The Four Non-Negotiable Attributes of Digital Experience Platform Success

Contributed by Rangle.io

Digital experiences are where customers communicate what they want, how they want it. Managing these experiences is where digital-first companies win or lose.

As customer-centric operating models flourish in this hyper-competitive digital economy, it’s important for executives and team leaders to ask themselves a simple question: What are the attributes of an effective digital experience platform?

Strategies are just paper. Digital experiences are touchpoints where your customer communicates what they want and how they want it. Your platform and how you manage it are essential to success. More bluntly, best-in-class experiences are the only path to being competitive in a digital-first world. Your platform is where the action occurs.

In order to make a digital experience platform (that is, your highly-integrated technologies that are used to create your frontend customer experiences across all available touchpoints) successful, there are four non-negotiable attributes that represent a mindset and culture shift necessary for the digital era. Compromising on these is like compromising on the foundation of a skyscraper — you’ll never be able to build and scale your existing business if your foundations aren’t solid.

Attribute 1: A digital experience platform is both comprehensive and open-ended

Your digital experience platform must enable multi-channel experiences for a wide range of users, leading to an infinite set of digital interactions.

There’s no getting around the fact that a modern digital experience is an ecosystem of products and platforms. Because of this, your teams are building more and newer experiences, creating more complexity over time that you have to grapple with.

Most projects slow down because of complexity. They can’t achieve scale so they become inconsistent, making for slower releases and exponentially slower approval times. “We can’t publish!” becomes the refrain heard over and over again.

In the highly risk-averse waterfall era, executives assumed that they knew what the future held. But could you have predicted cloud architecture? What about the disruption of the taxi industry by a technology company? Or how about a global uptick in online shopping necessitated by a highly contagious disease?

To be truly successful in modern digital, you have to embrace uncertainty and complexity instead of trying to reduce it. A digital experience platform keeps the experiences synchronized and evolvable in real-time and puts your focus on the future.

With a consistency-building and speed-enhancing product like a design system, your integrated digital experience platform will ensure that long cycle times are reduced and waiting for approvals, instead, becomes a built-in set of checks and balances. Modern digital teams should be able to publish weekly (if not daily), and this goal for increased speed and flexibility is the North Star that can drive your digital experience platform build.

Of course, this means that the design system itself is a set of experiences, and needs to evolve with the same fluidity as the experiences built with the design system. It also means that everyone needs to be at the table: Brand, product, design, technology, and marketing. And the supporting services — DesignOps and DevOps, for example, must be in place. Hence, all design systems are part of a larger digital experience platform, and all digital experience platforms must include a design system.

Attribute 2: Marketing and merchandising teams can build experiences without help from a shared services team

In traditional digital commerce models, the teams that are closest to the customer, such as marketers and merchandisers, have their hands tied in updating digital experiences like their websites – this is because they must route all requests through their IT or development team (often using a ticketing system, where improvements to customer experience are deemed less important than bug fixes).

The inability to respond at the speed of the market and keep up with the customer means a lot of lost revenue for businesses in the digital age. It also means a ton of coordination, queuing, prioritization, research, negotiation, and consensus-building. Five minutes of work can take months of lead time and dozens of hours of effort.

These rigid systems that both marketing and development hate should be a thing of the past. With a digital experience platform and headless CMS, the power and control of the website are put straight into the hands of the content creators. As a result, their ideas, customer feedback, and shifting market trends can become new content in a matter of hours or minutes, not a matter of weeks. More importantly, the governance process can be moved closer to the team, and the reversibility of changes it allows means 95 percent of the work can be deemed “fast path” and low-risk. Companies that want to be truly customer-centric need to make this change happen today.

The old way serves the system, not the customer. If your organization is truly committed, you must invest in decoupling the development and design of your digital products from the delivery of new content-heavy experiences. Instead of being constrained by your platform, any digital tools your teams use should be an enabler — your digital experience products most of all.

Attribute 3: Testing is safe — and it becomes the norm

A digital experience platform allows customer-facing teams to test experiences without permission-seeking. This is critical for speed to market for several reasons.

