New industries, new innovations—women pioneers are everywhere. For this inspiring series, we’re asked our partner companies to submit one woman “Pathfinder” to represent their work, their products, their industry, or their values. (And often, all of the above.)
Meet Jennifer Pigott, Senior Product Manager, Health Insurance, at Gradient AI. She’s challenging the status quo in order to drive change in healthcare.
What path are you forging?
I am a woman lead product manager in health tech helping drive impact and solve problems in healthcare. Whether it's building solutions to alert providers to actionable patient care gaps, helping life sciences evaluate the effectiveness of their drugs/devices, or empowering payers to predict and manage costs for their insured groups and members, I always strive to build platforms and products that deliver the most value to customers and help drive meaningful change.
What inspired you to pursue this field?
As a pre-med and economics major, I was always both fascinated and frustrated by our healthcare system—particularly how the incentives of various stakeholders (providers, regulators, insurers, the medical supply chain, pharma, etc.) rarely aligned to reduce costs and improve outcomes. After graduating, I initially pursued a career in medicine—taking the MCAT, applying to medical schools, and working in the Emergency Department. However, seeing firsthand the outcomes and inefficiencies of a fee-for-service model, I realized early that I wanted to help change the system from the outside instead. I quickly pivoted and started interviewing at various health tech startups, eventually finding my way into a small but fast-growing company focused on improving care for underserved Medicaid, Medicare, and uninsured populations.
What’s a cool project or program you’ve developed as a result of your work in this area?
I’ve been lucky enough to work on so many cool, diverse projects throughout my career from helping build population health tools—like care gap alerting at the point of care, educational and health outcome dashboards, custom registries, and patient outreach initiatives—to leading data quality and de-identification programs for one of the largest U.S. health research platforms. And most recently, I’ve been helping drive the development of more advanced and intuitively designed tooling that leverages machine learning (ML) algorithms to help identify, manage, and predict overall health risk across insured groups and their members.
What resources or people have been influential in your success in your field?
Having the opportunity to interact with so many diverse teams and customers in an early startup environment was the single biggest factor in helping me learn everything from the healthcare industry itself, programming, team dynamics, product strategy, to system architecture. For instance, I was able to brainstorm regularly with the chief data architect (one of the smartest people I have ever met) and engage daily with customers on the ground to understand their unique pain points and explore improvement ideas. That hands-on experience in combination with juggling multiple responsibilities (that would ordinarily be divided into various positions within a larger company) was instrumental in my development. In later roles, I was also fortunate to be mentored by amazing product strategists who shared their learnings and approach from their experience working at the largest tech giants.
What advice would you give to aspiring professionals looking to break into and make an impact in emerging industries or technologies or at their company?
Always challenge the status quo. If you see a better way of doing something, take the initiative to make it happen. If decisions are being made without sufficient data, do your own research and share those insights with the team. If you have a great idea with potential business and customer value that isn’t being considered, create a detailed strategy and present it to decision makers. If something isn’t being executed well, take the time to provide clear and concise instructions or specifications early so that the path can be corrected. Don’t wait for others to follow through or to validate or prioritize your ideas—everyone is busy. If you see value in a project, take ownership, conduct thorough research, provide detailed documentation, influence others, listen to customers, learn from experts, and ask tough questions. Proactivity, ownership, and follow-through will lead to positive outcomes.
