Building Eliza’s design partner program from scratch
Before we had a product - we had design partners.
Recruiting:
Eliza started with hundreds of interviews of experts, users, and customers. During those interviews I began recruiting therapists to join our design partner panel. Partners recruited were:
Solo practitioners who had a few years of work experience.
Worked primarily with adults.
LMFTs focused individual counseling in general practice areas (instead of specialized practice areas like addiction or trauma).
The objective was to “sell” our partners on the relationship - not the product. Something I said often was “we don’t have a solution yet, but we agree on the problem. Our first step is building a solution entirely around YOU.”
Partners could lean in gradually. We often had 3-4 conversations before a design partner joined.
Recruiting was the hardest part of this process. Therapists are skeptical of technology and AI. It took hundreds of conversations to identify good candidates, and even more conversations to get those candidates on board. To retain partners we":
Offered flexibility and agency. It was easy to let our partners tell us how much time they were willing to commit, how they preferred to engage and what their worries are so that we could meet them where they were at.
Provided fair compensation. These professionals were giving up billable hours to further our project. We offered advisor equity and reasonable hourly rates to offset that cost.
Program Structure
Our relationship was encoded in an advisor agreement, and (mostly) compensated with advisor equity.
We met on a regular bi-weekly cadence, shared our product roadmap with partners, and sent out release notes for each new iteration of the product.
Bi-weekly design partner feedback cycles were timed to production cycles.
Feedback notes were compiled and shared in research & engineering slack channels and updated in a running research journal that the entire team had access to.
Our Services
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