Last year there were nearly 10,000 reported tech startups in New York City, which was ranked the second-best tech ecosystem in the world behind Silicon Valley, according to Tech:NYC data.
At ground level, there are success stories everywhere. CLEAR, a secure ID platform, recently completed a $100 million strategic funding round and is looking at expanding its products into new industries. Meanwhile, Spring Health completed a $190 million Series C and hit a $2 billion valuation, making co-founder and CEO April Koh the youngest woman CEO of a unicorn startup. With this funding comes the opportunity for these companies to add features and products to their portfolios.
“Over the next six months, our team is working on strategically expanding our offerings in mental health care as well as continuously improving the product experience so that we can better serve our members and care team,” said Spring Health Product Manager Larissa Chan. “This requires thorough, in-depth user research to identify and prioritize the most impactful projects.”
CLEAR and Spring Health hold just a few of the golden opportunities for product managers to explore in the city that never sleeps. Currently, there are more than 675 product jobs posted on Built In NYC.
Built In connected with professionals from these companies and more from around the city to see what their teams have to offer ambitious product managers.
Spring Health is a mental health benefits company for employers.
What are the biggest projects or challenges your product management team is working on in the next six months?
Our goal is to help our members receive mental health care tailored specifically to their needs and reduce barriers to care. We want to create our products and services in a way that makes mental healthcare relevant and beneficial for everyone. I find it both fun and challenging trying to figure out how our products at Spring Health can best meet our members, no matter where they are in their mental health journey. I am excited to work with all the stakeholders at my company, our strategic partners and our members to take Spring Health to the next level.
What opportunities exist at your organization for ambitious PMs?
We recently launched a LinkedIn Learning program so that every employee can access curated courses aligned to their professional interests. Our leadership hosts fireside chats with early-stage to late-stage entrepreneurs to help us build our network and inspire innovation. Everyone is encouraged to lead company-wide brown bag lunches and share knowledge ranging from user stories to provider operations to data analytics. With these resources, I can achieve my ambitious goals as a PM: pitching and executing disruptive ideas, managing and leading a team of junior PMs, and building my technical skills. I am given full ownership, responsibility and autonomy to lead initiatives that I believe will improve our members’ experiences. Spring Health’s culture of embracing growth and change inspires me to challenge myself every day.
I am given full ownership, responsibility and autonomy to lead initiatives that I believe will improve our members’ experiences.”
How have you been able to grow your career within Spring Health?
The genuine support from my leadership and coworkers that I have received since day one at Spring Health has been unmatched. Within only a few months of joining the company, I led a cross-functional, complex project that impacted thousands of families’ lives. Spring Health now offers families the ability to get therapy for their children within days, compared to the industry average of multiple months. From a more technical lens, I have been working on the team’s data strategy and implementation to help shape the product roadmap for precision mental healthcare. Outside of day-to-day product management execution, I have also been given the chance to help define the company’s product vision, directly engage and collaborate with employers and members, and develop my mentorship and leadership skills. Spring Health truly believes in my potential, and I have deeply appreciated all the opportunities to accelerate my career.
TrialSpark is a software platform that powers end-to-end clinical trials.
What are the biggest projects or challenges your product management team is working on in the next six months?
One of the biggest opportunities we have is to enable more efficient scientific trial designs by revolutionizing the way that trial data is collected and analyzed. Currently, this is a long, manual, and waterfall-driven process, meaning data cannot be analyzed for months after patients complete their study. Most industry tech is not well-equipped to handle the many disparate data sources that are now available for clinical trials: wearables, sensors, hospital visits, paper charts, imaging and lab results, to name a few.
In the next six months, we’re developing a data platform that will automate the most rote and labor-intensive tasks needed to standardize and clean data. Our challenge is to build a product that will help our teams evolve toward a better and faster method of data cleaning. In a world where 80 percent of potential data risks are automatically found, how can our products enable our users to find that last, difficult-to-detect 20 percent? How can we enable our users to trust an automated system to do the work that previously took them hours of careful inspection to do?
What opportunities exist at your organization for ambitious PMs?
The clinical trial space is endless and complex, and TrialSpark’s success in challenging industry norms depends on first-principles thinking and rigorous experimentation, which is where good product management shines. Our PMs are entrusted with big, ambiguous problems and are given a ton of autonomy and resources to solve them. We have a clear end goal, which is our vision state, but it’s the responsibility of PMs to define how we plan to get there and rally the company around that strategy.
Our PMs are entrusted with big, ambiguous problems and are given a ton of autonomy and resources to solve them.”
How have you been able to grow your career within TrialSpark?
I’ve been with TrialSpark for about three years. I started off as a product manager helping execute against the roadmap for my product area. From day one, there has been a lot of trust and autonomy. Over time, I’ve been lucky to receive increasingly complex objectives and bigger scope. Most recently, I have been involved in completely rethinking TrialSpark’s entire clinical data strategy. That’s not uncommon at TrialSpark though. Company culture is oriented toward empowering individuals to be owners and recognizing strong performance from within. Now I’m leading two squads of 13 engineers for our flagship product and responsible for our two-to-threeyear vision.
Orchard is a financing and real estate platform.
What are the biggest projects or challenges your product management team is working on in the next six months?
