Despite facing challenges at his former roles as an associate at Ernst & Young and a product lead at a global tech company, Urim Choi would face the biggest one of his career at Eden Health.
As director of product management, Choi helped lead the healthcare provider startup through the release of its COVID-19 solutions this past year. His hard work paid off.
“Guiding the team through extreme ambiguity by balancing patience and decisiveness has been the most challenging set of problems I have had in my career thus far,” Choi said. “We really had to evaluate how we did discovery and scoping here at Eden.”
Choi isn’t alone in his growth experiences from the past year.
Lidia Shong, MANTL’s director of marketing, shared similar sentiments about her role leading the fintech company through its recent changes.
“This past year has been the most challenging and rewarding,” Shong said. “We had to pivot and adapt to ever-changing market conditions due to the pandemic. The biggest lessons I’ve learned through it all: stay true to your core values while focusing on flawless execution.”
As NYC tech continues to evolve, many local companies are seeking talented professionals to guide them through it. Ready to take the leap? Check out the opportunities at Eden Health, MANTL, plus five other companies below.
What they do: Available in more than 50 airports, stadiums and other venues, CLEAR offers a touchless entry and identification system.
Company culture in one word: “Obsessed. This stems from one of our core values, which is ‘obsessed with the customer experience,’” Clory Jackson, senior director of operations, said. “The obsession we have with making our members happy reverberates throughout our company. Every team and individual is perpetually preoccupied with optimizing or innovating experiences for ourselves internally and for our members. For example, we recently enhanced the identification experience using irises. Clear has always offered irises as an easy, touchless solution. We were so serious about making this experience even better that we created a cross-functional task force to think up and execute ideas. Creating pop-up, cross-functional teams to provide laser focus is something we do often at Clear.”
Coolest project Jackson has worked on: “I’ve recently been working with our training team to create a leadership development program for our operations organization. We’re developing all of the courses in-house and it’s given me exposure to virtually every single team in the company. I’ve learned so much about how people digest and use information differently. I’ve used these lessons to amp up my communication strategy for other projects. I’m better at consensus-building and helping teams keep up in evolving, fast-paced projects.”
What they do: Wix’s website creation platform includes templates and editor tools that help anyone launch a website for business or for fun. Since the company’s 2006 launch, more than 182 million people have used its services.
Company culture in one word: “Collaborative. Wix has an open culture and is a huge company,” said Daniella O’Donnell, a team lead for account management. “We have offices around the world and thousands of employees. Despite having so many different voices throughout our company, Wix leaders manage to make each person feel heard while genuinely wanting to hear everyone’s opinions and ideas. Wix is always open to trying new ideas and sometimes these ideas have even turned into new teams within our company. These teams are generated from our employees speaking up and sharing their ideas and Wix is giving us the power to test these new projects.”
O’Donnell’s growth at Wix: “When I joined Wix, the partners team was only a few months old. There were only four account managers and we were in the very early stages of creating this team. During this time I have been able to experience the incredible growth of our team and help develop a solid, more structured service offering. Today, the partners team has 20-plus account managers across six different teams. I have been given the opportunity to take what I have learned as an individual contributor and now manage one of these account management teams. Wix moves really fast, and it’s a pleasure to experience this growth with such a great group of people.”
What they do: Vise’s AI-powered asset management platform helps financial advisors automate investment management and customize portfolios based on portfolio analytics.
Company culture in one word: “Optimistic. There are so many good things I could say about Vise’s culture, but a new hire recently used this word to describe it, and I think it’s perfect,” said Niki Sri-Kumar, VP of product. “We’re bringing fresh ideas and transformation to a longstanding industry. It would be easy to get discouraged by the size and complexity of the problem, but our optimism encourages us to see the size of opportunity and impact we can have. There is so much positive energy and excitement within the team about what we’re building and the progress we’re seeing. We are heads down, but we make sure to have a mini Slack celebration for every new account we onboard.”
Sri-Kumar’s growth at Vise: “I’ve been at Vise for four months, and I’ve already gotten to see so much change and growth at the company. My own professional opportunity has been in building a product organization from scratch, working with engineering to refine planning and prioritization processes, finding the right approach to collaboration with sales and articulating our overall product strategy and team culture while hiring our first designers. It’s been a blast so far.”
What they do: MANTL’s platform supports banks and credit unions with onboarding new customers, streamlining back office operations and opening new accounts.
Company culture in one word: “Authentic. At MANTL, we value transparency and integrity and focus on doing what’s right for our customers without compromise,” said Lidia Shong, director of marketing. “We foster a culture based on authenticity and open, honest communication so that we can bring out and elevate the best version of each other, as well as support each other through the hard times.”
