Fireside Product Management · 2025-11-03 · 40 min
The Interview That Sparked This Essay Joe Corkery and I worked together at Google years ago, and he has since gone on to build a venture-backed company tackling a real and systemic problem in healthcare communication. This essay is my attempt to synthesize that conversation. It is written for early and mid career PMs in Silicon Valley who want to get sharper at product judgment, market discovery, customer validation, and knowing the difference between encouragement and signal. If you feel like you have ever shipped something, presented it to customers, and then heard polite nodding instead of movement and urgency, this is for you. Joe’s Unusual Career Arc Joe’s background is not typical for a founder. He is a software engineer. And a physician. And someone who has led business development in the pharmaceutical industry. That multidisciplinary profile allowed him to see something that many insiders miss: healthcare is full of problems that everyone acknowledges, yet very few organizations are structurally capable of solving. When Joe joined Google Cloud in 2014, he helped start the healthcare and life sciences product org. Yet the timing was difficult.
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