Meet the Team: Jenny Chu, Head of Product

Jenny Chu is the Head of Product at Eucalyptus. The Product team owns and drives the digital experience of Eucalyptus brands, from the patient experience to the tools and portals that our doctors, health coaches and pharmacists use. The Product's team is responsible for building a seamless, high touch, high quality healthcare experience across all of our Brands: Kin, Pilot, Juniper, Software and Normal.

Hey Jenny, tell us a little about yourself.

Hi! I'm Jenny, Head of Product at Eucalyptus. I joined as the first product manager on the team less than 2 years ago. I started my career in generalist roles, then focused on product design before eventually accidentally falling into product managment across early stage startups and Atlassian.

In my spare time, I do one of three things (1) explore new food places (2) play badminton or (3) draw or watercolour.

Why did you become a PM?

So I didn't intentionally try to become a product manager. I was just generally interested in building products and the process behind it.

My first product management role was by luck. I was cold e-mailing a bunch of places to get UX design experience. Finally, one person responded from an agency, and while they did not have roles open for me, they forwarded me to another company in their office. One way or another, I turned up to an interview and they hired me as a product manager. This is actually how I met Tim, our CEO, who worked in the same company as me.

Since then, I felt really lucky to be in this role. I am motivated by learning, and this is probably the perfect role for me. You always have something to learn because product management across industries, company cultures and stages is so different.

What do you do as Head of Product?

Driving the vision and strategy for the product, and ensuring we all have alignment on that. That would include building systems for the teams to feel empowered and autonomous, and making sure we're aligned. Beyond this, I try to foster a good product culture as well through coaching, principles and rituals that help bring teams together.

What has been the most challenging part about your role?

Being able to respond to the needs of the company at different stages of its growth. I have to be really proactive about blockers, or issues that may pop up as a result of a high growth startup such as escalation and unblocking teams.

Finally, as the team grows, it's super challenging to keep a pulse across all the functions to understand how things are going.

What's the coolest project you've been a part of?

Definitely the project where we unified all of our backend and technology so we can support all of our brands on one platform. It gives us the ability to launch as many brands as possible with minimal effort and maintanence. We get to focus all of our engineering efforts into the patient experience as a result.

Kin, our second brand, took 3-6 months to build, Software took us about 2 months and our latest brand, Juniper, took us around 2-3 weeks.

3 awesome things about my role are:

1. Having the opportunity to think about the future and create the vision on how Euc can make a tangible impact on Aussie healthcare

2. Being able to manage and mentor an amazing group of product designers and managers and see them take on feedback and grow

3. The fact that we tangibly improve the quality of life of people

What is something you have learnt while being at Eucalyptus?

If you don't have all of the answers (in startups, you often don't), but you have a high performing team that can ship quickly and learn — then do it. Like, do enough research and insights, then have conviction to do it, and if you fail, at least you learn quickly.

What's your favourite Eucalyptus value?

"If not you, then who?"

We're one of the first disruptors in healthcare of Australia — we are all doing this for the first time. We can't leverage on previous experiences, or other companies, because there are none. So whenever I feel like I am not good enough, or have impostor syndrome, I always think about that value.

What's your favourite Eucalyptus moment?

So, I joined Eucalyptus just before COVID lockdown happened, and then we all went remote. I spent a couple of weeks in this really small, old office. There were times when the pipes leaked and we had to do meetings on the stairwell because we ran out of space. During lockdown, we raised Series B, tripled the team and had the funding to move into a new office.

On our first day back in the office, the founders made us meet up in the old office. It was clear that maybe 20% of the company could fit into the office? We then walked all the way to the other side of the CBD to the new office, and the contrast between the old and new was incredible. We finally had meeting rooms, nice new desks and so much space to play around with.

It was that moment where it really solidified a new chapter for Eucalyptus — that we were no longer a scrappy startup.

What advice would you give to someone thinking about applying to Eucalyptus?

Eucalyptus is a great place if you are someone that is passionate about making change, and have the drive to do so. Here, you're empowered to "just go for it" and not get told what to do. We're looking for self-starters!

So if you identify as one, check out our careers page, as we're always hiring. 😉