When Jesse Horowitz joined Oscar’s Product Team in 2014, things were pretty different. He remembers when the all-company meeting was 50 people meeting in the office, and how the whole organization could easily meet at a bar for happy hour. A lot has changed since those days: “In my eight years here, we’ve probably had about 15 different versions of Oscar. We’ve grown and adapted so quickly over the years,” Jesse said. “But there’s also been so many components of who we are as a company that remain consistent.” In his opinion, there’s a lot that’s stayed the same: Oscar’s mission orientation, the caliber of people that come to work here, the complexity of the problems we work to solve, and the desire to work fast and adapt, to name a few.
Jesse joined Oscar as one of the first Product Managers. “What brought me here was excitement about joining a company that was using technology to do something really bold and audacious,” he said. “I was really drawn in by the complexity of this crazy, gnarly thing that Oscar was setting out to do.” In his early days as a Product Manager, he worked on Oscar’s internal systems, which became a major focus of the company. “We realized that a key way for us to grow our vision was to enable our operating teams to do all the things we had to do, and do them well,” he said.
Over the next three years, he grew a team of Product Managers who worked on these internal platforms. He also managed the Insurance Operations department, integrating their subject matter expertise more tightly with the tech team’s work. For the last year, he’s worked as Oscar’s Chief Product Officer, overseeing the entire product organization, which includes product management, design, product solutions, and product operations. Jesse has gotten to know the ins and outs of Oscar’s product, to drive innovation and growth.
Before joining Oscar, Jesse was no stranger to creating innovative products. In the early days of his career he worked for a mental health organization, eventually pivoting to enter the tech scene. “I started to get really into the idea of using technology to change how companies operate,” he said. He joined a tech company in its early stages, when it had about 100 employees. As the years went on he became an expert on the product, and when the organization needed support in creating a new version, they turned to Jesse, asking him to join the product team. He was eager to get into the field, and jumped right in. He worked there for seven years, watching the organization evolve from a startup to a public company, and learning to love working in product.