First, it ensures that your customer is always the most important stakeholder in your decision-making process. Second, it reduces time-wasting permission-seeking from those in different parts of the business who don’t have the full context needed to make informed decisions about your digital products and the customers they serve. Finally, it holds the teams who do work on your products and serve your customers accountable — and this makes them more engaged and more likely to generate the ideas and solutions that will differentiate your business.

Getting permission to make iterative changes to your product from anyone but the team’s executive sponsor is a waste of time. A team that is focused, empowered, and accountable for your digital products is much better poised to make decisions than anyone who is half-involved, half-interested, and ultimately not accountable for failure. Single-threaded leadership, made popular by Amazon, ensures that only those accountable for the success of the digital product are making decisions about it, as their expertise in the product and its customer is critical.

This ultimately means that your teams can iterate on your digital experiences and be in dialogue with your customer in a way that few companies have been able to achieve thus far. Fast changes, faster feedback loops, and a pure customer focus keeps experiences fresh and exciting, and keeps customers engaged and happy.

Attribute 4: Reversible actions mean there are no mistakes — just bigger or smaller successes

With a well-integrated digital experience platform, teams have permission to follow outcomes, rather than just follow instructions.

Instead of being beholden to project timelines with specific deliverables based on weak assumptions, teams can adjust to what’s most valuable in service to the business (within the constraints of their team mandate, of course!).

With reversibility, teams can be accountable to goals and the supporting data, not the project plan. They can experiment and test towards a better product than could be conceived at the beginning of a digital product build.

This unlocks flow, purpose, and customer-centricity like nothing else. When a digital product is governed by a broader set of business outcomes, rather than feature or project outcomes, the focus on serving the customer becomes paramount.

Consider this example from Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio and author of Ask Your Developer. In his book he asks executives if they would prefer to “put a team of hundreds on the idea, [take] five years to build the ‘perfect’ thing, [take] out a Super Bowl ad, and [spend] $25 million on a big ad campaign, all to find out that customers don’t care” or to have a small team spend three months and $50,000 testing a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong.

As Lawson says, that team didn’t waste $50,000, they saved you $25 million. With a future-ready digital experience platform, small bets on customer experience can return big results — or they can prevent you from chasing ideas that your customers don’t find worth their while.

No executive has perfect intuition or a crystal ball that allows them to see the future of their business. But what they can do instead is create the conditions for future success by enabling their teams with the tools and platforms they need to test, iterate, and experiment their way towards real customer-centricity.

An effective digital experience platform allows for reversibility. This can’t be overstated. Yes, testing is valuable, but rapid reversibility is magical and allows for massive reductions in operational expenses and time-to-value while improving customer-centricity and innovation.

Read the full article here

About Rango.io

Rangle is a strategic partner for enterprise organizations and scale ups, solving their most complex challenges at the intersection of technology and product management. Our experts are hands-on, working directly with our clients’ practitioners, embedding in the business to co-create the goals, growth strategy and processes.

To learn more about Rangle.io visit: https://rangle.io/

#MillenniumLive Like A Survey, But Better with ThoughtExchange

What if you could hear from all your employees at once, and leverage their expertise into a strategy you could use? With the world’s first and only anti-bias enterprise discussion management platform, the actual human perspective can be scaled into high-quality data to solve the most critical business problems. Thousands of leaders are gaining insights and bringing millions of people together in the business, public, and education sectors using ThoughtExchange.

#MillenniumLive welcomes Dave MacLeod, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at ThoughtExchange and Arun Chidambaram, People Analytics at GE Healthcare. During this episode, the two discuss the value ThoughtExchange brought to GE Healthcare, and how using ThoughtExchange impacts productivity and empower leadership decisions, now and in the future!

Listen on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts.

About ThoughtExchange

ThoughtExchange lets people lead challenging conversations about things that matter. ThoughtExchange allows people to quickly and easily connect with their team to solve problems together. The ThoughtExchange app lets people ask an open-ended question and invite groups of 10 or 10,000 people to answer it in what’s called an “exchange.” Not only do people submit their own answers, they also get to rate other participants’ answers, so the most popular ideas rise to the top.

