How Empathy Drives Product Strategy at Dova
At Dova, empathy shapes every aspect of product strategy. Through a rigorous human-centered design process, we continuously surface insights that directly inform product direction.
What is Human-Centered Design (HCD)?
HCD is a problem-solving approach that puts people first. It starts with empathy: understanding the needs, challenges, motivations, and workflows of those we're designing for.
The Double Diamond is an HCD framework with two phases: discovering the right problem and developing the right solution. It uses divergent exploration and convergent decision-making to stay grounded in empathy and deliver real impact.
The core value of HCD lies in direct, 1:1 conversations with a diverse range of stakeholders. These discussions are designed to surface latent needs, motivations, and desires that often go unspoken—providing deep insight to inform solutions that are intuitive, inclusive, and truly meaningful.
Turning Conversations into Insight: A Case Study
During the development of DovaVision, we partnered with Alimentiv and conducted generative research to explore the problem space.
Applying human-centered design in practice takes planning and structure. To ensure we gathered meaningful insights, we followed the process outlined below:
Workflow Mapping: We mapped how patients, physicians, hospitals, and pharma interact in the imaging workflow to understand each stakeholder's core motivations and incentives.
Diverse Outreach: Based on the workflow map, we engaged specific stakeholders across clinical ops, imaging, and pharma to gather diverse perspectives and inform more inclusive solutions.
Interview Design and Preparation: We created and tested semi-structured discussion guides to keep interviews focused, yet flexible.
In-Depth Conversations: We conducted 9 stakeholder interviews and explored workflows in granular detail to unearth challenges, all while staying objective and letting tangents reveal unexpected insights.(Tip: The Mom Test is a great guide for running better interviews.)
Capturing Insights in Real Time: We used Miro to document pain points, motivations, and emotional tone immediately after each session to ensure we captured thoughts while they were fresh.
Synthesizing Insights Across Conversations: By looking across the entire data set, we identified patterns, contradictions, and unmet needs, grounding insights in lived experience.
Creating Needs-Based Profiles: We built profiles based on motivations and challenges, not job titles, to inform product positioning and hypotheses for further development.
What we learned
While we can’t share all the juicy details and insights, we uncovered the following high-level opportunities to improve endoscopy imaging in clinical trials:
Granular Data Insights: Increasing the granularity of endoscopy video analysis could help pharmaceutical organizations make more informed decisions about drug efficacy early.
Operational Efficiency: Reducing the time it takes to read an image can help sites meet narrow screening windows, minimizing delays and reducing the risk of patient dropout during enrollment.
AI Savvy-ness is Increasing: The industry is evolving and it's clear that tools like DovaVision will be supporting the paradigm shift towards trusted, explainable AI.
Automation Opportunities: Clinical trials operations involve managing multiple dependencies. Automating manual workflows to maintain high standards throughout a trial could reduce costs significantly.
