Hired by the CEO of a home health and hospice workflow company that had no products, only bespoke customer builds. We productized the business into three, and cut the wait for a hospice patient’s pain medication from as much as eight hours to fifteen minutes.
Worldview built custom document management workflows for home health and hospice agencies. Good business, real customers, genuine domain expertise. But every new customer meant a brand-new workflow and a brand-new cloud setup, built by hand. Revenue scaled with headcount, which is another way of saying it did not scale.
There was no product function at all. The CEO and founder brought me in to productize what the company already knew how to do, and to build new products on top of it.
Over two years we shipped three products, stood up a ten-person product organization, integrated with the EMRs the industry actually runs on, and won the internal argument that let us build the flagship offshore for a third of the cost, six months early.
That is the one word for the product situation. Not broken, not chaotic. There was simply nothing to point at and call a product. The company sold expertise and delivered it one implementation at a time.
Sales could not sell a thing, they could only sell a promise to build a thing. Delivery started from scratch every time. And the customer-facing surface everyone actually touched was a front end to Hyland OnBase, an archaic desktop system every single customer disliked using.
A new workflow and a new cloud setup per account. Nothing carried forward.
No packaged offering, only live human demos, no pricing that held from one deal to the next.
A clunky legacy desktop front end that nobody would have chosen.
Picture a hospice patient at home who needs a tightly regulated pain medication. The nurse fills out the physician’s order on paper. A runner, an actual person in an actual car, drives over, collects the form, and drops it in the doctor’s inbox. The doctor signs it whenever they next come up for air. The runner drives it back to the pharmacy or the nurse. Then the patient gets relief.
That loop took anywhere from two to eight hours. For a patient in pain, that is the whole product problem, and no amount of document-management sophistication upstream fixed it.
The fix was to remove the car. Scan and upload the order from the nurse’s phone at the bedside, route it into a mobile-optimized signing portal, text and email the physician, let them sign on whatever device is in their hand, and return the signed order to the nurse automatically. Two to eight hours became ten to fifteen minutes, and the runner line item disappeared with it.
The company’s one-off solutions became a modular mobile app, a signing portal sold as its own SaaS product, and a modern front end for the legacy system customers were stuck with. Some customization still happened, because every agency differs, but sales finally had something to demo instead of something to promise.
Modules connected to the EMRs these agencies live in: Axxess, KanTime, and Home Care Home Base. Some of those relationships were integrations and some were partnerships, and telling the difference, then managing each accordingly, was a meaningful part of the job.
A modular app for nurses in the field, connected to the EMR.
The flagship. A mobile-optimized portal that gets a physician’s order signed in minutes.
A clean front end over the archaic Hyland OnBase desktop system every customer disliked.
The CEO was firmly against building anything overseas, and he had earned that position. A previous head of engineering had sent work offshore, it failed, and the company wrote off more than $150,000. Raising the idea again was not a technical conversation. It was a trust conversation.
So I made the case in the only terms that matter to a founder who has been burned: a side-by-side of what the eSign portal would cost and how long it would take to build with US salaried engineers, against a larger offshore team at roughly a third of the cost, delivering six months sooner. Then I owned the risk of it personally.
It shipped in six months, on time and under budget, avoiding more than $1.1M in build cost. That is money the company never had to spend, not a line item it removed.
the engineering cost, at US salaries
longer to a shippable product
for the same budget envelope
in build cost avoided
to launch, on time and under budget
within four months of release
Building the organization was half the mandate. I hired and led a five-person team of product managers, technical program managers, business analysts, R&D, and QA, alongside the design function.
The design system was not a nice-to-have. Three products shipped by three groups will drift into three brands unless something holds them together, and a company making its first move from services to product cannot afford to look like a collection of side projects. The system set the tone. The prototypes we built to pixel level signalled something narrower and more useful: that this team pays attention to detail, which is exactly what a healthcare buyer is checking for.
On compliance, we treated HIPAA as an architectural constraint rather than a checkbox at the end. Protected health information was encrypted in transit, the data layer was HIPAA-compliant by design, and messaging between field nurses, back office, and physicians ran inside that boundary rather than through consumer chat apps, which is how most of these conversations happened before.
On the eSign portal, the company’s first true zero-to-one SaaS product.
By building offshore at a third of US cost, delivered six months early.
Order turnaround cut from two to eight hours down to ten to fifteen minutes.
Mobile, SaaS, and a modernized legacy front end, built by a team that did not exist before.
Two pressures at once. The product was enterprise-grade software touching regulated clinical workflows, so it had to perform from the first day with no hiccups. And it was being built by an offshore team the CEO had not wanted, against his stated judgment, on my recommendation. A rough launch would not have read as a bug. It would have read as proof he was right.
Most of the effort went into making sure the offshore team understood the frameworks, the design system, and above all the why behind what we were building. What I would do differently is spend more time on site with them. Nothing replaces standing at a whiteboard with the engineers, which is the same lesson two weeks in Finland taught me at Benjamin, learned here the harder way.
Plenty of good companies are really services businesses wearing a software label. Every deal is a build, margins stay flat, and valuation follows margins. Productizing that is a specific skill: finding the repeatable core inside bespoke work, deciding what stays custom, and shipping something sales can actually demo.
The other half is doing it under regulation and at a cost that survives board scrutiny. Enterprise-grade products in healthcare, fintech, or anywhere compliance sets the floor have to be right on day one. Knowing where to spend and where to save, and being willing to put your own credibility behind that call, is what gets a first product out the door without betting the company on it.
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Results reflect work delivered as a product executive at Worldview. Figures are as reported at the time of the engagement.
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