For more information visit https://thoughtexchange.com

Improve Employee Well-Being with O.C.Tanner

Contributed by O.C Tanner

Employee well-being: addressing burnout in a diverse workplace

The world of work has changed dramatically and organizations struggle to attract and retain top talent—especially diverse talent. For HR leaders to reach their hiring and retention goals, and for organizations to reach their growth goals, they need a more holistic view of employee wellbeing. This includes their diverse employees.

There’s plenty of quantitative research on the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce. Organizations with diverse workforces enjoy increased financial performance, innovation, and creativity. They also experience lower attrition and can better mitigate the high costs of turnover. While most companies approach DEI through changes in hiring, promotion, personal development, and other policies, HR leaders must go beyond that and dig deep into ensuring and improving another DEI needs—employee wellbeing—especially in diverse groups where burnout can run rampant.

What do we mean by employee well-being?

Let’s start by taking a closer look at what we mean by employee well-being, what it is, and why it’s important, especially in diverse groups.

What is employee wellbeing?

Employee wellbeing is the capacity employees have to work through day-to-day stressors, be productive, maintain their proficiency, and seek their potential. Employee wellbeing is a hot topic in today’s HR circles because wellbeing research shows that employees in good health are more likely to deliver optimal performance in the workplace. Optimal performance drives productivity, efficiency, and organizational growth.

What does employee wellbeing look like?

Employees need both mental and physical wellness to thrive. Those who succeed in both areas report not only having a better quality of life, but also benefit from having a lower risk of disease, illness, and injury. This leads to increased work productivity and a greater likelihood of contributing to corporate wellbeing culture.

Wellbeing as a corporate strategy ensures that employees are able to contribute their best while navigating the myriad challenges that impact how they live, work, and relate to others.

Why is employee wellbeing important?

Employee wellbeing can drive meaningful change within any work culture. But it’s imperative that business leaders address employees’ total wellbeing. This not only includes their physical, mental, emotional, and financial health, but also work-life balance and social equity.

For example, HBR reported last year that 42% of women and 35% of men in corporate America have felt burned out in the last few months (up from 32% and 28% respectively last year). And 1 out of every 3 women surveyed have considered downshifting or leaving the workforce altogether (up from 1 in 4 in 2021). These figures come from McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s latest Women in the Workplace report, which surveyed 65,000 people across the U.S.

Employee burnout is the number one problem in employee wellbeing

It’s always good to consider burnout when developing a comprehensive employee wellbeing program, but after more than two years of a global pandemic, it’s more important than ever. Check out these troubling employee burnout statistics:

In 2021, 79% of employees experienced work-related stress in the past month

44% report physical fatigue from work-related stress
32% report emotional exhaustion from work
While the average employee says they are “fine” 14 times each week when asked how they are doing, they are lying almost 20% of the time
70% of employees feel their employers aren’t doing enough to prevent or mitigate burnout at work.

Click here to read more

About O.C Tanner

O.C. Tanner helps organizations inspire and appreciate great work. Thousands of clients globally use our cloud-based technology, tools, and awards to provide meaningful recognition for their employees.

Learn more at www.octanner.com.

#MillenniumLive Behind Every Great Idea is a Human Truth with Visier

#MillenniumLive welcomes Paul Rubenstein, Head of People & Culture at Visier, the recognized global leader in people analytics and on-demand answers for people-powered businesses. Visier reveals the fundamental questions and actionable insights to help businesses and employees win together. to answer organizations’ most pressing HR questions to solve the most urgent workforce challenges. Paul joins this episode to discuss how People Data is changing the way we manage, employees’ future expectations, and what’s next in DEIB.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts.

About Visier

Visier is the recognized global leader in people analytics and on-demand answers for people-powered business. Founded in 2010 by the pioneers of business intelligence, Visier focuses on what matters to business leaders: revealing the fundamental questions and actionable truths capable of elevating your employees – and your business – to new heights. Headquartered in Vancouver, BC with offices and team members worldwide, Visier has 15,000 customers in 75 countries around the world, including enterprises like Adobe, BASF, Bridgestone, Electronic Arts, McKesson, Merck KGaA, Uber, and more.