Our flagship service offering, Move First, enables homeowners looking for their next house to make a competitive offer, win their dream home and move right away. During the next six months, our team will rebuild our offering to reduce overhead costs and improve the experience for our employees and customers alike. Customers will maintain the same value props — become a non-contingent buyer and get an offer accepted, move first and skip home showings, get top dollar for your old home — but an even more seamless home purchasing experience.
This project is particularly interesting due to its cross-functional nature. It truly touches every team at Orchard. I’ll get the opportunity to partner with colleagues across the organization and have a massive impact on our bottom line.
What opportunities exist at your organization for ambitious PMs?
Orchard has helped thousands of families across the country to win their dream homes, but there is still plenty of unexplored opportunity. Our product managers play a key part in figuring out what pathways we take. We’re not just focused on fine-tuning the product offering that already exists; we’re building new things and experimenting with fundamental changes to our offering, whether that means expanding to new markets, integrating a new system into our product ecosystem, or building a new offering that addresses the needs of a previously unserved customer base. One of our core values is “own it” and that is truly the case – PMs are ultimately responsible for the success of these initiatives, which I think is an exciting environment for any ambitious PM.
We’re not just focused on fine-tuning the product offering that already exists; we’re building new things and experimenting with fundamental changes.”
How have you been able to grow your career within Orchard?
I’ve had the chance to own product initiatives tied to company-level goals that impact a wide range of teams. With that has come the opportunity to work closely with and learn from leaders across the organization.
More recently, I’ve been given the opportunity to lead the development of a new associate product manager program at Orchard. This program is specifically designed for professionals who may have worked in tech companies previously but who are new to product management. Program participants will be offered skill-building classes, mentorship sessions and other professional development opportunities.
Working on this program has been an invaluable learning experience. I am partnering with our recruiting team to improve my hiring skills, which includes learning how to identify high-potential candidates with no previous product management experience. I’m also working with stakeholders across the company to identify the most meaningful sessions we can offer these trainees. I can truly say that Orchard is a wonderful place to grow your career and look forward to getting to know our first class of associate product managers.
CLEAR is a secure identity verification platform.
What are the biggest projects or challenges your product management team is working on in the next six months?
As we’re shifting toward a platform-first mentality across the company, we’re developing a product that allows our members to verify their identity and share various attributes about themselves, with their consent, to our partners. This information can range from being of legal age to purchase alcohol all the way to opening a bank account, or sharing that employment status. Creating smaller building blocks that can be embedded in a variety of external applications presents a different set of challenges around discovery, integration and ongoing support.
To that end, across the company, we’re heavily investing in building not just new products and features, but the tools and processes to drive self-service support and scale.
What opportunities exist at your organization for ambitious PMs?
While many know us from the CLEAR Plus lanes in airports, we’re growing rapidly across travel and hospitality, healthcare, sports, entertainment and aviation; powering those is the CLEAR Identity Platform. Whether you’re looking to build something completely new within the platform, drive a new vertical, or extend and improve our existing products, there’s ample opportunity to run with new ideas and influence roadmaps across the board.
There’s ample opportunity to run with new ideas and influence roadmaps across the board.”
How have you been able to grow your career within CLEAR?
I started eight and a half years ago as a software engineer in charge of the airport kiosks, back when CLEAR had a six-person engineering squad, including the CTO. Since then, I’ve been able to stay at the forefront of new use cases and ways to tie a CLEAR member’s identity to their daily lives, working across growth, product and engineering to maintain a holistic view of customer needs, how they’re using our products, and help influence what we’re building.
Happify Health is a software-enabled healthcare platform.
What are the biggest projects or challenges your product management team is working on in the next six months?
We’re building a connected offering that shortens the distance between need and care by creating personalized digital therapeutics and clinical-grade care solutions that deliver each person the care they need when they need it.
We have a lot on our plate this year. We’re planning to launch several new products and services designed to extend our platform and strengthen the user experience. We also plan to deepen our integrations with ecosystem partners to create seamless user journeys. All of this aims to ultimately make healing more precise, personal and connected.
How Happify Health’s Platform Leverages AI
- Precision care: shortens the distance between need and care by giving each person the care they need, when they need it, in the way they want.
- Intelligent healing: understands each person’s unique needs and preferences, then personalizes the healing approach accordingly.
- Sequences: provide bespoke configurations of digital and human care services, tailored to people’s needs.
What opportunities exist at your organization for ambitious PMs?
We lead the company’s product strategy and work closely with cross-functional teams to bring this strategy to life. It’s our job to plan, build and manage our intelligent healing platform. Our product management team is working on various areas of the platform, including handling data and infrastructure, innovating AI products, developing front-end engaging features, implementing complex integrations with our partners and more.
As a growing organization, there are always career opportunities within our department. We encourage excellence and look for people who demonstrate an ownership mindset and the courage to redefine. My managing philosophy is to enjoy the ride. It’s not all about reaching the goal, it’s also about how you get there.
My managing philosophy is to enjoy the ride. It’s not all about reaching the goal, it’s also about how you get there.”
How have you been able to grow your career within your company?
When I joined Happify Health in 2020 as head of direct to consumer, I was tasked with launching our care app named Kopa. At launch, we created a caring community for people managing psoriasis. Within a year and a half, we introduced three additional communities supporting women and midlife, multiple sclerosis, and pregnancy. I’m proud to say we now support a growing community of more than 70,000 members.
My career grew within Happify Health, and I took on a new role last summer. As chief product officer, I am now responsible for the development of all the company’s products and am working on weaving them into a personalized, connected, intelligent healing platform.
