Meet Paloma: the Ops coordinator behind 80,000 psychotherapy sessions on the Alan Clinic

Paloma helps Alan members feel calmer, supported, and more in control of their mental health, impacting tens of thousands of lives through over 80,000 online psychotherapy sessions.

As Operations Coordinator for the Alan Clinic, she works at the intersection of product, care teams, and mental health professionals to ensure a seamless experience for both members and practitioners.

In this article, we share the transcript of her interview, where Paloma talks about how she found her way to Alan, what drives her every day, how Alan has lived up to (and even exceeded) her expectations, and a standout operations story she’s particularly proud of.

If you’re curious about digital mental health and how operational excellence can directly improve members’ lives, this one’s for you!

Prefer watching over reading? Check out the video ➡️ here ⬅️

Thinking about joining our Ops team? Explore opportunities ➡️ here ⬅️

Either Dust or Raycast.

Definitely having to go through IT to add an external user to a specific Slack channel.

It wasn’t a bug, but when the electricity shut down in Spain and Portugal—terrifying moments.

I want to say mix, but I’m in the office a lot—so office. Except during the summer, then mix.

Hard feedback delivered softly.

Async.

I’m Paloma, I’m 29 years old. I live in Paris but I was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico.

Before Alan, I was working at another French tech company in operations. The move towards Alan in operations was quite obvious and natural for me. Before working at Alan, in the company I was in, I was covered by Alan already so I was familiar with the product and was excited by the thought of working behind it.

I’ve also always prided myself in working for companies that are mission-driven and with values that are aligned to my own.

I’m part of the Clinic Run team. My specific missions are around our mental health offering. It includes therapy sessions but also psychological advice through our chat.

What it implies in the day to day: hiring and onboarding and also managing the relationship with our freelance health professionals. It’s also making sure that all the tools that they’re using are working correctly both for members and for our health professionals.

Gathering feedback on how we can improve, and actually working to implement those improvements—and working with the team to adopt those new tools.

So I definitely have to say I love digging into issues reported by health professionals or care team members—anyone that has an issue with the clinic in itself.

I love looking at the data and understanding the size, the impact of the problem: is it a one-off thing? Is there a pattern going on? Understanding how many people are impacted and then based on that deciding on the next action. Do we leave it? Is it a fire we’re willing to let burn? Is it something that needs immediate action?

And then finding an actual solution. Part of that is identifying: is it a systemic issue? Is it something that within our system we built incorrectly? Is it a bug or is it an educational issue?

And then once I identify that, and the solution that goes along with it—that “aha” moment of being like, “okay this is what I need to do”—and actually getting my hands into doing it.

Of course sometimes I need the help of engineers. So in those cases my favorite moment is when they tell me a fix is going into prod in the next five minutes, and then being able to tell the good news to the health professional.

I had heard a lot about Alan and the culture—specifically the async, written-first culture—before I applied.

I was actually scared that meant people would only talk to each other during lunch breaks and that if you had a question you needed to look at all the written content that we have, and no one was there to answer your questions.

I started realizing how untrue this was during the interview process.

Today one of the things that I like the most about the company and the culture is how willing to help people are. So no matter the size of the question, of course it’s always appreciated that you go look for the answer before, but if you want to dig deeper, if you can’t find the answer, people will always be there to help you understand better, learn more, grow as a professional and as a person and individual.

So I really appreciate being surrounded by colleagues that are so willing to help and talk—even though sometimes we talk in person, it’s not only async.

So it’s not my favorite ops story ever, but it is my favorite recent one—it’s one I’m proud of.

I identified that there was a difference between the way one of our partners and we counted our member base—so total amount of people that are covered by Alan. This was obviously impacting the way we were reporting invoicing versus theirs, and payments were not aligned.

So I sat down with them and we really dug into “okay what is your calculation or your way of calculating, and what is ours.”

It was really fun because neither one of us—both my point of contact and myself—are more on the operations and partner-facing side. So it’s not us doing the calculations, yet we managed to figure out how things were calculated on our own, and then fix it and pass that on to the teams that we work with.

And we ended up saving money on that !

Thinking about joining our Ops team? Explore opportunities here !