213. How to manage a genius, with Steve Roest, CEO of PocDoc

0:00Al Elliott:What if you want to hire people who are genuinely brilliant? I'm talking about the top 1 % of experts, the PhD scientists, the AI engineers who could probably code circles around most of us. Well, that is hard enough. But how are you supposed to manage these geniuses? The conventional wisdom says you need to be the smartest person in the room to lead great teams. But what if that could be completely wrong? Our guest today manages some of the cleverest people on the planet. My name is Steve Roost and I am the CEO and co-founder of PocDoc, which is one of the UK's fastest growing health tech businesses.

0:32Al Elliott:Now, Steve openly admits that he's not the most technical person on his team, yet he's successfully leading scientists and engineers who are developing cutting edge medical diagnostics. Steve believes being the non-technical founder is actually his superpower. So if you've ever felt intimidated by the expertise around you or wondered how to hire and manage brilliant people without micromanaging them, this episode is for you. Join us today as we discover how the most innovative companies in the world manage their technical teams. Welcome to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture.

1:06We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne and I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.

1:14Al Elliott:My name is Al, I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. After this very short break, we'll hear how our personal tragedy in Steve's life set him on this mission and why he wants to prevent anyone else going through this same heartbreak. Does your experience with AI sound a little like this? You prompt for 20 minutes, the output is polished, is confident and is completely flipping useless. Well, that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. Mm-hmm. But you know what does know something about your business? HubSpot. HubSpot's AI. It works with your actual customer data.

1:46Every interaction, every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it.

1:55Al Elliott:Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

2:03Welcome back. Let's go and join Al and hear Steve's story. My name is Steve Roost and I am the CEO and co-founder of PocDoc, which is one of the UK's fastest growing health tech businesses. I'm also the creator and host of one of Europe's largest health tech podcasts, which is called the Health Tech Hour. And in my spare time, of which I, to be fair, don't have quite a lot, I run something called the Last Friday Club, where I help entrepreneurs in a free safe space to answer any challenges. I give up the last Friday of every month to help entrepreneurs.

2:36Al Elliott:I think you admitted to me when we chatted before that you're not necessarily the cleverest person in the room. So how do you manage all these geniuses? Sure. So I don't have a clinical background or a healthcare background, which is definitely true. PocDoc's initial area of focus was cardiovascular disease, so the prevention of heart attack and strokes. Um, my passion for that, I guess, comes from when I was 14 and my dad was basically the same age that I am now, almost to the day. He had a huge stroke due to undiagnosed cardiovascular disease. So I've always, it was catastrophic for him, as you'd expect, catastrophic for our family.

3:15Um, all kinds of bad stuff happened as a result. And it, it meant that I had a really deep understanding of that disease area. so while i wasn't a healthcare professional i really understood that use case from a very personal patient perspective which was very helpful and that really created the drive for the healthy heart check our pocdocs healthy heart check is now the number one diagnostic test on the high street it's available in boots super drug well and it delivers in nine minutes the equivalent of the nhs health check just using one of our rapid test kits and the pocdoc app but to answer your kind of original question.

3:54I'm not sure I've necessarily ever been the smartest guy in the room. I'm not sure I've ever been the dumbest guy in the room either. I think that what I've learned through my career of having done multiple ventures is you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to ask the right questions. And actually, when you're dealing with highly technical, complex, multifaceted problems that need to be solved highly collaboratively, it actually isn't beneficial to be the quote unquote smartest person in the room because that doesn't actually necessarily create the right environment to solve those problems in the best way and so you know we've developed cutting-edge biochemistry we've developed cutting-edge applied AI to transform a smartphone image of a rapid test into a fully quantified cardiovascular risk assessment.

4:46I'm an expert in neither of those places, but I am capable and confident enough to challenge the individuals in those groups and ask common sense questions and challenge them to sort of establish why we should do one thing and why we should not do the other. What I've seen consistently with highly technical groups, highly technical individuals, is that there's often a default to perceived wisdom in those groups because of the incredible level of qualification and experience it takes to get to be proficient in those specialties. And often it's a bit of like wood for the trees issue. So under no circumstances am I in my R &D group saying, well, you know, this is how you dilute samples and this is how you run, you know, experiments.

5:39And this is what we do with the freeze dryer and things like that. Like that's definitely not what's happening, but I can set questions and goals, um, and challenge them and help them solve problems, um, in a way that they might not necessarily be able to do themselves. So I'm, I'm a, I'm a huge advocate for, um, technical businesses to have senior people that aren't technical or don't have technical backgrounds as well, right? You can't run an R &D group without someone that's highly qualified in that scientific area or clinical area. I'm definitely not saying that, but having that blend at the top is really helpful.

