At Tuck, there’s a lot of emphasis on understanding other people’s goals within a team and how to extract the best work from each person. The soft skills and the collaboration I learned at Tuck have helped me be successful.

Just two years ago, many observers doubted 23andMe’s future, even though in 2008 it had been named one of Time magazine’s “best inventions of the year.” By spitting into a tube and mailing it in to the genetic testing company, customers could glean a wide array of information hidden in their DNA. But the company soon hit a regulatory roadblock.

Maggie Misztal T’14, hired to serve as 23andMe’s product manager for customer reports, took the job at a challenging time. The FDA had recently issued 23andMe a stern letter shutting down its ability to provide people with health information related to their DNA, restricting them to ancestry information alone. The FDA needed to be convinced that direct-to-consumer genetic tests were providing accurate information in a manner that could be easily understood by the consumer without interpretation by a medical professional.

While demonstrating clinical validity was relatively straightforward, proving that consumers could understand genetic data on their own was unprecedented. And that was Misztal’s charge, with the future of the company in no small part depending on her. Misztal was exactly where she wanted to be. She had come to Tuck wary of returning to the peripatetic lifestyle she experienced in three years at General Electric and two at Deloitte.
           
Past projects at Deloitte and a summer internship at Medtronic had piqued her interest in health care technology, so like most students, she embarked on a series of conversations with people in the industry. She kept returning to one core idea: “What got me excited was this theme of patients becoming consumers of health care and people being more vested in taking care of themselves, but also wanting more information,” she says. “I narrowed my search to companies that were putting more decision-making power in the hands of people so they can take better care of themselves.”
           
As product manager for consumer reports, Misztal worked with scientists, designers, and engineers to retool the old reports and validate them to the FDA through formal user testing. Misztal’s role has been to distill down complex genetic concepts to layperson’s level and deliver the genomic information customers want to know in a way they can understand. Her team does in-person and phone interviews with consumers, sits behind two-way mirrors observing would-be customers, sends out follow-up surveys, and records screen video from user sessions. Misztal identifies the type of research needed and the questions to ask users. She also analyzes and interprets the results.

In October 2015, their work paid off when the FDA approved 23andMe’s carrier screening reports for several dozen genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease. Misztal now oversees these reports, as well as those over which the FDA does not claim oversight: findings for ancestry, basic physical traits, and wellness.

In July, Misztal oversaw the launch of a new saturated fat and diet report, which helps identify people who are strongly prone to obesity when they consume high-fat foods. Her team is continually working on adding new reports, and she is actively involved in what those will be. “We want to put out things that are valuable, not reports that are like horoscopes for people’s health,” says Misztal. “Science has to be the foundation of what we report.”

23andMe’s business model includes more than data reporting. With permission, it uses hundreds of thousands of its customer genomes in research to make new genetic discoveries. In August, for example, it announced the discovery of 15 new genetic variants linked to major depression based on the genomes of 450,000 customers.

The company hopes discoveries like these will eventually become FDA-approved customer reports. Similarly, 23andMe is in ongoing talks with the FDA that Misztal hopes will lead to new reports on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and breast cancer.

“Being a non-technical project manager, a lot of the value I bring is my ability to work with all different types of people and build a culture around that,” says Misztal. “At Tuck, there’s a lot of emphasis on understanding other people’s goals within a team and how to extract the best work from each person. The soft skills and the collaboration I learned at Tuck have helped me be successful.”