Oura Tech Squad Stories: Context Squad

Get2Know the Product Manager

Hi! I’m Alec, and I’m from Toronto. I’m a bit of an Oura veteran, meaning that I was here  before our big growth spree in 2020 - longer than many. I used to be a graphic designer and worked with magazines back in the day, in the early 2000s. I’m probably one of the few Product Managers with a UX background. When graphic design became a bit mundane for me, I got into data visualization and started learning about UX and Product Management. That led me to working with wellness wearable companies, like Interaxon - the makers of a brain sensing headband called Muse. I am really interested in working in the wellness industry and also solving problems that have never been solved before.

I first learned about Oura while I was doing competitive research on the wellness technology space. I was releasing several hybrid software/hardware products and got interested in the possibilities of Oura as a product. I started working in the Context Squad in May 2020. The Context Squad enables Oura Ring’s end user data gathering, analyzing, and visualization. We help Oura users better understand their data.

Now, I work in Product Management at Oura. Part of our job is charting the course, what’s the range of things we should work on, why this and why now, building business cases, customer feature requests, running user testing, and user and market research. The aim is to discover how to make Oura an even better health wearable. Product Management is also about articulating to the company why we have come to these conclusions, then building with the design team (how it looks, how it feels, what’s the experience), with data science (how the data is gathered and visualized), and development teams (how it works).

I love working in a space where I get to be involved in a product or feature from inception to delivery. 

The Context Squad

Our team is a diverse team of cross-functional experts working together towards our common purpose. We are all experts in our own fields, and it’s super fulfilling to work with similarly-minded people in different disciplines. We appreciate each others’ knowledge and work in unison across multiple countries.

This is us: 

Jukka, our Lead iOS Engineer (Finland)

Miska, our Data Scientist (Finland)

Jukka K, our Algorithm Engineer (Finland)

Janne, our UX Designer (San Francisco)

Alec, Product Manager (Toronto)

"My team is full of highly experienced professionals who I truly admire. Every individual has deep knowledge of their field and are easily approached." - Miska, Data Scientist (in the photo below)

Our team members are currently based in Helsinki, Oulu, Toronto, and Santa Barbara. We kick off our weeks together on Monday. We also have some other recurring blocker meetings within a work week. Working together is our norm, and we usually work together directly in specific files or on Slack. We are all working online, and it is not an obstacle for us to get the job done. Although we work successfully online we are still looking forward to meeting in person. 

What The Context Squad Actually Does

Our team answers the questions; How does everything in context affect your health, readiness, and sleep? If you've slept poorly or well, how can you improve or keep your healthy routines? How does a cool bedroom compare to a hot bedroom on your individual level? We aim to answer these questions to offer insights and valuable information to our customers based on different contextual features such as tags. Providing contextual cause and effect information to our customers distinguishes Oura from multiple competitors and allows our users to toe in to healthy lifestyle habits to improve their overall health.

The Context Squad is really about making sense of the data gathered from the ring to the customer - and literally giving them the context of how to analyse their personal data. It’s about marrying and defining data science and data visualization to provide interesting data and value to the end-user. Our team also defines how we collect more data from the ring, and also how we categorize our database. By categorizing the incoming data we can find unique user profiles who we can then serve better and create a more thorough feedback loop. This helps Oura’s tech teams to develop more personalized features for specific user profiles.

One of the features our Context Squad team has developed is “Automatic Activity Detection” - launched in 2021. By studying the data coming from the accelerometer in the ring, we could detect really great activity based data. We were able to detect that when hands going back and forth and the body going up and down in a certain pattern is aligned with what happens when you run. We could also detect that your body has higher horizontal acceleration when cycling. Or the movement of your hands when swimming or dancing. The more data we get in, the more we are able to create accurate algorithms to measure the activity.

"My role is to find the patterns and relationships between health and context. To answer the question, how does everything in your context affect your sleep. Additionally, my goal is to reduce the friction of providing contextual information. As an example we can reduce friction by recommending most probable events associated with certain sleep biometrics; You wake up on Saturday with very low scores and see: - Very high resting heart rate - Very low heart rate variability - Restful sleep = Alcohol. On the other hand we might see that it's a summer night, your body temperature has increased, you got a lot of light sleep and it was a pretty restless night; you probably slept in a hot bedroom that caused these symptoms.” - Miska, Data Scientist

Cross-team Collaboration at Oura

Due to the complexity of Oura’s tech ecosystem, we need to work in close collaboration across teams to deliver a great customer experience for end-users. Our squad provides the features that allow users to provide context to their lifestyle and habits. The team also uses the information to form a coherent image of the individuals' context and its effect on sleep, Readiness, and overall wellbeing. 

The work is linked to other teams in many ways. The Data & ML platform squad will provide the Context Squad with necessary data and tools that allows our team to use the gathered data in the most efficient way. The Health Squad provides the most accurate information about the users’ Sleep and Readiness that will be linked to contextual information, where we find patterns and causalities from. (Get to know more about our Health Squad in Tubi's blog). The Core Squad then deploys our developed algorithms to be used within the application. The Core Squad is responsible for the Oura app framework (all the stuff that the app has to have e.g. building media libraries).

Customer Centric Development Tackles Universal Challenges

The interesting challenge for our team is combining advanced data science, algorithms, and visualisation with a customer friendly product. There is a lot of data: half of the challenge is finding useful patterns within the data, and the other half is how to make the user data and goals comprehensible for the user themselves. In terms of complexity — it’s pretty easy to pick an individual’s personal data (predictable), but it’s much harder to take that finding and map it to 10 people or a huge population of 350,000 people. We apply reliable, applicable data science algorithms to find those patterns.

The problems that we are focusing on at Oura are universal. It’s really satisfying to give holistic help to people and guide them with data e.g. to have better sleeping habits. It has been amazing to realize the power of tech and how it can improve the quality of people’s life. 

Cutting Edge Wellness Technology and Intelligent Professionals with a Shared Mission

At Oura we work with cutting edge technologies on a daily basis and learn widely from multiple different areas of technology. Oura is not just a fancy gadget to monitor your health, it has the potential to improve your overall health and wellbeing. Everybody at Oura is working towards this goal and lives the mission by wearing an Oura Ring.

Oura takes two-way communication very seriously. The transparency from leadership is great! The leadership is very clear about  customer and employee feedback and what actions are going to be taken forward and what not. They actively listen to employees and try to always stay on the right path.

Personally, I like the intellectual challenge and the squad model of six week chunks to solve really tough problems. The best thing at Oura is that everyone here is extremely intelligent and a talented professional, which means that learning is exponential!

Learn more about careers at Oura and our open positions!

Read more about Oura's tech organization from CTO Teemu Kurppa's perspective.