Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill (AI & data product management leadership—powered by UX design)

185 - Driving Healthcare Impact by Aligning Teams Around Outcomes with Bill Saltmarsh

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Dec 23, 2025

Bill Saltmarsh, the Vice President of Enterprise Data and Transformation at Children's Mercy Kansas City, shares his journey from analyst to data leader. He emphasizes the importance of a product mindset in healthcare data, advocating for meaningful outcomes over simply producing reports. Bill discusses the need for better stakeholder communication and how balancing product-focused behaviors with leadership expectations can foster trust. The conversation also covers generative AI's role in clinical workflows and the criticality of data literacy in empowering organizations.

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ANECDOTE

From Analyst Frustration To Product Mindset

Bill Saltmarsh started as an individual analyst who repeatedly saw a gap between requests and actual outcomes.
That experience led him to adopt and later scale a data-as-product mindset as a leader.

ADVICE

Require Problem Discovery Before Delivery

Set clear expectations with stakeholders that the data team will interrogate requests before building solutions.
Tell stakeholders this improves decision-making and prevents becoming a report factory.

INSIGHT

Leadership Shapes Data Team Autonomy

Leadership must clarify the data function's definition of success and communicate it transparently.
That alignment lets individual contributors work autonomously toward impactful outcomes.

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Bill Saltmarsh joins me to discuss where a modern CDO gets the inspiration to “operate in the producty way” in his domain, which is healthcare. Now Vice President of Enterprise Data and Transformation and the Chief Data Officer at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, his early days as an analyst revealed a gap between what stakeholders asked for vs. the outcomes they sought. This convinced him that data teams need to pause, ask better questions, and prioritize meaningful outcomes over quickly churning out dashboards and reports.

Bill and I discuss how a producty mindset can be embedded across an organization. He also talks about why data leaders must set firm expectations. We explore the personal and cultural shifts needed for analysts and data scientists to embrace design, facilitation, and deeper discovery, even when it initially seems to slow things down. We also examine how to define value and ROI in healthcare, where a data team's impact is often indirect.

By tying data efforts to organizational OKRs and investing in governance, strong data foundations, and data literacy, he argues that analytics, data, and AI can drive better decisions, enhance patient care, and create durable organizational value.

Highlights/ Skip to:

What led Bill Saltmarsh to run his team at Children’s Mercy “the producty way” (1:42)
The kinds of environments Bill worked in prior that influenced his current management philosophy (4:36)
Why data teams shouldn’t be report factories (6:37)
Setting the standard at the leadership level vs the everyday work (10:53)
How Bill is skilling and hiring for non-technical skills (i.e. product, design, etc) (13:51)
Patterns that data professionals go through to know if they’re guiding stakeholders correctly (20:54)
The point when Bill has to think about the financial side of the hospital (26:30)
How Bill thinks about measuring the data team’s contributions to the hospital’s success (30:28)
Bill’s philosophy on generative AI (36:00)

Links

Bill Saltmarsh on LinkedIn