CPO Rising Series: Optum Fmr CCO on Building Products That Work for 150 Million People

What does it take to build products that work for 150 million people in one of the most regulated industries in the world? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Optum Fmr Chief Consumer Officer Rita Khan will be speaking on how product leadership is transforming healthcare at scale. Rita shares why understanding the full stakeholder ecosystem matters more than quick UX wins, how she frames investment portfolios to earn executive trust quarter by quarter, and why she only hires “shapers” who refuse to accept the industry’s constraints as excuses for bad experiences.

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Show Notes:

1. Rita landed at Best Buy as the company’s second product manager ever, discovering a passion for the role that would shape her entire career. She describes it as the best job she’d ever had, built around a small agile team with real accountability for business outcomes.
2. The product function has evolved from being seen as a delivery organization to being recognized as a strategic one. Product leaders now sit at the executive table, feed into broader portfolio decisions, and increasingly step into P&L leadership roles.
3. The lines between business, product, and technology are merging into one function, and Rita finds that convergence genuinely exciting. It means product leaders can have more integrated impact across the entire organization rather than being siloed into one lane.
4. In healthcare, AI isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the single most important tool for unlocking the fragmented, siloed patient experience. AI makes it possible to create integrated, conversational experiences that follow a patient across finding care, scheduling, managing a condition, and post-care in ways that weren’t possible before.
5. Agentic solutions can start connecting healthcare data across previously siloed systems without requiring complex integrations. Something as basic as scheduling care, which has historically been an operational and data nightmare, becomes newly solvable when agents can take on the orchestration work.
6. Simple UX solutions can have serious unintended consequences in healthcare. Making it easier to message your provider sounds great until you realize providers are already burned out, and you’ve just added to their load. Understanding the full stakeholder ecosystem before building is essential.
7. Rita frames investment decisions as a transparent portfolio across three horizons: foundational work to keep the lights on, near-term improvements, and longer-term transformative bets. Making that visible to the business demystifies product spending and builds organizational trust.
8. Returning each quarter to say “your investment yielded this” is how Rita earns the next tranche of funding. Proving outcomes in terms the business understands, then asking for more, creates a virtuous cycle of trust and investment.
9. Her advice for new CPOs entering healthcare is to resist the urge to prove yourself quickly. Healthcare is regulated, human, and fragmented in ways that outsiders consistently underestimate, and oversimplifying it is the fastest way to hurt the very patients you’re there to help.
10. The patient’s needs come first, but caring for patients requires caring for providers. Rita sees patients, providers, and care teams as an ecosystem where you can’t afford to create a loser; if a product harms the provider’s ability to deliver care, it ultimately harms the patient.
11. CPO impact shows up in three measurable dimensions: cost efficiency through self-service reducing unnecessary call volume, NPS and loyalty driven by great digital experiences, and growth through increased adoption and client acquisition.
12. Rita’s AI adoption goal for her organization is 30% efficiency improvement by 2026. She frames it not as a cost reduction but as a capacity and quality play, the only way to tackle everything the organization needs to do within its investment constraints.
13. An AI enablement council that brings together experience, analytics, and engineering is how Rita coordinates AI adoption across functions. The goal is collective progress rather than siloed experimentation happening independently across teams.
14. Deciding what not to build comes down to rigorous value-based prioritization. With hundreds of millions of dollars in backlog requests across five business units, the discipline of asking what will have the biggest impact on the most people is what keeps the team focused.
15. “Not now” is a complete answer, as long as it comes with the reasoning. Rita has no problem saying it when the data supports it, and she uses product approval boards where stakeholders are part of the process so they never feel shut out.
16. At the scale of Optum, where a product needs to work for 150 million people, you can’t pilot forever. Sometimes the cost of scaling an innovative idea makes it impractical, and sometimes you need to build in-house because no partner can meet your requirements at that scale.
17. Great product managers are business-minded, technically proficient, and equally passionate about the end user. Rita looks for people who can see around corners and imagine what the future could look like rather than just optimizing what already exists.
18. Rita only hires shapers — people who want to write the story, not fit into it. In healthcare that means refusing to accept regulation or fragmentation as a valid excuse for a bad experience and always looking for the workaround.
19. Rita uses AI to run a personal board of directors: nine personas with perspectives completely opposite from her own, loaded into Google Gemini. When she brings questions to the board she gets adversarial viewpoints she wouldn’t have considered on her own, and the board even gives her homework and holds her accountable.
20. Rita’s career origin story is a reminder of what’s at stake in healthcare. As a 22-year-old at Target her manager told her “nobody’s dying because of your work.” Now she builds products where the implications directly affect whether real people get the care they need, and that weight shapes everything about how she works.