6:14So I'm the non-technical co-founder, if you want to put it like that. And my two other co-founders are both scientists. So I come from a commercial business background. They come from a scientific background. I've become a lot more scientifically literate they've become a lot more commercially literate that's how I would explain that one so right from the start Steve's challenging this idea that you need to be the most qualified person to lead experts what's important is how he frames it he's not saying technical knowledge doesn't matter he's saying the role of a leader is fundamentally different and Steve's story goes deeper than just management philosophy his motivation is deeply personal and I think that's really important for understanding how he approaches leadership.

6:57Let's hear about why he chose a business route rather than becoming a scientist himself.

7:02Al Elliott:Can we just go back to the point which I know is not a great point to go back to but after your dad had his stroke you obviously read up on it you learned a lot about it why didn't you go down a technical route why didn't you become a clinician or a scientist? It's a really, really good question. I think from a young age, from the point at which my dad's stroke happened, my mum became his sort of default carer. I mean, he was in hospital for a really long time and he was bedridden for an even longer period of time. And so we, my sister and I, who was two years younger than me, was sort of left to our own devices for a few years.

7:43I was really focused on following sort of, I guess, my dad's footsteps. So my dad, in the 90s, this is sort of when I became conscious of what he did for a job, I guess. He was in and around all of the telco space, which is what the internet was called back then. And so he started and ran a number of those early online ventures where you put the CD in the machine. He ran CompuServe, if anyone listening remembers CompuServe. And so, you know, we used to have TV crews over the house filming all of these different random things. You know, I remember they came over one time and we had one of the first ever internet through the TV boxes, which was just such a poor product.

8:23It was just completely unusable. It was horrendous. But it was sort of now seeing what Netflix is and it sort of actually wasn't, it was sort of like this very, very initial version, but this was all on a dial-up modem, so it just didn't work. And then after he had his stroke, he was out of the workforce for a while. And the first job that he could get coming back really was the CEO of this troubled startup. He was the first CEO that the founders had hired. they'd raised a million dollars as a series a right so just put that in perspective a series a as a million dollars and um uh they weren't really making any progress to market they had huge issues they had all kinds of stuff but their tech was really good that business was a business called shazam so he was the first ceo of shazam and um back when there was no smartphones this was all pre this was years pre-smartphone and um so i did my work experience ripping cds off so that they could build up their music library and things like that.

9:24So I was always really, we used to have venture capitalists over, my mom would cook them dinner and things like that. So it was a really weird childhood in some ways, very good in some ways, but otherwise definitely non-standard. But it made me realize that I found the elements of high risk, high reward that you could get within tech, whether it was a startup or not necessarily a startup, but that sort of high growth industry where you're willing to trade time and effort and pension effectively against a highly non-linear accelerated route of growth. I was totally fine with that trade. Like I was completely fine.

10:05I mean, even when I was a kid, I knew from an early age that I could work in a way that other people couldn't work or wouldn't work. And so, um, not all the time, you know, like I've, I've been quite public about the fact that I failed my first year at Oxford because I didn't work hard enough. After that, I worked really, really hard. So it wasn't like I was some beast the whole time, but I could look around and realized that I was able to work harder than other people were if I really cared. And I sort of self-selected for industries that valued that. My claim to fame, so to speak is that I'm I think I'm still the only person in college history to have failed their first year and ended with a first with distinction so I flamed out in my first year because I I came from a state school um and a sort of inner city state school um and it was a really horrible school experience for me I mean it was it was awful um but got to Oxford super happy had had like, you know, the sort of three to five years leading up to that was this very turbulent, difficult period of time at home with my dad after I was 14.

11:20And it was a very, very strange existence. Got to Oxford, had this huge freedom, also got to Oxford and realized that the gulf between my education and everyone else's education was enormous. I mean, it was talk about imposter syndrome, I was completely blown away. You know, like I, I was dealing with people with, with intellects that were just like a, like a, you know, a mystery to me. I mean, it was insane. And so for the first time in my whole life before or since I just stuck my head in the sand. You know, I was a rower before I became the captain of my college rowing club. I, you know, I went into the social life piece and strangely enough, I failed my first year.

12:07Nearly got kicked out. And actually, weirdly, this is kind of funny, but every single person I spoke to, so my tutors, my dad, quite a lot of my friends from home, who else, quite a few other people, they said, you're not Oxford material, mate. Look, you tried it, didn't work. You're a state school kid. Look, good on you. Even my dad told me to quit. He was like, just lower your expectations. just just there's no harm you know because he got kicked out of university at the end of his first year or second year and i sort of spent the summer thinking it through my girlfriend broke up with me as well from oxford as well which sucked at the time and then um i just thought you know what i'm not having this like i'm not gonna i'm not gonna quit i've never quit i'm not quitting so i studied scrape through um scrape through my research and then from there was sort of off at the races really

12:59Al Elliott:This is such a classic trait for an entrepreneur. When everyone tells you to quit, you dig in. Now, it doesn't always work out, but when it does, it's a personal victory because entrepreneurs love to prove the world wrong. They absolutely do. And early exposure to startups and these high growth environments have absolutely shaped Steve's risk tolerance. He discovered that he could work harder than most people when he really cared about something. That's such a crucial trait for leading innovation teams. But here is the key question. If you're not the technical expert, if you don't always understand the work that your guys do, how do you actually lead these teams day to day?

