My work has focused on two main areas throughout my internship: conducting a market sizing analysis for the assistive technology market of people with speech disabilities and designing a go-to-market strategy by leveraging key insights from the initial market sizing analysis. My work fits into the company’s main mission in two ways. Firstly, even though the flagship product of the company was ready to be offered, the company did not have a clear view on the size and therefore the potential of the market in which it operates. My market sizing analysis created a baseline for financial planning and enabled the firms to have more realistic revenue expectations. Secondly, my work helped the company to identify quick win opportunities in the market. The output of the go-to-market strategy was to focus on people with speech disabilities who are residing in their homes, rather than staying in institutional healthcare centers. By implementing this output, company was able to identify a reimbursement scheme; and such a reimbursement scheme provided people with even easier access to the main product of the company.

I utilized my learnings in CBS in two major areas. First of all, thanks to the course that I have taken in the first semester named managerial statistics, I was able to decide on “What is an acceptable error margin?” while conducting the aforementioned market sizing analysis in the USA. Since such a market sizing had never been done in the USA before, I had to extrapolate different sources to come up with a final number. During the extrapolation process, deciding on the reasonability of assumptions and therefore error margins were quite critical, and the insights that I gained in managerial statistics have greatly helped me. Secondly, I was able to drive insights based on the set of frameworks that I learned in “Transforming the delivery of healthcare services” course that I have taken during the summer. Since end users of the company that I worked for were people with speech disabilities, understanding the potential reimbursements schemes for those people were crucial to make our product further accessible to them. Being aware of key components of Medicare and Medicaid schemes helped me to identify a relatively niche reimbursement scheme in the USA healthcare system called home and community based service waiver program (HCBS), with which the company had a chance to reimburse its products.

Two important challenges that I faced was being not familiar with a so-called startup culture and having relatively limited understanding about overall healthcare system. I was not familiar with the startup culture because I worked as a management consultant before starting CBS. In management consulting, one of the main goals is to align with multiple stakeholders. In a startup, however, the expectation is to become as “agile” as possible by maximizing tangible output with limited time and opportunities. Identifying, learning, and internalizing such a mindset change was one of my key challenges throughout my internship. Similarly, my knowledge on the US healthcare sector was rather limited at the beginning of my internship, constituting a significant challenge for me to understand the widely used terminology with is the firm. Thanks to the relevant classes that I have taken in CBS and support of other team members in the firm; I was be able to overcome both challenges.

My first important realization and therefore takeaway out of my internship was the difference of paradigm/mindset between corporate firms and startups. As a management consultant who had a change to be exposed to the professional atmosphere of corporate firms, realizing how the mindset is different in a startup ecosystem was an important milestone for me. Secondly, and most importantly, the firm that I worked for has an important mission: building speech recognition technology designed to understand speech impairments, disorders, or disabilities. Being a part of such social-impact work and producing tangible outcomes that change the lives of disabled people reminded me the importance of sympathy and mutual understanding.