Leader Spotlight: How improv comedy influences product management, with Kevin Erdner

Kevin Erdner is Senior Director of Product Management at Labcorp, a lab diagnostics and drug development company. After starting his career in the media industry, he kicked off his product management journey as a senior applications analyst at West Penn Allegheny Health System. From there, Kevin transitioned to a product owner/product business analyst role at Philips Healthcare, where he worked for over a decade. He served as a senior global product manager at Philips before his current role at Labcorp.

In our conversation, Kevin talks about how improv comedy taught him valuable lessons about product management, including adopting a “yes, and” culture and the importance of starting with small ideas. He also shares how to balance innovation with regulations in the healthcare industry.

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Shifting from the media industry to healthcare

Your career started in the media industry before you decided to begin your journey in healthcare. What factors drove you to transition to such a drastically different industry?

I started my career in media and saw a lot of success there. I learned a lot and had a software development job doing amazing, innovative things. We were pushing the envelope and our company was industry leading. I would say that the consultant, Simon Sinek, put it best — "knowing your why." When I woke up every morning, I’d ask, "Am I contributing to society in a way that I want to?" A lot of people got a lot of enjoyment out of TV and the shows we were helping with, but to me, it wasn't fulfilling enough.

So, I looked around and said, "What is my true passion and how can I fuel it?” I realized that my passion lies in solving real problems and being innovative, while doing that in a way and for people who really need it. Healthcare was the natural answer. I've never looked back and I feel it every day. I come to work knowing that there's a patient who needs help. They're at the end of everything that I do, and that drives me.

How did you adapt your approach to product strategy after making this leap?

Healthcare is quite different from the media industry. For one, it has a lot of compliance and regulations. There were a few regulations in cable TV, but not nearly to this extent. That was a big shift, and those are all table stakes. You have to adhere to those regulations, which are all there for a good reason.

In terms of KPIs, the media industry focuses on engagement-driven metrics. Healthcare centers more around outcome-driven metrics. Also, in the media industry, we’d look at how long someone uses a product, but it wasn’t to the extent of social media apps where you want eyes on the product as long as possible. In healthcare, however, that is not the case at all — I want that number to go down. It’s not because we don't want people to use it, but we want to be as efficient as possible so those doctors, nurses, and physicians can get back to doing what they do best, which is providing patient care.

There was also a big shift for me in terms of integrations. In healthcare, there are so many different systems we connect to. The market composition was a big one too. In the cable industry, there are only a few players, but they're all very large corporations. In healthcare, we have large corporations, as well as medium-sized health plans and practices, and small companies too. They all have the same goal in mind, but they reach it in different ways.

Are there any specific lessons that you learned from your time working in the media industry that you apply to your current role?

The first that comes to mind is the need to get out of the office to avoid inside-out thinking. When I was in the media industry, we had a very large enterprise-wide solution, which was great. But it also gave us a lot of opportunity to say, "Wouldn't it be cool if it did this?” Yeah, it would be cool, but what problem is it solving? At times, we didn't ask ourselves that second question enough. We just thought that if something would be a neat addition, we should pursue it. But that wasn’t reality — we weren’t users.

So, we had to get out of the office and do that research ourselves. When I first started there, I needed to take some time before I could get out and visit a customer. We were doing a lot of this inside-out thinking and created a new feature. We thought it was great. We loved it. When we went to show the customer, our expectations were high, but they looked at us and said, "Why'd you do that? We would never use it."

They scolded us on how they do their job and why that idea was actually quite bad. My coworker and I looked at each other and later asked, “How much time did we just waste creating this and making an assumption that they would use it?” That was a huge career lesson for me — avoid that inside-out thinking and get out of the office, no matter how much experience you have and how long you've been in the industry.

You mentioned the move to focusing on regulatory compliance and shifting from engagement metrics to new expectations in the healthcare space. Can you talk about how you managed that shift in terms of how you prioritize features?

The number one thing is to always put the patient at the center of priorities. It sounds obvious, but you can never say it too many times. Make sure you understand the regulations and have good people on staff to assist you. It gets challenging when you’re in a situation where a client is asking for something that you want to prioritize, but there’s a new regulation around it. What do you do? There are different ways to satisfy the regulation, but we have to navigate meeting that standard while also being efficient, not burning out the user, and developing it promptly.

Sometimes, people say, "Regulations are on the right and adding value to the software is on the left," but that's not how I see it. Adhering to regulations is a must-have, but how can we implement a solution that adheres to it while also adding user value? From a marketing standpoint, this will matter, too. You can turn this into a positive and position your product to be a leader in regulatory compliance and patient safety.

In fact, I’ve done that in previous roles. I distinctly remember being at a conference in Europe and a customer coming up to me and saying, "I trust you. I trust your product because you all take a very serious look at compliance.” That made me feel good.