13:35Al Elliott:So at Oxford, you were surrounded by people who you felt perhaps had got a better education or that you perceived maybe knew more than you. You've now surrounded yourself deliberately with people who are experts in a narrow field. How much do you need to know as a leader about what they do to help them or to guide them or to lead them? That is a really, really good question. And I think that it's not necessarily, I think that's a question that I ask myself continuously as I seek to improve. And the job of a CEO and founder is to help the company win. I think the thing that I fall back on is that the first thing is that these groups with highly technical people do not need you to tell them how to do their job.

14:22So if you have an AI engineer and you are telling them how to code a model, they aren't very good at AI. That's the reality. Similarly, if I have an R &D scientist and I'm explaining to them how to plan and run an experiment to develop a new piece of biochemistry, that's not right. That person is not the right person for that role. Or you as a leader are massively overstepping your boundaries. The only exception to that, for example, is there are many technical businesses, scientific businesses, where the CEO or senior leader is an expert in that field. But that person then ultimately is the head of that group.

15:06They're not necessarily acting like a CEO. They're more acting like the head of that group. And that's okay. And that can work really well. And there's loads of examples of that working really super well. Like, for example, Bill Gates is a great example in Microsoft. He was awesome at coding. So he ran, effectively, an engineering group, which is really good. Congrats. That works really well. In our business where we've got multiple different departments that all have to come together to build a medical device, which is multifaceted, that's not really very practical. And that's also the same way in many other places.

15:36So the first thing is that they don't need you to do their job for them. And if they do, they're probably not right or good enough. The second thing is they don't know, for the most part, the overall vision of where you're trying to get to. Okay. Because they're in their piece of the puzzle, trying to deliver on what you're asking them to do. When I'm talking about this, I mean, predominantly technical businesses that are trying to solve technical, scientific engineering challenges. So your job isn't, you have to appreciate that if you haven't explained to them how these pieces come together, and if there's no proactive plan about how these pieces come together they will not do that themselves because they're so busy solving the thousands of hard problems that they need to solve to finalize the product or improve the product you can't expect them to have headspace to then also be great at inter-team operability this is just in my in my experience that doesn't happen so that then leads on to where i played the role which is one this is where i believe my value add in is in these things making sure that that there is a very clear set of goals that we're trying to get to with some timelines that are then broken down into a set of priorities that we think we need to achieve to achieve the goal because in in medical devices really you fail thousands of times in thousands of ways and then you sort of make it successful so it's actually about how you create a mentality and a process to fail slightly better each time and avoid going down rabbit holes that suck up time suck up cash and won't go anywhere so whenever something fails there might be a hundred reasons why it didn't work the ability that you have to um you have to try as this is what i try and do is help guide people into solving the problems that will help us move forward more quickly as opposed to getting distracted by things that aren't necessarily relevant.

17:43So I see the role of a sort of non-technical founder in a technical business as almost like the person that sets the overall plan and agenda and is responsible for challenging the people in those groups and helping them make better decisions about how they solve those problems but not solving those problems for themselves. This is such an important distinction that Steve is making, a leader's role isn't to tell experts how to do their job. It's to help them understand how their work fits into the bigger picture.

18:10Al Elliott:And this is a trap that a lot of owners and leaders tend to fall into. They either try to become technical experts themselves, which is obviously impossible at scale, or they are completely hands-off and provide no direction whatsoever. Steve's managed to find this middle ground where he's setting clear goals and challenging assumptions without overstepping into the technical details. But this approach does create its own challenges, particularly when you're dealing with brilliant people who might have very strong opinions about how things should be done. And the brutal truth is this, not all brilliant people are natural team players.

18:42Al Elliott:Academic environments often reward individual achievement over collaboration. So the challenge is to help these experts work as a team and it's not always easy. I mean, I'd even go further is like we have scientists, we have tech engineers, and then we have other people, if that makes sense. So it's not just tech sales. We have a whole scientific group as well. So there's a huge amount that has to come together there, but all of that would be useless unless we had understood from the beginning. And obviously this stuff, it does, it does move around. I'm not saying it doesn't, but at the beginning, we had a very clear idea about what our product needed to do to solve a real customer problem.

