRP Partners provides some of the best advice for startups, including his series on sales and marketing. Although written for high-tech startups, Suster’s advice is readily applied to medical device companies. His recent post on managing your sales pipeline is truly insightful. Enjoy it here!
Henry Laurence Gantt (1861 - 1919) Image via Wikipedia
Is there a medical device company anywhere that doesn’t use Microsoft Project to manage product development projects? After all, it’s a time-tested, incredibly powerful Gantt-charting tool, and it plays nicely with Microsoft Office. What’s not to like?
Okay, maybe I have a few pet peeves:
Project management is much more than just a Gantt chart. I want tools to help manage shared files, calendars, bug/issue-tracking, and assignable tasks.
Distributed teams need to be able to access and update the project plan in real time from anywhere. Sharing mpp files via email is a recipe for version conflict. And who wants to shell out for a copy of MS Project for everyone on the team?
Too many times I’ve seen MS projects enter the land of tangled task links, where timelines in project plans no longer make any sense. Too many times, project planning meetings screech to a halt so distraught project managers can run off and burn several hours untangling links and rearranging tasks.
I could go on. So I’ve been looking for a better solution for years, and I’m starting to see signs of life beyond MS project.
Kaiser Health News and NPR yesterday reported on an important US healthcare trend: Hospitals Lure Doctors Away From Private Practice. A dramatic shift from practice-owning physicians to salaried, hospital-employed physicians, could create an equally dramatic shift in medical device market opportunities.
The confluence of cheap computing power, cheap memory, and cheap bandwidth has fueled the emergence of web 2.0 companies like Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and foursquare. Because software-based-products are inherently extensible and mutable, these web 2.0 startups have rethought the concept of the product lifecycle, enabling their web-based products to evolve new capabilities monthly, weekly or even daily. (Contrast that to the less-than-annual releases of Microsoft Office.)
In turn, this rethinking of the product lifecycle has spurred dramatic changes to the way these companies and products are formed, financed, and managed. The term Lean Startup captures the philosophy and practices of this new way of thinking. Despite the relative immutability and non-extensibility of most medical devices, we can find ways to apply Lean Startup concepts to medical device startups. In a previous post, I discussed the Lean Startup concept of Product/Market fit in the context of medical devices. Now that we have defined Product/Market fit, the question is “how do we get there?”
If you think that follow-on funding from your venture backers is guaranteed because they reserved additional funds for your investment, think again.
Recently, Fred Destin of Atlas Ventures warns that normal venture fund practices will favor some portfolio companies and negatively impact others. Check out his blog post here.
You can’t help but be moved by the plight of the patients in Saturday’s NY Times article “New Drugs Stir Debate on Rules of Clinical Trials.” The article caused me to reflect on my role, as a medical device executive, in the design of clinical trials. The story presents the ethical challenges of a randomized controlled clinical trial (RCT) of a new drug, through the story of two patients in the trial. The same challenges faced by drug trials also apply to medical device trials. What are some of the issues and what are some of the options?
In case you missed it, on Monday 13 September 2010, the Archives of Internal Medicine reported that highly-paid physician-consultants to medical device companies did not disclose device company relationships in peer-reviewed journal articles. In New York Times coverage,”Representatives from Stryker, Zimmer and DePuy had no immediate comment on Monday.”
Yesterday, Consumers Union published quality rankings of 221 of 1,100 cardiac surgery programs in the US. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read the New England Journal of Medicine and New York Times coverage. The underlying data come from a clinical registry developed by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, and managed by Duke Clinical Research Institute. I expect to see registries used more commonly for the clinical, regulatory and market development of new medical devices.
My friend and serial CEO Dan McNulty encouraged me to write about stock options. My experience is that stock options encourage employees to “think like an owner. ” I have always found that my colleagues are motivated by the potential of their options, and are interested in the drivers of their stock’s valuation. So it’s an important subject and I appreciate Dan’s suggesting it.
Stock options are a subject that has been extremely well covered on the web, particularly by VentureHacks and Mark Suster of GRP Partners. So, in this post, I’ll mostly point you to other blog posts. Read them. I’ll also try to provide some helpful information specific to medical device companies, and share a couple of thoughts from my experience.
Jay Caplan on Medical Devices 