Shong’s growth at MANTL: “I’ve been leading our marketing efforts at MANTL for a little over a year. This past year has been the most challenging and rewarding. We had to pivot and adapt to ever-changing market conditions due to the pandemic. The biggest lessons I’ve learned through it all: stay true to your core values while focusing on flawless execution. Crises will come and go, but if you stick to your true values, your efforts will withstand the bumps along the road.”
What they do: Described as a “concierge doctor for every employee,” Eden Health’s app connects employees with mental and physical primary healthcare. The company has also added COVID-19 services, like virtual and in-person screenings and testings, to help employees and return to the office safely.
Company culture in one word: “Magical. The team here at Eden Health rallies around creating a magical experience for our customer and our coworkers,” said Urim Choi, director of product management. “In an industry that’s known to be frustrating and slow to change, it takes serious commitment from everyone at the company to deliver these magical experiences consistently at scale. I see this commitment and aspiration in every meeting I’m in, and it’s a big reason I'm excited to be a part of this organization. I’m continually amazed by the magic we create through our collaborative care model. It’s a model that allows us to provide physical and mental healthcare in a seamless and intuitive way for our patients. It’s rewarding to see how patients can achieve significantly better outcomes by building an experience optimized for the patient — not the medical system. Each patient that tells us that they received care that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten or that they're able to live a more fulfilled life because of us fuels our drive to bring this experience to more people.”
Coolest project Choi has worked on: “The biggest achievement I’ve been a part of this year is our success around our COVID-19 related products. It’s been a major driver of Eden Health’s growth in 2020 and getting to this point was anything but a straight path. Guiding the team through extreme ambiguity by balancing patience and decisiveness has been the most challenging set of problems I have had in my career thus far. We really had to evaluate how we did discovery and scoping here at Eden. It allowed us to cut most of the fat in the process and focus on the core activities that provided the most value. It also required us to be more candid and bold in our scoping discussions. That type of extreme collaboration allowed us to be in a great position heading into 2021, and it helped me refine my craft as a product manager that I couldn’t have otherwise.”
What they do: StrongArm Technologies offers a machine learning platform and IoT devices that measure and analyze risk factors of industrial workers on the job to prevent musculoskeletal injuries.
Company culture in one word: “Adaptability. Without a deeply rooted culture of adaptability and recognizing the need to innovate our technology, I fear our mission would have fallen by the wayside,” said Ahmed Elsaeyed, a data engineer. “In the face of the invisible but very tangible threat of COVID-19, for us, we had to adapt or close shop. We deal in safety data for real people, with real families and lives that go well beyond punching in and punching out.”
Coolest project Elsaeyed has worked on: “To address the pandemic threat, myself and the engineering team had to enhance our existing wearable safety technology. No longer were our FUSE Sensors concerned solely with keeping individual wearers safe from ergonomic injuries at work. Now, our sensors had to communicate with each other in real time and alert users when specific proximity thresholds were crossed. This presented the single most compelling and complex projects I’ve ever worked on. We had to quickly research, develop and test our COVID-19 feature enhancement while collaborating across the company. I had to leverage new technology, including deploying the data analysis tool Spark, which we used to build our data pipeline. By the end of the project, we had a pipeline that could tell us which users came into contact with each other and for how long, giving us the ability to provide social distancing alerts for our users in real time and accurate, anonymized contact tracing reports on demand.”
What they do: Using AI, Remesh hosts live conversations with up to 1,000 participants to help clients understand their employees, collect product feedback, create marketing campaigns and more.
Company culture in one word: “Resilient. Every day, I have the opportunity to test my limits and learn quickly,” said Shay Myrick, manager of customer success. “This is my first tech startup experience and there’s a level of trust and expectation to learn the product well. My team looks at “failing” not as a setback but as a means to grow.”
Myrick continued: “Six months into the job, our platform relaunched with a new interface, features and algorithms to educate clients. I was nervous to completely re-learn my job again but the team organized group trainings, mock client calls and cheat sheets to prepare us for forthcoming questions and demos. Senior team members advised us to be confident, to lean on our personalities through the nerves and to finesse the script so that it felt natural. When the time came for client-facing situations, I was equipped with both the hard and soft skills to support the projects and instill confidence in the platform to meet their goals. Remesh is fast-paced and complex with an ever-changing product, but it is also a collaborative and encouraging place to grow.”
Coolest project Myrick has worked on: “I love innovation and human-first research, and one of the coolest projects I’ve worked on was pre-market concept testing for a soon-to-be launched beauty brand at a global CPG company. The new brand is intended to address stress-related skincare issues which I had never heard of before. The client gathered feedback on imagery, brand claims and firsthand reactions to the idea from consumers within a 60-minute Remesh session. It was exciting to see the honest opinions and insights into stress shared by consumers and how they’d expect the product to work for their skin. I consulted on the formatting of the stimuli for optimal interpretation of the ideas and best platform usage. I’m tapping into my curiosity of product development and becoming a more well-rounded career person with each passing week at Remesh.”
