During this time of pandemic business shift, perhaps we’ve all become a little too familiar with web-conferencing platforms.
We slide from call-to-call, but there is a strong reality when you hit that button… “End Meeting For All.” The reality is that you and your teammates are now left alone to pursue your commitments, and this, very likely, takes place in make-shift, basement dwellings that have become our work bubbles of solitude.
As a longtime leader of geographically diverse software teams, this is actually a comfortable familiarity for me and my teams. Our tools in the software development world were designed for complex and remote collaboration. However, there are key drivers to successful product launches that go much further beyond our ability to write code. Many times, we can tend to think of the code and the process as our job when, in fact, the product and its users should be our passion.
This mantra of putting users squarely in mind is nothing new to those of us using modern development methodologies. Everything we do is driven as User Stories. However, what is unique (and frankly, most exciting to me) about the Preview Shoulder project at Genesis Software Innovations is that we work alongside a design team of world-class, fellowship-trained, orthopedic surgeons in every development effort, which is led by our Medical Director, our Software Director, and a core team of implant design specialists.
GSI is not a collection of software developers thinking about what “surgeons might do or appreciate” while we sit in our basements (ok, we might be). This is a hand-in-hand effort with surgeons who have experience and expertise that only comes from thousands of hours in the OR.
As a team, we have a priceless opportunity to bring our diverse talents together and pursue critical, and “if we could only do x”, features. We think through patient and surgeon problems together and push-back the temptation to fall into cycles where we are looking for solutions for the sake of the technologies available.
This is a collaboration that has a goal to improve outcomes for patients and improve the lives of our surgeons by putting them back in control. To give the surgeon the ability to plan with flexibility and efficiency because we are quickly coming back to a world where there is a growing backlog of patients waiting for life-altering surgery.
So, as a GSI software and surgeon design team, we summon the courage. We put on our headphones and click on the “Join Call” button. It’s who we are, and we look forward to the coming day when we can sit face-to-face with each other again as a product design team. In turn, we anticipate the day when happy patients are sitting across from those same surgeons because we pushed through the unknown together.