To learn more visit https://www.visier.com

The Millennium Alliance Commits Fully To In-Person Programs For 2023 And Beyond

NEW YORK – October 26, 2022 – The Millennium Alliance, an invitation-only organization for Senior-Level Executives and Business Transformers, in September of this year made its triumphant return to the in-person stage when they successfully hosted their first non-virtual C-Suite Assembly in two and a half years in Miami. The program was met with rave reviews across the board from members and partners and left those in attendance craving even more of these incredible in-person networking experiences. As a result, Millennium is continuing to stand behind its commitment to listening to the needs and desires of its community, as they announce its decision to pivot back fully to hosting in-person programs in 2023 and beyond.

“After evaluating the needs and wants of our community by gathering a significant amount of their feedback, we came to the clear conclusion that despite the success that our virtual programs have had, which delivered the highest revenues in our nine-year existence in 2021, there is an overwhelming desire from the vast majority of our C-Suite members to return to the in-person assembly format that Millennium was known for and that people loved pre-pandemic. Our entire team has been blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response to our initial in-person programs and cannot wait to bring our one-of-a-kind executive education and networking experience to even more cities across North America next year.” – Alex Sobol, Co-Founder, The Millennium Alliance

To check out the full list of in-person programs that Millennium is hosting, take a look at their growing calendar of assemblies.

For more information or to get in contact with The Millennium Alliance directly, contact info@mill-all.com

About The Millennium Alliance

The Millennium Alliance is a leading technology and business educational advisory firm with the sole mission of helping to transform the digital enterprise. Through our executive education platform, peer-to-peer learning model via our senior-level Assemblies, exclusive research projects conducted with Ivy League academic institutions, and our numerous digital properties, we have become a trusted source for real-world tangible learning and engagement opportunities for senior executives and their technology partners.

This all started in 2014 when our founders, Alex Sobol & Rob Davis decided to create the most intimate, high-level & exclusive in-person and online think tank for leaders in a wide variety of industries within both the private and public sectors: The Millennium Alliance. Since its founding, Millennium has built a strong reputation nationwide, now with thousands of engaged Members, and was recently featured on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies. The Millennium Alliance is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan.

Building upon its award-winning conference and executive education businesses, today, The Millennium Alliance continues to stay connected with its C-Suite Members and partners through intimate In-Person Assemblies, industry-leading Executive Education Opportunities, and by providing exclusive industry insights from the nation’s leading academics, business leaders, and technology providers via our 50+ annual events and The Digital Diary Content Platform, as well as the rapidly growing #MillenniumLive Podcast Series.

Is a Lack of Discoverability Costing You New Customers?

Contributed by Slickdeals

Although window shopping has always been one of the most delightful parts of the shopping experience, consumers are now more interested in finding new brands and products than ever. The Covid-19 pandemic was a major contributor to this focus on product discovery, as it altered the needs of the average consumer. Shopping lists changed forever, and they continue to evolve today. Pitney Bowes reported that even during the recent Delta surge, 55% of consumers said they expected to discover new brands and retailers while shopping online.

Yet, the element of discovery is oftentimes missing from online shopping journeys, which can make trying a new product or brand difficult for consumers. Likewise, without facilitating discovery– and more specifically, deal discovery– retailers and brands may find it difficult to inspire serendipitous purchases or replicate the “window shopping” experience for consumers.

Whereas consumers used to discover items in a multitude of ways in-store (through salesperson recommendations or high-impact merchandise displays, to name a few) the online shopper majorly relies on proactive online search and targeted ads (which are typically indicative of what they’re already aware of and shopping for). This makes it difficult for consumers to discover new brands or products that they didn’t know they needed.

However, by combining paid media with entertainment and social elements, brands can facilitate consumer discovery and new customer engagement.

Unlike other social commerce sites, Slickdeals sits organically at the intersection of social and commerce. Whereas traditional social media platforms shoehorn in a commerce experience (consider an ad in the middle of your friend’s Instagram story), users come to Slickdeals to talk exclusively about shopping, discover new brands and products, and purchase items they stumble upon in their deal feed. Through its mobile app, desktop site, and browser extension, Slickdeals facilitates discovery among a robust community of savvy shoppers.

