Balancing Growth and Efficiency in CareOps

I spoke with Gaurai, Head of Care Operations, and Laura, VP of Product at Daybreak Health about scaling mental health.

Here are the main takeaways:

(1) Creating a supportive environment for clinicians is critical. Clinicians are not machines. They are the cornerstones of why you exist as a company.  It's vital to create a community where they feel supported and understood, as this leads to better engagement and retention. When clinicians feel valued, it doesn’t just improve their well-being; it directly impacts patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes, and ultimately drives the company’s growth.

(2) Don't burden your care team with customizations. While custom requests might win contracts, they often destroy efficiency. So when a customer asks for customization, the product team starts with “Why?” and often find a simpler solution. For example, when a customer wanted more check-ins, what they really needed was visibility, solved by creating a real-time dashboard—no extra burden on clinicians.

(3) Salesforce Healthcloud wasn’t working for their providers, so they scrapped it. Daybreak initially built their EHR on Salesforce Health Cloud, but it was so cumbersome that providers stopped logging in. So, they decided to built their own EHR from scratch, using composable technology to create something that truly works.(

(4) Fail-fast experiments bring freedom and focus. At Daybreak, everything is an experiment. This mindset was crucial when refining their staffing model for a new health plan. By testing different approaches, like moving from a W-2 model to a hybrid 1099 model, they quickly found what worked best by embracing failures as part of the process.

‍(5) KPI-driven product management should be the norm. At previous companies, product was about checking boxes—adding features without measuring impact. At Daybreak, they’ve flipped the script, always asking, “What will this achieve?. If you don’t adopt this KPI-first mindset early, it becomes a nightmare to change later.

The full recording is packed with even more insights on building resilient operations and effective teams. Don’t miss out—watch the replay here.