Product Management at ALIS
By 2030, all baby boomers (U.S. citizens born between 1946 - 1960) will be over the age of 65, over 20% of the total population. As our boomer parents age, the need for better care management across a range of needs and experiences will continue to grow. Assisted living facilities (which can house independent living, assisted living, memory care, and rehab individuals) must cater to many different levels of cognition, physical aptitude and health of their residents.
I worked at ALIS from 2022-2025, and as a product manager, was in charge of a team working to provide solutions for billing, sales, and family engagement staff in assisted living communities using ALIS to manage their populations.
The Business of Assisted Living
Assisted living communities are many businesses wrapped into one: hospitality managers, healthcare providers, accountants, business office managers, sales representatives, and family engagement coordinators.
Sales teams must be competitive, working to maintain occupational numbers in the buildings and ensuring the future of the company. As our national population ages, communities are now newly competitive - offering benefits and amenities at different price points for different types of customers and financial situations. Gone are the days of dreading the thought of putting mom and dad “in a home” - now, communities offer spas, swimming pools, 24/7 concierge services, and dedicated teams devoted to enriching the lives of their residents.
Billing teams generate invoices and take payments, and are responsible for generating reporting for corporate teams, confirming occupancy and A/R data. They also manage accounts of residents who receive some level of state-pay insurance (whether that shows up as VA benefits, Medicaid, or Medicare).
Family Engagement teams must ensure that family members are not left in the dark on their resident’s welfare. Engagement team members must track the needs of the resident and report any concerning changes back to the family if action must be taken, or even just to suggest changes to the resident’s daily schedule that could improve quality of life.
User Issue:
Product Opportunity:
The team could have spent weeks going back and forth on what to add and what to leave on the cutting room floor. Instead, because the user experience was already so frayed and sales associates were checking so many places, the team moved forward on putting together an MVP of a “dashboard” for sales folks with only our existing modules and data in ALIS. Consolidating the disparate modules into easy-to-read widgets, we created a helpful tool for sales associates to check in on their daily tasks and activities across the platform.
Product Management Lesson:
As product manager, the hardest part of this project was cutting bells and whistles that would have added unnecessary development time. When doing competitive analysis, I found many CRM platforms that seemed to have it all, with fancy analytics tools that ALIS didn’t offer in the same way. Rather than add these, I chose to rely on ALIS’s robust CRM functionality, and build a solid foundation for future cool analytics tools we can add as we build the dashboard out.