19:26And we hung everything, all of our design decisions, our innovation decisions, our technology decisions were hung off of that thesis. So they came after, we knew what our technology roughly could do conceptually, but we developed it to solve customer problems. We didn't develop the technology, then try and use it to solve customer problems. When I started in health, there were a few things that really struck me as really odd. One of them is referring to sales as funding and growth or revenue growth as adoption, right? I think those are almost like codes that some groups of people, some tribes of people prefer to use to distance themselves from the nitty gritty of actually selling.

20:17And sometimes that might be because they're not familiar with selling. Sometimes they're not comfortable with it. Sometimes they view it like a black box and someone just, you know, making it rain and things like that. But I think those kinds of distinctions are super unhelpful. So my background is purely in what was really deep experience in and around commercial B2B sales. So I really understand this this area deeply and that sort of forms some of the stuff that i help other entrepreneurs with particularly in technical companies um so i think the the way that we've built things at poc dog from from day one is that there's no there's no barriers between the groups first of all um obviously sales for example can't sell something that doesn't exist so particularly in medical devices so you can't you you can't history's littered with examples of companies that have salespeople out there selling vaporware that never materializes.

21:13So that's pointless. So we've been very clear that they're only able to sell what's actually available. Now, there might be some things that they talk about, oh, this is coming, this is coming, but that's a very clear rule set fundamentally. The second thing is, is I'm a huge believer, and this is the way I came up, is that the best salespeople are the people that understand the product the best. The really great elite sellers really understand every aspect of the product. So to your point around, do we let the scientists talk to the salespeople? Well, actually the salespeople sit at the center.

21:48So if you think about our tech stack, we've got physical microfluidics, we've got AI diagnostics, we've got a digital infrastructure that integrates back up with the patient record and integrates with risk assessment tools and does all kinds of other bells and whistles, connects people to treatment. And salespeople in our organization actually sit at the center of that and understand all of those aspects. Whereas if you're a specialist in R &D, you're desperately every day trying to solve 100 hard things that day. You probably don't have a lot of exposure to how we integrate back up with the patient record.

22:22But if you're a salesperson and you don't understand that element, then you're not going to be able to go and talk to the healthcare system about how that works. who actually they're in this very privileged position to get a really good overview of how all this stuff fits together. And then the final piece, if we go back to what we talked about before, businesses, not just PocDoc, businesses exist to solve customer pain. If you can't solve a pain for a customer, then I don't quite know what the longevity looks like for your business. And so actually salespeople are really that frontline of listening to customers, ensuring that the great technology that we've developed solves those issues for those customers and then feeding back any new problems or new things or new opportunities back into the business.

23:07So I'm a big believer, and I sort of write about this on LinkedIn quite a bit, about how we need to move past sales being this sort of quote-unquote dirty word. And that's why I don't like the use of funding instead of revenue or adoption. It sort of makes it a bit more childish. Welcome to the break.

23:26Al Elliott:Yes, my favorite part of the show. These two idiots have stopped talking. Yes, I want to tell you about my new favorite podcast. No, that's a lie. It's my old favorite podcast. I've been on this one for a while. Didn't know where that was going. It is called I Digress. It is hosted by Troy Sandage and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Yes, it's got shows that are under 30 minutes and I Digress helps eliminate complexity, complications and confusion in your business with frameworks and strategies that achieve scalable and sustainable success.

23:57Al Elliott:At least that's what it says here. And if you do want to hear a really personal story, go to episode 136. This is Troy's honest account of fatherhood, killing hustle culture, and what really matters when you stop performing and start living with intention. Listen to I Digress wherever you get your podcasts. That concludes the break. Let's return to the scheduled programming. Back to the studio.

24:23putting salespeople at the center makes perfect sense from a systems thinking perspective they're the ones who need to understand every component and how it all fits together for the

24:32Al Elliott:customer there is a problem though scientists and technical people want to solve complicated problems that's what they live for but businesses need to solve problems the customers have so we have this situation where sometimes the thing your technical people want to work on is something your customers don't actually want. Do you find that people who are working on very hard problems, that they might be a little afraid of actually going to market with it because that will then say nobody wants it? With the healthy heart check, I'll just talk about the healthy heart check. We knew quite a lot about the pathways that we were going to solve for the healthcare system before we started any development.

25:13So that is how you should build products and services. Now, sometimes you might be ahead of the curve and a lot of innovation is ahead of the curve, as in you're solving a problem that people might not realize that they needed quite yet. Like Uber, for example, solved an issue that we didn't realize we had, but it turns out, oh my goodness, did we have that problem? Right? We've really had that problem. But if you'd have asked at the time, I'm not sure necessarily many people would have landed on that spontaneously. So there is an element of that, but with the healthy heart check, we, um, we, we, we deliberately spent a huge amount of time on understanding the customer problem.