Flatiron Health Leadership & Management

What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced?

My management approach could be described as empowering leadership. Rather than micromanaging the “how,” I’m focusing on providing the necessary context and support to make sure the team can make efficient progress toward our goals. This approach is built on a foundation of trust in execution and giving people the autonomy to try new things.

An important component of this is focussing on feedback and growth. Regular feedback is part of our overall management culture and happens day to day, during one-on-ones and in dedicated sessions during the year.

Which forum or ritual keeps priorities and expectations clear?

We maintain alignment through a multi-level system of rituals that connect long-term vision to daily tasks. At a high level, yearly OKRs serve as our foundational business objectives, which are further refined during quarterly planning sessions. This ensures the broader strategy is translated into actionable goals for the team every few months.

To keep these priorities front of mind during the work week, we kick off our sprint planning sessions by revisiting our high-level goals and deriving sprint goals, which are then also pinned in our team chat.

What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?

The team is most excited about our strategic shift from execution to enablement. We are moving away from having to manually execute individual, complex data operations and toward a broader vision for scaling our impact strategically. To make this a reality, we reserve dedicated time for engineering projects specifically designed to increase our velocity, allowing the team to focus on the bigger picture rather than repetitive tasks.

One central metric we use to track this progress is the automation level of operational work. This metric serves as a direct indicator of our success in reducing manual repetitive work. By seeing this number increase, the team has tangible proof that we are successfully shifting our engineering time away from maintenance and toward higher-impact enablement projects.

Flatiron’s leadership and management approach helps ensure technology for cancer research is shaped by the people closest to the work and the patients it is meant to serve.

“In this way, my team brings a holistic perspective when directly supporting all of Flatiron’s cross-functional teams innovating, designing, and maintaining technology to accelerate cancer clinical research. We strive to inject the voice of the investigators, trial sponsors, site research teams, and of course, the patients, into everything we do.”