On July 6th, 2022, at 7:24 in the morning, I was sitting alone in a teletherapy waiting room. Kiki, our mascot, was keeping me company on the screen: "Looks like it's just you, yourself, and y'all?... and me? Hold tight!"
My patient that morning was Sam. Sam was 7, had been born at 28 weeks, and had recently been diagnosed with ADHD. He got distracted easily, especially during tasks he didn't choose, and was only following single-step directions so far. He loved dinosaurs.
Except, Sam didn't exist.
Bethany, a clinician who worked on our team at the time, had created his patient profile for me, and in a few minutes, she would log on and play him.
A couple of months earlier, I had presented a slide to the whole company called "Therapist for a Day."
The idea was simple. Every developer would be paired with a clinician. The clinician would sketch out a plan for a 15-minute session with a patient in their field and explain the thinking behind it. The developer would then build out the details in Ambiki (the resources, the activity lists, the visual schedule) and run the session over our own teletherapy platform.
The developer would play the therapist, and the clinician would play the patient. Here is how I explained the why on that slide: "It's one thing to hear about what a therapist does, it is another thing to actually try it yourself."
Bethany's plan for Sam had three goals: follow two-step classroom directions, practice visual scanning, and maintain an appropriate distance from classmates while walking in line. So I built a five-step visual schedule: Warm Up, Dinosaur Maze, Let's Play a Game, Two-Step Directions, and a dinosaur video clip as a reward. I created a maze PDF and lists of two-step directions for Sam to practice.
I started building the visual schedule at 8:23 AM. By 8:36 AM, I had filed two bugs. One still makes me wince. After saving a visual schedule, you could add more cards. They appeared on the screen, and there was no save button, so you assumed they were saved. Refresh the page, and they disappeared. The only way to save them was to open Settings and click Save there.
Kurt fixed the bug that same day, and it shipped two days later. But it had taken just thirteen minutes of actually using our product to discover something we'd completely overlooked.
That experience reinforced something we've become much more intentional about over the years at Ambiki: investing in QA and finding opportunities to dogfood our own products whenever we can.
We've always spent a lot of time talking to therapists and learning from their experiences. But even with a great QA team and constant customer feedback, some things only become obvious when you're the one doing the work.
If you build tools for other people, find opportunities to step into their shoes and use what you've built.
Bring a dinosaur maze.