MedicSana, Inc
“You know, we could start this company for real,” Alex said.
I was having a drink in downtown Austin with Alex Castillo, a classmate and project partner in Stanford’s Mobile Health without Borders online class. At the time, I was deliberating between a half-finished business school application and the advice of my frog design coworkers and mentors to “just start a company, you’ll learn more anyway.”
“Alright, Lets do it.”
The next couple of years, I would take on the role of MedicSana’s CEO as we raised seed capital, built a fantastic remote team, a product, and eventually exited though a buy-out from our Austin-based strategic investors. The project was not without its ups and downs, but it was an incredible learning experience for me.
It is the intent of this site to discuss the challenges and victories of the last couple of years.
Project: MedicSana
As a start-up co-founder, I’ve stretched my brain in ways I couldn’t imagine. This blog serves as my portfolio piece for the project. I’ve broken is down according to the various skill sets I’ve had the opportunity to develop.
This collection of articles doesn’t need to be read in any specific order, feel free to click around and only read the parts that are of interest to you.
Research
The core of everything we did at MedicSana was the manifestation of the research practice we developed early on in the company. I talk in a bit more detail about our Design Research Process in the early days with Latino immigrants living in Texas, and the MedicSana brand tenets and design principles that came out of them. Later on in the project, we were also able to gather a small Doctor Research Group in El Salvador and Mexico.
For more of my thoughts on design research, I’ve also been putting together a multi-part series about research process on my blog starting with DR 101: What is Design Research?
Brand
Check out my write up of our Brand Strategy for an overview of how our research manifested in crafting the tenets of our brand. On the Brand Artifacts page, I discuss in a little more detail how our team crafted elements like our name and logo.
Our brand tenets were the engine that kept the team on track, and we kept an evolving write-up on our internal wiki. I’ve copied our Brand Tenets Wiki Page over in full for reference.
App Design and Development
On the design side, I’ve also created a gallery page that talks in a little more detail about the UI design of the MedicSana App.
As a “Product Owner” on our development team, I worked closely day to day with our CIO Jonathan MacDonald to keep our scrum team running smoothly. I outline Our Experiences with Scrum, and in a three-part post, talk in a little bit more detail about I: Our Documentation Rules, II: Our Design Language System Documentation, and III: Our User Story Documentation. These articles are a little more in depth and assume a basic knowledge of what an agile development process is.
Other Interesting Things
One unexpected challenge was hiring for the company, so I’ve written about the Hiring Process we developed. Finally, I’ve learned a lot over the course of this adventure from reading, so I’ve also included My Reading List and a List of Tools that we’ve found useful as a 100% remote start-up.
More about Me
After graduating from the University of Kansas in 2011 with a degree in Industrial design, I joined frog design where I worked as a user experience designer for three years. After frog, I raising funding and rolled on to MedicSana as full-time CEO, designer, and scrum product owner. Since then, I’ve spent time working in China, Myanmar, and as a nomadic remote worker. I’m certified as a Product Owner (PSPO I) and Scrum Master (PSM I). My full work history is on my linkedin page, and you can see more of my work on my UX Portfolio.
In my free time, I read quite a bit about behavioral economics and on my blog, Knowledge in Society, I write about various topics that discuss the relationship between design research, behavioral economics, and entrepreneurship, including a multi-part introduction to design research. I also love photography, check out my photography portfolio here!