Leader Spotlight: Turning failure points into great user experiences with Manash Bhattacharjee
Manash is a Digital Commerce, Fintech, and Healthcare Tech Executive passionate about building 0-1 products. He has scaled global teams (20x), driven multi-billion-dollar growth, and built a lean, OKR-driven product culture. In his current role as GM of HSA and Digital (Mobile, Web, Investment) products at HealthEquity, he is advancing the organization’s mission to empower working Americans and make HSAs more common than 401(k)s by 2030.
Previously, Manash built enterprise SaaS at Oracle, led fintech innovation at Thomson Reuters, drove digital payments at Mastercard, and accelerated D2C/eCommerce at PepsiCo. He is also an industry speaker, inventor, author, and early-stage investor.
In our conversation, Manash talks about using technology with data visibility to monitor and process points of failures quickly. He discusses how he works to merge healthcare compliance with intuitive user experiences, as well as how short-term wins in a product can turn into long-term solutions.
A digital-first strategy to connect data
You've led digital transformations in a variety of verticals — consumer goods, financial services, and now healthcare. What are some common principles you apply, regardless of industry, when driving digital-first strategies?
Digital and consumer-first strategies are inherently linked. The primary principle I emphasize for digital strategy is ensuring consumer-centricity. This involves a laser focus on user needs and problems and moving beyond a minimum viable experience to deliver a minimum likable experience, at least in the initial phase. In essence, digital channels raise the bar for consumer experience.
Technology organizations often adopt a scrappy approach, favoring rapid testing and learning. They tend to launch a basic product and then iterate based on user feedback. While this approach has its merits, today’s consumers expect polished experiences from the outset, shaped by the high standards set by platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and various social media sites.
Is it easier to scale from a minimum likeable product, or MLP, vs. an MVP?
The answer depends on the objective. An MVP is suitable for experimenting in unfamiliar areas, allowing for initial insights into strategy, user experience, and research. This is particularly relevant for areas outside the organization's or ecosystem's core expertise.
However, when addressing consumer experience in core or related domains, an MLP is crucial. Failing to meet this benchmark can hinder initial data acquisition, which is essential for effective testing and learning.
Part of delivering exceptional experiences is determining and addressing failure points for products. Do you approach this differently in healthcare than you might in other verticals?
Yes — failure points often vary by vertical, and I've worked in many environments with multiple different failure points. For instance, at Pepsi, I helped develop a direct store distribution (DSD) network connected to Amazon. This involved mapping numerous connection points and potential failures across different systems and organizations. By using APIs and ensuring data visibility, we could effectively monitor and respond to these failures.
The healthcare industry presents unique challenges due to its complexity and the fragmented nature of data. It’s a huge industry — it makes up around 24 percent of the U.S. GDP, close to $4 trillion. Healthcare is especially complicated because data is often not shared among the three main ecosystem participants: payer, provider, and consumer.
With data often siloed across payers, providers, and consumers, identifying and resolving failure points becomes significantly more difficult. For example, a consumer needing an X-ray may struggle to find the right provider due to this data fragmentation. At HealthEquity, we aim to address these pain points by employing a digital-first strategy to connect this disparate data.
Turning short-term wins into long-term solutions
When you identify failure points, how do you determine which to prioritize and address first?
To prioritize failure points, we establish comprehensive monitoring capabilities. This involves mapping the end-to-end process and identifying all touchpoints, defining good and bad use cases for each touchpoint, and implementing monitoring systems with flags and triggers for bad use cases. The core principle is to react swiftly to failures. We develop processes and leverage technology to enable rapid response and recovery.
Highly regulated industries like healthcare and fintech face unique challenges. In fintech, fraud is a significant concern. The industry has made strides in real-time fraud detection, such as identifying suspicious card transactions. This involves employing various monitoring mechanisms and triggers across issuers and processors to promptly flag potential fraud, determine responsibility, and initiate swift action. We also track these incidents to identify trends and improve our response strategies.
While immediate action is crucial for critical failures like fraud, less urgent issues require a balanced approach. For instance, when addressing transaction errors, a short-term solution might involve asking the consumer to verify the transaction. However, the long-term solution lies in building sophisticated, risk-based decision systems and technology infrastructure to detect fraud without direct consumer input.
At HealthEquity, we prioritize this approach: using short-term wins, such as an MLP, to address immediate needs, and then leveraging data to develop more robust, long-term solutions for our members, with a focus on a seamless digital and mobile experience.
Marrying compliance with consumer experience
You mentioned earlier that, especially in healthcare, data is often siloed. How do you work around that challenge?
We address this challenge through partnerships and technology. We obtain data directly from our partners, with user and employee consent (e.g., medical healthcare expenses). This enables us to streamline processes like expense reimbursement. When direct data acquisition is not feasible (e.g., from insurance carriers), we provide features like mobile receipt scanning with AI-powered data extraction to our members/consumers to simplify the process of data ingestion required for the reimbursement process.
Our mobile and web experiences are designed with robust security measures to comply with healthcare data regulations. This involves rigorous security reviews for every new feature. For example, our recent mobile app redesign involved significant investment to enhance the member experience while adhering to evolving data and compliance requirements. This often necessitates multiple iterations to achieve the optimal balance between user experience and regulatory compliance.
The role of innovation in strategy
You've also filed over 40 patents throughout your career. What role does IP play in your strategic planning?
Intellectual property is crucial to strategic planning. Organizations with strong IP are typically forward-thinking, focused on developing unique experiences, technology, and standards that benefit both consumers and the organization by providing a competitive edge.
I see IP serving three key roles:
Driving innovation — IP inherently requires novelty, fostering a culture of innovation within the organization
Strategic advantage — IP can be strategically leveraged to build capabilities that create a competitive advantage
Differentiation — IP helps establish a "moat" around these capabilities, differentiating the organization in the market
Personally, I find great satisfaction in generating new ideas and seeing them come to fruition.
Can you share a patent or innovative idea that you’re especially proud of?
A lot of my patents are in the payments ecosystem. I built quite a few related to consumer experience. One that also relates to healthcare needs was developed to help people who have allergies. When you enter a restaurant, the server asks you if you have any allergies or dietary restrictions. One of the patents I built was a way to incorporate those things into a digital wallet. The mobile system could talk to the POS or ordering systems in the restaurant to transfer that allergy information while also providing loyalty information for the customer. I haven't seen this idea go live yet, but it may have huge potential.