ZOE Health Study

Head of Product (since 2020)

I currently lead the ZOE Health Study - where over 4.8mn people across the UK, US and Sweden have been using our app to contribute their data to COVID-19 science since the pandemic began. More recently, we have conducted large-scale studies on Intermittent Fasting, Stool Habits, Blood Pressure, Menopause and more! 

If you'd asked me before the pandemic what I thought my role might look like now, I couldn't even have dreamed up my current reality!

There is a saying that the Mandarin for "crisis" contains the character symbolising "opportunity" (which actually isn't technically true..!) but I certainly feel like my role at the ZOE Health Study has given me an incredible opportunity to use Product to make genuine real-world impact in a time of global crisis.

That real-world impact has manifested in all sorts of ways. Here are just a handful of examples:

• The ZOE COVID Study (previous name for the Health Study) got officially recognised on the government COVID-19 testing portal for national access to PCR tests - this gave much-needed test access to PCR tests for tens of thousands of people each week who displayed non-classical COVID-19 symptoms

• We collaborated with the UK Vaccine Taskforce to support the targeted recruitment of ZOE COVID Study users to vaccine trials - as a result, ZOE recruited significant numbers of participants to the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine trials and the Janssen vaccine trials (ZOE provided an estimated 20% of the total recruits)

• ZOE was the first globally to launch large-scale app-based vaccine monitoring in the real world - we've since accumulated over 1.4mn logged vaccines and provided the rapid source of high quantity + quality data that has produced multiple scientific papers in prestigious journals such as The Lancet Infectious Diseases e.g. here and here

• We launched a study on the interaction of diet and COVID-19 in the UK and US, which collected diet data from over 1.1mn people - making it the largest diet study in the world of its kind, and resulted in a scientific papers which has recently been accepted by Nature Food

• The ZOE COVID/Health Study is continually called on by media outlets all around the globe to provide COVID-19 insights to the public. Here are some recent examples from the BBC and Forbes.

My role within all this of course includes the typical responsibilities you see with a Head of Product - such as setting the app strategy and roadmap and overseeing new feature launches. But as a small startup within a startup (ZOE) where we are a lean team #SmallButMighty - what I do reaches well beyond those standard duties, extending to things like:

• Securing funding - I led the efforts which secured us a total of £5.1mn in grant funding from the UK Government

• Identifying, building and maintaining collaborations with external organisations and academic institutions (like King's College London who we work closely with)

• Communicating our scientific findings to the public via webinars and media appearances
• Making sure that our team is at the top of their game always - both through evolving ways of working and ensuring diversity of background and thought

Check out the ZOE Health Study

Babylon Health

AI Product Manager (2018 - 2020)

Babylon Health was where I started my Product Management career.

Babylon had many arms to it - such as AI Symptom Checking, Virtual GP Consultations, Digital Twin and more - and that breadth provided the perfect basis for starting out in Product Management. My time there turned out to be a colourful mosaic of different product experiences that both helped me set a strong Product foundation and figure out what I enjoyed most in Product...

Upon joining Babylon, I was set to work first on Babylon's User Graph - this was essentially the system that Babylon used to store all the knowledge it had on each of its patients using a standardised language for medical concepts (see more in my blog). When you have that much knowledge on each patient's health, you have a lot of power to help them individually and improve their experience in your app.

For example, if a patient told a Babylon GP a few months ago about their family history of disease and other risk factors, the User Graph could "remember" it and then apply it next time that same patient asks Babylon AI to check her symptoms, or the next time a doctor tries to give her a diagnosis, or even visualise that knowledge on her 3D Digital Twin. Knowledge really is power and there were a whole lot of potential applications of Babylon's User Graph - I spent my first 6 months creating prototypes for these.

I then became the Product Manager for Applied Machine Learning at Babylon. Our team's challenge was to help the Babylon machine understand human intentions better.

This was a hard task for many reasons:

• The flipside of Babylon having so many arms was that people would approach the app with a lot of different intentions!
• The primary machine-user interface for this at the time involved free text - and unstructured data poses its own set of problems (see my blog here)
• Failure is not well-tolerated in a medical device (but all AI systems have some level of unpredictability in them!)

We came close but our initial product - the Intent Recogniser - didn't make it to launch (get in touch if you want to hear my learnings from this first product failure!)

But our team was resilient and we quickly created an alternative, more fail-safe option - the Symptom Selector - which is still used in the app today by Babylon's 4 million users.

My final stretch at Babylon had me creating a new type of offering - the Pre-Consultation Flow - designed to automate the gathering of relevant health information from patients just before their virtual consultation and then sharing that with the clinician to save 10% of appointment time.

Whilst those previous experiences had some level of coordination with other product teams, this project took cross-functional working (an essential part of being a successful PM) to the next level - I aligned 5 product teams spread over 3 departments behind the singular mission to successfully deliver the Pre-Consultation Flow.

Check out Babylon Health

Ernst & Young (EY)

Strategy Consultant (2014 - 2018)

Fresh out of university, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, only that I was curious to explore the world of business that was very new to me at the time.

So I went into consulting at EY where I spent 4 years understanding how to improve businesses, their tooling and the services that they offer to their customers.

Over the course of many projects in wide-ranging industries like healthcare, oil & gas and social enterprise, I honed a couple of skills that turned out to be invaluable to me as now in Product Management: how to solve complex problems in a structued way, managing challenging stakeholders and compelling communication (that includes creating beautiful slide decks!)

But perhaps the most important thing that Strategy Consulting taught me was that I was aching to make real-world impact on people myself instead of offering advice on it from the sidelines. You could say I wanted to go from being an “Advisor” to being a “Builder”.

On top of that, I realised that I had a lot of creativity that I’d been itching to apply – I wanted to create truly novel solutions and cutting edge technology such as AI really excited me because I knew it could enable totally new solutions and experiences that wouldn’t be possible without AI.

Check out EY Strategy

University of Cambridge

Natural Sciences BA (2011 - 2014)

Gonville & Caius College

I focused on the Biological side of Natural Sciences as I've always found something irresistably fascinating about studying living things. 

In my final year, I specialised in Experimental Psychology as I really wanted to learn more about the intricacies of the mind - ranging from neuroscience to developmental psychology, from pathopsychology to psychophysics. 

My Interests

In contrast to the many hours I spend at my desk and on calls all day, I can't help being active whenever I have free time - figure skating, hiking, bouldering, dancing and singing in a bossa nova band!

I also love the arts - I play the piano (am DipABRSM performance diploma-certified!) and must have visited at least a few dozen art galleries in the past year alone!