Viewing improv comedy as innovation

What specific strategies or exercises have you implemented to encourage creativity and out-of-the-box thinking?

Eight or nine years ago, I got involved in improv comedy. I actually saw an improv actor at a business analyst conference I attended. They mentioned how skills from improv can apply to business analysis, and that stuck with me. A while later, I decided to take my first improv class and see if I liked it or not. Eight years later, I'm still highly involved in the improv community.

In doing comedy, we improvise, which is a form of innovation. We may ask the audience at the beginning of the show for a one-word suggestion and then we take that one word and we'll create 20 or 30 minutes of funny entertainment based on that one word. That's raw innovation. How come we can do that on stage but have such a hard time doing it in the office? I did a lot of thinking and research on that. I have a master's in leadership, so it actually falls right into my wheelhouse.

I came to realize that we're challenged with doing it in the office because of culture. The culture we have on stage is absolutely amazing. With my improv troupe, we have such trust in everyone else. It's very open, honest, and accepting. We live by a principle in improv called "yes, and" where you accept what someone says to you and then you add to it. I thought, “What if we did that in the office?” When we’re trying to solve a problem, someone says, “Hey, here's my idea,” and I say “yes, and?” Then, we build upon it to come to a solution.

I try to instill that with my team to encourage that out-of-the-box thinking. I want to create that safe space where you know that your ideas are going to be heard and no one's going to put you down, even if it’s a bad one!

In talking about the improv culture, you mentioned the need for a safe space and how you're bringing that into the office. Are there other learnings from improv that you're bringing into your team?

Definitely. There's a saying we use in improv — "Bring a brick, not a cathedral." In an improv scene, you don’t just walk out and say, “Well, the sun is shining today. I'm about to get sunburned. My dog left me, my wife just ran away, I broke my leg, and I can't believe that I'm here." That's a lot of information! So, we say, "Just bring one thing." Just walk out and start with one thing, then build on it.

When you're trying to solve a problem, by nature, people will want to come and have that big idea. There's a pressure we put on ourselves to solve that big problem and prove our worth. But that blocks people from being innovative. It constricts you into thinking that your small ideas aren’t enough so you shouldn’t say them.

That’s why I tell people to bring a brick, not a cathedral. I don’t want there to be pressure to only present your big ideas. Come out and say the first thing on your mind. Because when you give that small piece, that's going to get somebody else thinking. They're going to add a small piece and someone else is going to add a small piece, and before you know it, you have a big solution for the problem.

Prioritization and managing disruption

How do you balance fostering a fun and creative environment with ensuring that your team meets its end goals and delivers products on time?

It's such a myth that a team that's having fun doesn't deliver products on time or doesn't get the job done. Usually, when people are having fun, they're performing well. Why would you want to stop that? With my team, I always like to remind us why we're here. We're here for the patient. The patient is at the center of everything we do. I like to tell everyone to foster that environment at the same time and be a bit more lighthearted.

As a very extreme example of this, I’ve asked people, “Have you ever laughed at a funeral?” And most people will smile and say, "Well, yeah, I did." A funeral is obviously a very serious, sad event, but someone broke that ice to make you laugh. You coped with it a little bit in a hard time. So when we're facing a very serious problem that we need to solve, don't be afraid to be human and don't be afraid to laugh. Understand why you're here and what drives you.

This is probably no surprise, but I crack jokes in serious meetings. Everyone laughs, and you can see people take a breath. Pressure comes down, and everyone performs better. We're not all tight anymore. It's still an important problem that we have to solve, but now we’re relaxing about it a little bit more. Just like a team losing the game by a couple points, they're having fun. They're serious, but they’re having a good time doing what they love.

Lastly, in your LinkedIn profile, you list ‘disruptive change’ as one of your specialties. What do you think constitutes this type of change in the healthcare industry and how are you empowering your team to embrace it, especially as technology evolves so rapidly?

There are lots of trends and opportunities for us in healthcare. Things like lowering costs are a disruption, for example. Same with increased accessibility and patient-centric models that empower patients with more control of their data. Scheduling treatment plans, value-based healthcare, and this transition from fee-for-service to outcomes-based reimbursement are also great examples.

The elephant in the room here is AI. AI is such an amazing tool. It's everywhere. Customers come to us and ask, "What are you doing with AI?" I find that fascinating. The marketing around AI is phenomenal. There is so much push for it that customers are asking for it. But back to good solid product management practices, we need to make sure that there's a real problem out there that we're solving with AI and that problem is worth solving.

With my team, I want to make sure they’re staying educated with AI so they know what it is, what it is not, and what it can do. What are the ethical concerns with it? Are we keeping those in mind? That could really cause a disruptive change. Things like AI-powered coding and billing, for instance, would be super powerful. It can help us get back to our core purpose, that we want our users to get back to their patients quicker. We want users to get back to what they do best.

I'm super excited for the problems that we can solve that we've never even dreamed we could solve before.