Full Range: Product managers at Alan – Sebastien Phlix

Today, we’re meeting Seb:

Bruno Vegreville, Alan (B.V) : Hi Seb, can you present yourself and tell us how you got into product management?

Sebastien Phlix, Alan (S.P) : My name is Sebastian, but most people call me Seb actually! I finished business school back in Paris almost 10 years ago, and I knew I wanted to do something with tech. I looked for roles and ended up working at TypeForm, I moved to Barcelona for that. I loved working with different profiles, and I've been doing that ever since. 

B.V : What do you currently do at Alan?

S.P :  I'm a product manager and my scope is Spain. Alan was launched in 2016 and in 2020, we decided to expand internationally. I joined the team to grow the product in Spain, because it's a very different healthcare system. 

We basically built a lot of things from scratch and now we're unifying our experience again. I've been doing that for the last four years! 

B.V : How do you prepare for the unknown when entering a new market? 

S.P :  There's definitely tons of unknowns, that's why we decided to launch separate things in the beginning. I think the key is to be really close to the market and the customers. To speak to company admins, to speak to employees who have health insurance, to really understand how things are working and then to basically iterate as quickly as you can. 

You launch new things, you try something out or you show people Figma prototypes, you interview them a lot. 

It's all those product discovery techniques that you can use to de risk over time and then you try to learn as fast as you can. 

B.V : What was the initial team?

S.P : Initially there was only one team that launched two countries at the same time, Belgium and Spain. When I joined, we started having separate local teams, but it remains really small teams. 

It's like, four to six engineers, one designer, two people in operations, and one person for insurance. And that's basically the team that has built the product over the years.

B.V : What do you spend your time on currently?

S.P : I'm not sure there's a typical week, even right now, because it really changes a lot. There can be times when you do a lot of discovery, so you will have literally 10 to 15 customer calls in the week because you really wanna learn about something. There will be other weeks when it's like more quiet during the quarter when you might work on longer term strategy and vision setting. 

It really depends on the week if you spend more time with customers or with your internal teams. Sometimes there are also hiring peaks where you spend a lot of time interviewing candidates. 

So it's a really varied job. And that's what I also really like because no week is like the other. And so there's a lot of variety which keeps you on your toes. 

B.V : What would be your piece of advice for someone launching a new country?

S.P : I think the most important thing I would say is to be open minded. A lot of people assume that things are gonna be the same than in the country they came from, or in the country they worked in, before but it really depends. 

I think the key to being successful is to fully embrace the local context and to really understand how people think and how they operate, and to adjust your approach based on that. It's like pure empathy and pure understanding and also putting into work to understand all those nuances.

Do you want to launch a new country or build new programs to improve the mental and physical health of our insured members? Check out our careers page or find us on Linkedin.