Slickdeals’ unique discovery component yields repeat visitors and unplanned purchases. For example, in a 2019 survey, Slickdeals found that 85% of shoppers regularly found new products when browsing the site and 91% bought items they weren’t even searching for. And these shoppers are ready and willing to engage with different brands. Five of the top 10 most popular deal alerts created in 2021 did not mention a specific brand, indicating interest in a product with no brand or retailer in mind.

Additionally, discovering new products and the fear of missing out on a great deal keeps users coming back to Slickdeals, often multiple times a day. In 2021, 73% of total desktop visitors were flagged as returning shoppers while the mobile app saw a daily average of nearly 2 visits per unique visitor.

So, as social commerce continues to claim more of the shopping journey, it’s crucial for advertisers to facilitate discovery in a way that adds value to the consumer’s shopping experience and encourages engagement.

Click here to get in touch to learn more about how Slickdeals can help you brand or product get discovered by over 12M monthly users.

About Slickdeals

Slickdeals is the only shopping platform powered by millions of avid shoppers, where consumers interact to share and discover the most up-to-date information on online shopping deals and coupons. Through the power of human intelligence, Slickdeals has saved its 12 million savvy shoppers $10 billion by providing a forum for deal discovery and shopping discussion; as well as shopping tools such as its free Android or IOS app; its browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge; and its Slickdeals Cashback Rewards program. Slickdeals is one of the top ten most visited shopping sites in the U.S. per Similarweb.

For more information, visit: https://slickdeals.net/

Quantum Workplace: 2022 Organizational Culture Research Report

Contributed by Quantum Workplace

65% of employees say their company culture has changed since the start of the pandemic. Our latest research shows the link between culture, engagement, and retention. It will help organizational leaders rethink their approach to culture to shape foundation for business success.

Key Takeaways:

The most important elements of workplace culture
How culture impacts employee engagement & retention
The impact of remote/hybrid work on company culture
5 tips for creating a strong & engaging workplace culture

Make Culture Your Competitive Advantage

As the employee landscape continues to change it is important to rethink culture to ensure trust and communication across the organization can be sustained. Culture in the workplace affects every aspect of the employee and business lifecycle. Strategically listening to employees allows organizations to focus on what matters—building a strong foundation for employee engagement, performance, and development.

Read the full report here: https://bit.ly/3CFKQbJ

About Quantum Workplace

At Quantum workplace, they help leaders connect the dots between engagement and performance with intuitive and user-friendly tools including comprehensive and automated employee surveys; goal setting and tracking tools; peer-to-peer recognition; real-time feedback; continuous one on ones; smart talent reviews; and, robust people analytics.

With 9,000 organizations surveyed annually, Quantum Workplace has grown into North America’s largest database of employee engagement data—through its core engagement and performance platform and nationally recognized Best Places to Work program. Quantum Workplace’s engagement, performance, and intelligence solutions help them power teams to stay focused engaged and deliver powerful business results.

For more information: visit: https://www.quantumworkplace.com/

Meet Quantum Workplace at Our Transformational CHRO & Benefits Leadership Assembly November 9-10 in New Orleans

Join their roundtable discussion on approaching culture with confidence in uncertain times & meet their experts Mark Rathouz, Account Executive & Todd Pernicek, Senior Insights Analyst.Attendees will explore:

Why culture is key, especially in changing and uncertain times
Discuss how to design a powerful & magnetic culture in a new world of work
Learn how to leverage your culture for employee, team, and organizational success

#MillenniumLive Making Ordinary Customer Experiences Extraordinary

#MillenniumLive welcomes Mark Smith, VP of Digital Engagement Solutions at CSG. By channeling the power of all, our partners at CSG make ordinary customer and employee experience extraordinary. CSG is with you and your customers every step of the way and at every stage of the customer lifecycle. They consult on customer needs, design a front-facing customer experience and deliver the back-end systems to back it up and CX consultancy to continue fine-tuning and improving interactions and operations. Mark discusses ways to improve customer experience, the best way to centralize enterprise data, and how important executing journeys in real-time is.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts.

