Today, we invite you to get acquainted with the incredible story from the founder of remote medical lab Lab Me Dr. Anthony Close. He describes in detail how his laboratory grows and develops, about remote team management, and how Standuply helps him in this.

This story is about successes, failures, and winning secrets on how to beat the significant problems around workflows and communication.

Anthony will tell how Lab Me has faced along the way, and the methods they used with Standuply to help reduce overall costs while optimizing time.

How A Doctor Turned Tech: Anthony’s Story

First, a little bit of background: Lab Me is a remote laboratory that takes blood tests by mail, decodes them in detail for easy understanding and lets you track it.

No queues, no waiting, and paperwork – you are sent a disposable kit for self-sampling of blood, you independently carry out the procedure according to the instructions below, send your samples to the laboratory and wait for the decoded result.

As a doctor, I have worked in over four countries and have built multidisciplinary clinics managing over 20 people per clinic. The clinics were focused on chronic pain management of the spine. 

Lab Me was founded in March 2018 and was originally intended to be a mobile application utilizing OCR to decipher complex blood reports.

We pivoted in March of 2019 and by the first week in August, we had launched a D2C blood testing and analytics company. The current version of Lab Me was launched in three months’ time.

We save our clients hundreds of dollars and weeks of waiting and driving time by providing you with an affordable, finger-prick blood test you can do at home. You mail it back and 48 after we receive it – you have simple, easy to understand results on your online dashboard.

We are, on average, 20% more accurate than our closest competitors because we use a patented FDA approved sample collection system that can separate plasma from the blood.

Hiring For Repeatable, Scalable, & Profitable Growth 

Lab Me is headquartered in Chicago and Singapore, but our team is based in the USA, Asia, and Europe. We have a team of 10 essentially operating 24/7. But we had to put a lot of effort to find them.

The formula is really simple: hire bad people = get bad results. It’s harder than it seems, especially if the founder is playing HR.

We have a clearly defined system that A/Bs tests hire based on personality traits, and we have narrowed it down to something that is repeatable, scalable, and profitable. It was in this way we could also learn from our mistakes.

Working in a startup, especially in a remote environment, involves a special individual.

You can be good at development, marketing, or design, but just because you are good in an office doesn’t mean he/she will be good at home or in a remote environment.

Lab Me operates on transparency, metrics, and online tools to ensure quality work is being done and allows us the ability to optimize, transfer, or terminate an individual or workflow rapidly.

Standuply helps us during our probationary first month for new hires by allowing us to weed out non-performers quickly.  

Without a clear and straightforward system, there is no remote team. There are only remote people.

This is why Standuply is so essential for Lab Me. It is part of being needed – to become a team.

Remote working with Lab Me comes with some amazing freedoms but at the cost of your own mind discipline to deal with those freedoms. 

“Standuply allows us to make data-driven decisions around team hiring, management, and optimization in the blink of an eye.“

Dr. Anthony Close
Founder of Lab Me

Product Management via Standuply

We started using OKR’s, and Standuply became one of our key results. 

For example, one of our quarterly development objectives is Fully Functional & User-Friendly Dashboard (you can see on the screenshot below).

One of the key results of this objective is 100% completion of reporting via Standuply.

To achieve this, we created clear communication rules between the team and management.

For example, when replying to standup meetings in Standuply, we gave exact rules on what we wanted to see. 

It all starts with the tools you use to build your coms infrastructure in a way that is cost & time efficient.

• Our “stock-standard” company stack is: Product Management – Trello 
• Virtual Office Communications – Slack
• Development Team Reporting – Standuply
• OKR Development – Weekdone

The integrations with Slack and Trello are what make Trello so powerful for remote operations in particular.

As it integrates with both seamlessly, Standuply is the glue that ties it all together.

Reporting Using Standuply

Consistency without complexity was the vision with Standuply and other operations. 

Standuply note: you can read about all Standuply features in our Agile Project Management Guide.

We use three reports across four countries, with 4 of our 8 employees.

