What One Pulsara Developer Learned from a Client On-Site Visit

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Rachael Lovallo for writing today's blog post. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. 

I want to start today's post out with a Development Team fun fact: Did you know we start our monthly Project Review meetings by reading the company mission and purpose out loud? It sounds like a small action, but it frames the whole meeting, and our work for the coming month: 

Pulsara

Real-time communication across ALL healthcare entities

MISSION: We unite and empower people to improve health by simplifying care coordination.

PURPOSE: Improve the lives of patients and caregivers through innovative communication.

Now I’m going to jump topics, but stay with me. I promise I’ll tie everything together later. Last month, I had the honor and privilege of being able to step outside of my usual developer routine, and got to tag along with Client Services Specialist, Kate Jones for a customer visit. The opportunity of getting to travel to Hospitals using Pulsara rocked my world for a few reasons:

First, I’ve never actually set foot in a hospital! Urgent Care - check, Doctor’s office - check, but never an actual hospital (once I broke a bone, but it was my pinky and the Doctor just said to “be careful” with it for a few weeks). It always seemed incongruent to me to be employed at a company that aims to revolutionize Healthcare Communication, when I didn’t know the first thing about what that communication looked like in the real hospital world. 

Second, Development team members don’t usually get a chance to speak face to face with customers -- maybe for good reason. Speaking for myself, I’m introverted, and a little socially awkward, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to figure out how to better serve customers. Talking to people who use Pulsara daily in the real world has been a dream of mine since I started with the company, and before my trip I had a lot of curiosity about how to make test strategies at Pulsara better match how real users interact with the app. I feel extra lucky to work at a company that offers the opportunity for me to interface with customers and gather real world data I can apply to do my job better.

Unsurprisingly, my main takeaway from my visit wasn’t getting to see the interior of a hospital, or even the pages of workflow notes I collected. At the risk of sounding sappy, it was the experience of getting smacked in the face with our purpose - a main reason I joined the Pulsara team in the first place.

Sometimes even the most fulfilling role at a company doing good work can have days that seem far from earth shattering. We have meetings, code is written, bugs are found, more code is written. Visiting Pulsara customers and getting the opportunity to shake their hands, look them in the eye, and hear their success stories and challenges using the product was a (much larger scale) experience, similar to reading the company mission and purpose before our monthly meeting. It reframed everything.