The setting
is a marketplace and software platform that connects patients, health insurers and independent providers of mental health care across the United States. is the software therapists and psychiatric prescribers use to accept insurance and run their practice.
Activation declines need a shared explanation before recovery work becomes a bet on the wrong stage.
Porting signals protect the path from existing patients, while credentialing signals protect the path to an eligible first appointment.
Who you’d be doing this for
“I finished the steps I was given, but my first patient still isn't on the calendar.”
Andre Hernandez · Independent Therapist · a character in this brief
A newly credentialing clinician trying to bring an existing caseload onto the platform.
What is at stake
New clinicians are missing first appointments after completing early onboarding steps. You must decide whether AI drafts explanations from evidence or only assembles the evidence for PM review.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- porting recovery vs credentialing recovery
- one clear explanation vs competing candidate causes
- shared platform reuse vs activation-specific learning
- cohort detail vs stable metric definitions
Why Headway
Provider activation determines whether clinicians who join to accept insurance reach a healthy volume of appointments.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 104 more at Headway, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Headway. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Product Manager (opens in a new tab)
- Therapists spend a staggering amount of time on administrative tasks — credentialing, documentation, scheduling, billing — instead of with their patients.
- We're using AI to automate clinical workflows, simplify complex insurance requirements, and give providers more time to do what they came here to do.
- Staff Product Manager, Provider Activation (opens in a new tab)
- Build the strategy to drive the volume of activated providers and appointments per new provider, leading to growth in provider retention and LTV
- Drive porting: the tools, flows, and incentives that help providers bring their existing patients to Headway
- Staff Product Manager, Monetization and Pricing (opens in a new tab)
- Build the experimentation infrastructure: Work with Engineering and Data to create systems that enable rapid, controlled pricing experiments across geographies and segments.
- Your mission: build pricing into a durable, experimentation-driven lever for growth and revenue.
- Senior Product Manager, Supervisory Billing (opens in a new tab)
- Maximize the operational efficiency that will be required to scale this product to thousands of customers and appointments
- Staff Product Manager, Growth Automation & Enablement (opens in a new tab)
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
Similar problems at other organizations
Like this one, each of these turns on deciding on evidence that's still thin.
Creator feedback about publication setup is arriving faster than PMs can reconcile it into recurring problems.
You must decide where the AI's grouping of that feedback stops and where a PM's judgment begins on whether a cluster is a real setup barrier.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Headway’s Headway for Providers, written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Some clinicians discover a patient’s needs exceed their specialty only after care has begun.
You must weigh earlier routing signals against the risk of overstepping clinical judgment.
High-risk scores are clustering around complex psychiatric visits, and the reporting deadline is 10 business days away.
You must weigh payer-facing risk coverage against the cost of incorrectly challenging legitimate care.
Unsupported coaching prompts are appearing in prescriber notes that already contain the requested documentation.
You have to weigh faster recalibration against evidence that genuine quality findings still surface.
Other problems with a similar purpose
In each of these, as in this one, the aim is to turn fragmented, conflicting operational signals into one clear, actionable call.
Checking customers retry account actions when the mobile app and backend services tell an incomplete story.
You decide where the AI's trace of an incident stops and where the on-call engineer's confirmation of the cause begins.
Conflicting updates are letting carrier-integration risks reach readiness reviews too late.
You must decide which dependency changes the workflow sends straight to a Program Manager as uncertain and which it records as flags for the readiness record.
Regional production can stop while aggregate workspace activity still looks healthy.
You must decide where the ranking stops and the CSM starts: which signals set an account's place in the order, and which the CSM reads for themselves before choosing what to say.