They currently are:

For all Standuply reports we:

1. We set the time frame allowed for answering for 4 hours.
2. We send the reports to a public channel in Slack called #reporting.
3. Follow up with those reports both daily and on alignment calls at the start of the week. Any issues that seem stuck for the week get pushed to the alignment call for escalation.

Automated Classic Standups

Currently, we are using daily standups on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We do this by asking the standard questions with one modification. 

We also encourage obstacles. Lack of obstacles is an obstacle itself, in our opinion.

More importantly, it is the proposed solution to that obstacle. So to the last question, “Are there any obstacles?” we added in, “…If so, what is the proposed solution?”

Automated Retrospectives

Every two weeks, we do the retrospective. We try to keep it around the end of the day (4 pm) on the last Friday of the sprint.

At 7 pm on Friday, we have a Google Hangouts call and go through that report and decide how we are going to align the next sprint based on that report.

We use the questions standard retro questions:

1. What went well this sprint? Please list them.
2. What didn’t go well this sprint? Please list them.
3. What new activities should we start doing? Just think about what would make us more productive.

On the call, each team member walks us through their answers and the rest of the team has the floor to question, challenge, and then help with solutions and/or suggestions.  

Automated Survey On Current Tasks Reporting

We use it on Tuesday & Thursday. This report drills down on specific Trello cards being worked on in our product management board.

The process for our product management looks like this on a high level:

1. Trello For Basic Agile Management
   • User Stories (OKR: 2 Completed Per Sprint)
   • Story Points (OKR: 2-3 Per User Story Per Sprint)
2. Basic Workflow For New Card
   • Create a card
   • Add a label and the person responsible for getting it done.
   • Label it 
   • Add acceptance criteria

Standuply sends the following format to the person assigned to cards marked “In Progress”. 

1. Card Link
2. Questions
   • What have you done so far?
   • When do you think you will finish it?
   • Do you have any obstacles?  What’s the solution?

This helps the team quickly align twice a week. It has reduced double handling for us by 80% and led to an increase in value for our performance reviews at the end of the month. 

“Growth, on any scale, is not possible without team clarity. This is what Standuply gives to us.” 

Dr. Anthony Close
Founder of Lab Me

Reduce Complexity Where Possible

With all of these reports our basic format is as follows:

1. The link to the Trello card being referred to.
2. Specific and concise points rather than superfluous discussion.
3. Clear obstacles and solutions.

Here is how daily standup report shouldn’t look and how it should:

We want to keep it a quick read and now with analytics, I am starting to look at average characters per input vs. how I feel about the report (was it helpful or stressful). 

Time From To Do to Production

Time being estimated for finishing user stories was one of our biggest problems. It is a shared responsibility by the product manager (often the founder in the early stage) and the development staff.

In the image below, see if you can spot the problem.

Besides a low obstacle rate, the ‘when do you think you will finish’ question from daily standup was 53% and way below our minimum of 95% OKR set for development standup reporting.

It has changed how we deal with offenders, repeat offenders, those excelling, and has had a resounding impact on the speed of development and accountability of the team.

In our contracts, we clearly specify that Standuply is a part of reporting and is necessary for team play. If that can’t be followed, then we aren’t the right fit.

“Standuply is the only provider that allows for this with clarity & confidence.“

Dr. Anthony Close
Founder of Lab Me

It was important because we are not at the stage of having dedicated product managers. As with most startups, we are wearing multiple hats to ensure our growth and stability.

Increase Your Odds Early On With Standuply

We were fortunate to have had pre-product, pre-revenue funding such as we did.

That came from people believing in me and my ability to create and lead a team to success – nothing else. I don’t believe a pitch deck or fancy bravado is going to land you pre-product/revenue funding; unless you are incredibly lucky. 

Finally, Standuply has brought a lot of useful habits to our teamwork:

• clarity and transparency now are mandatory factors
• it helped us establish consistency in our processes
• the process of hiring employees now takes just a moment

Your odds are dramatically increased by having tools like Standuply at your disposal as a data-driven way to increase speed to market, reduce overall costs, and lead a team to greatness.