Cedar Co-Founder on Building Industry-Disrupting Healthcare Products

We recently sat down with Cedar Co-Founder, Arel Lidow, to discuss what goes into building an industry-disrupting healthcare product. It’s a great conversation for anyone who is building a product that is fighting against the status quo of a long-established industry.

If you’re interested in hearing the entire conversation with Cedar Co-Founder Arel Lidow on industry-disrupting healthcare products you can listen to the full episode of Product Talk above. You can also catch the highlights of the episode detailed below.

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On where the mission for Cedar began

Great companies start with one great idea and then grow from there to expand past a product and into a business.

“When we first started out, like most companies, you’re extremely narrowly focused on solving the one very micro problem. So for us, it was figure out how we can basically replace paper statements with a much better process after a patient has had a visit. Today, if you look at what Cedar does, we still do that. That’s the core of our business. But we’ve now expanded our vision.”

On their competition being the industry itself

While their focus is on creating a better user experience for their customers, it’s the industry itself that they need to work with (or against) to drive change and build an industry-disrupting healthcare product.

“In healthcare, the biggest competitor for us is really the status quo way of doing things. Most healthcare providers, they are pretty late adopters. They just went through this massive shift where they had to move over from recording all their health records on paper to actually using software and technology to record all their health records. So it literally just happened in the last 20 years. Many health systems are still in that process. 

For us, it’s really about figuring out how we work alongside those existing systems that have a lot of that sort of capabilities and are sort of the legacy systems used for all interaction with patients. How do we kind of complement what they do and overlay that without changing the core process inside these systems and that our clients use internally?

On what makes a great product

One fact remains true whether you’re building industry-disrupting healthcare products or any product.

“There’s an infinite number of adjectives that would describe a great product or a bad product. But I think there’s one thing that probably stands above all of them. And that’s whether a product is actually adopted and used.”

On what makes a great product manager

According to Arel, great product managers know how to get their team to buy into a product or mission.

“Product managers need to influence others without having direct control. That’s extremely challenging to do. It’s probably the hardest thing that great product managers do well, is they find ways to get others really excited.”