Steering a startup through a pandemic

Alan Pooley comes from a tech background with a successful career that includes working for Apple, managing the iPhone, iPad, and iOS pre-release roll-out, to the main carriers in France, Russia, and Israel. He also holds an MBA focusing on Applying Agile in the Gig Economy and has completed the King’s20 Accelerator programme from the Entrepreneurship Institute.

Through a Greenwich university networking event, Alan met Oslr co-founders, Dr Tom Simpson Consultant Physician in Respiratory and General Medicine with an MA in Clinical Education, and Dr Adam Pennycuick a Registrar in Oncology, Doctor of Philosophy, and software developer.

Together, they developed a cross-platform application to help create connections within the clinical setting between students and consultants and other experienced, practising clinicians. The platform works by making it easy to find students and teachers, arrange the sessions, and enhance teaching with online learning resources. It also helps doctors easily collect feedback for their portfolios.

BMJ’s corporate investment funding initiative BMJ New Ventures provided input at the prototype stage of Oslr’s journey. What did you gain from this?

“BMJ gave us expertise and guidance, which continues to serve us today. They told us, ‘if you deliver medical education from that platform at that precise moment, then you have the most accurate route to market possible that you could ever have.’ This was encouraging because it gave us the confidence that it was very probable that what we were developing would be a success.

Our biggest takeaway was BMJ’s excellent Agile approach to product development. The impact of that insight remains. Still today, we model our working ethos against the clearly defined frameworks that we learnt from BMJ. Everything we develop has our customer at the core, and we refine our product based on their needs. 

Five years later, I can say that this way of working is an essential factor in our sustainable business success. Our focus always comes back to having the end-user in mind and what is the impact. Obviously, the pandemic had a significant impact – covid-19 has created a deficit for medical education, and the effects on medical students will be far-reaching.

In March 2020, students were told to go home, so we were naturally alarmed when our usage flatlined that summer. But we resurfaced simply by taking the same agile approach that has continuously served us so well from the start.

What are your top tips for managing change in a company?

“Start with your customer: build user persona profiles and stories, only then consider what technology you can use to make his/life more manageable.”

Managing change within a company can be difficult, but the key is bringing staff along with you. They need to be engaged in what you are all trying to do and share the same values – something I refer to as brand citizenship. If staff go out of their way to build the brand, you have an engaged and loyal workforce.

Also, speak to your customers and build networks through peers to learn about needs and challenges. That way, you can develop concepts and the right resolutions to meet those needs.”