Anatomy of a role: The “Valkyrie” at Candid
RCM is a wicked problem. It is operationally complex, with workflows fragmented across systems and teams. Every practice requires customization to handle context-specific nuance. Winning for providers and patients requires adapting swiftly to changes in payer adjudication systems. In many ways, it is a data engineering problem that requires a different shape of human to solve.
At Candid Health, our approach to tackling this is the "Valkyrie" – a role that sits at the center of our customer-oriented culture and delivery model.
The Valkyrie role doesn't map to a standard job title – it's not a customer success manager, a solutions engineer, or a product manager. But it is a key ingredient in what makes Candid Health unique, and how we've been able to deliver outcomes for our customers.
I want to share the thinking behind why this role exists, what we've learned from investing in it, and why it’s an incredible engine for our growth – both in the professional opportunities it gives our team, and in the differentiated outcomes Candid delivers for RCM.
A distinctive role that helps us win
A Valkyrie is a single, empowered owner of outcomes that integrates across all elements of Candid Health to help our customers win. This is not a substance-light CSM-esque role that is mostly about relationship management and securing renewals and upsells.
Instead, Valkyries own the full surface area of a customer relationship, from the deepest technical details to the highest-level strategic conversations. They build credibility because they understand the details. They move faster because they don't need to coordinate across swimlanes. And they surface product insights that would have been lost in translation through a chain of handoffs, and in some cases even deliver the product updates themselves.
Integrated, broad, ambiguous roles are common at early-stage startups, but usually out of necessity. We chose it deliberately from the start, and that choice has underpinned our success at every stage of Candid’s growth. Our Valkyries consistently drive better outcomes than we would have seen from adopting a more traditional functional separation.
That said, as Candid has grown, we have evolved the Valkyrie role. We established dedicated teams for Customer Experience and Implementation, for example. But we have consistently and intentionally resisted functional separation unless absolutely necessary.
The upshot of this is that each Valkyrie remains the single-point owner of customer outcomes for our business, and is expected to be sufficiently competent across functional areas to deliver those outcomes in partnership with other teams.
Expanding into space
The Valkyrie model only works when individuals are willing to assert ownership. This is not a role where scope is neatly defined and handed down. Valkyries expand into space.
They are expected to identify valuable territory and move into it, whether that's an unowned customer problem, a gap between teams, or an emerging product opportunity. They see what needs to happen and make it happen, often before anyone asks.
What does this look like in practice?
- Calling payers and navigating phone trees to craft a better prompt for an AI voice agent to call on denied claims
- Migrating SQL queries underpinning critical reporting by hand
- Completing a crosswalk of hundreds of fields between a legacy system data model and Candid's
- Calling a clearinghouse and talking through the finer details of electronic data interchange specifications to debug a rejection.
The best Valkyries at Candid are full-stack operators. They are the ones that are driven to get deep into the details in pursuit of business outcomes, and also have the strategic judgment to know when and where to spend their, and others', precious time.
When Valkyries identify a valuable outcome, they don't wait for ideal conditions or perfectly defined processes – they figure out how to get it done with whatever tools and leverage are available.
The Valkyrie role as a talent forge
The Valkyrie role provides clear benefits to customers – and it’s also one of the best opportunities for accelerated personal and professional growth I've seen in my career.
Valkyries build deep competency in discovery, gathering data from customers and stakeholders to solve problems effectively. This requires building trust-based relationships quickly. They learn to execute complex initiatives by prioritizing, planning, and driving outcomes with different internal and external stakeholders, often influencing without authority. And they learn to build and deliver a compelling value narrative, whether that's a demo for a prospect, a QBR for a customer executive, or a case study for the market.
The best Valkyries also actively invest in the people around them, mentoring earlier-career teammates, sharing hard-won context, and leaving a map behind after charting new ground.
The value of these skills turns this role into a talent forge. Valkyries rapidly take ownership of bigger and bigger outcomes within the customer team, as well as in other parts of the business.
The strongest Valkyries don't wait for a defined promotion path. They grow by taking on harder problems, broadening their own scope, and stepping into more ambiguous challenges. They demonstrate they can deliver.
As Candid Health grows, Valkyries are expected to expand naturally into the needs of the business, often defining new roles before it’s obvious they are needed.
Being a Valkyrie is not for everyone
The reality is that solving the hardest, most complex, and most important problems often requires being willing to do really unsexy things, and to have a level of commitment that is uncommon. That commitment often extends to tolerating arduous work that unlocks a valuable outcome and reduces or eliminates a category of pain for other people.
The individuals who thrive in this role tend to be low-ego, high-slope generalists who are hungry for opportunities to learn and grow as quickly as possible. They are restless when they see a valuable problem that nobody is solving.
Our north star is to build a team of people that exhibit these characteristics, who thrive doing the unsexy things in pursuit of that higher-order outcome.
At its core, the Valkyrie role is our stake in the ground about how we’ll win – an assertion that a scrappy, resourceful generalist, given space and expansive ownership, will outperform a specialist every time.
So far, that assertion has paid off. Our job is to keep proving it right. The best Valkyries don't need anyone to tell them that – they're already doing it.