About CSG

CSG is a leader in innovative customer engagement, revenue management and payments solutions that make ordinary customer experiences extraordinary. Our cloud-first architecture and customer-obsessed mindset help companies around the world launch new digital services, expand into new markets, and create dynamic experiences that capture new customers and build brand loyalty. For over 40 years, CSG’s technologies and people have helped some of the world’s most recognizable brands solve their toughest business challenges and evolve to meet the demands of today’s digital economy with future-ready solutions that drive exceptional customer experiences. With more than 5,000 employees in over 20 countries, CSG is the trusted technology provider for leading global brands in telecommunications, retail, financial services and healthcare. Our solutions deliver real-world outcomes to more than 900 customers in over 120 countries.

To learn more visit https://www.csgi.com/

How SoFi Drives New User Acquisition with Slickdeals

Contributed by Slickdeals

Founded in 2011, SoFi is an American online personal finance company based in San Francisco, California. They provide a vast array of financial products including student and auto loan refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, and more to their 3.5 million members.

In 2019, SoFi launched its SoFi Money product. Looking to drive new user acquisition and promote awareness of their newest product, they partnered with Slickdeals to activate high-intent users and establish a presence within the Slickdeals shopping community.

Activating an Engaged Audience

Slickdeals users are financially-savvy and are always looking for ways to maximize their savings and diversify their portfolios.

4.5M Slickdeals shoppers have an affinity for banking services and are avid investors
Slickdeals visitors are 1.8x more likely to visit Personal Finance websites than the average internet user
1.3M Slickdeals shoppers are in-market for a financial or investment service

Knowing that Slickdeals users have an appetite for personal finance deals, the Slickdeals team used its resources to determine what type of offer would be most compelling in the community-based forums.

The team determined that an incentivized promotion, using Slickdeals Rewards as a vehicle for cashback, would receive positive feedback from the community. To stay competitive, Slickdeals recommended offering a $75 cashback bonus when users created and funded an account with $125.

Leveraging the Power of Community

The first $75 bonus offer posted in May 2021 utilized Slickdeals Rebates as a vehicle for cashback. The deal moved through the Slickdeals forums, achieving “Popular” status with no paid media promotions.

After sunsetting Slickdeals Rebates in June 2021, The team re-launched the same SoFi offer in July via Slickdeals’ new Rewards program. The Slickdeals Rewards program allowed for better tracking & attribution and delivered a more seamless user experience for shoppers to receive the $75 bonus.

This time, SoFi’s offer reached Frontpage status with no paid media promotions.

By maintaining a consistent presence in the Slickdeals forums, SoFi was able to boost brand awareness while the Slickdeals Rewards program made it more feasible to expand the longevity of the offer.

Over the course of 8 months, the deal post remained live and generated over 1,700 account signups.

The Results

Drove new user acquisition: 249% increase in SoFi Money accounts created across the Slickdeals ecosystem
Increased site traffic: 418% increase in outbound clicks across the Slickdeals ecosystem
Boosted SoFi’s market share: 28% increase in market share on Slickdeals
Improved brand awareness: 72% increase in “sofi” search term on Slickdeals

Read the full case study here: https://bit.ly/3UGbgSR

About Slickdeals

For more informatiom, visit: https://slickdeals.net/

#MillenniumLive on Healthcare in America with Dr. Jonathan Gruber

Alex’s next guest on the #MillenniumLive podcast series is Dr. Jonathan Gruber, Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992 (30 years). In this episode, they discuss the healthcare landscape today, including universal healthcare and MIT’s role in leading the charge.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts.

About Dr. Jonathan Gruber

Dr. Jonathan Gruber is a Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992 (30 years). He is also the Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the former President of the American Society of Health Economists. A member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the Econometric Society.

He has published more than 175 research articles, has edited six research volumes, and is the author of Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text, Health Care Reform, a graphic novel, and Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revived Economic Growth and the American Dream (with Simon Johnson). In 2006 Dr. Gruber received the American Society of Health Economists Inaugural Medal for the best health economist in the nation aged 40 and under.

During the 1997-1998 academic year, he was on leave as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department. And from 2003-2006 he was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort (aka Romneycare), and became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort.

During 2009-2010 he served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration and worked with both the Administration and Congress to help craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). In 2011 he was named “One of the Top 25 Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time” by Slate Magazine. In both 2006 and 2012 he was rated as one of the top 100 most powerful people in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare Magazine.