Product Thinking Podcast Episode 204 Summary

Title: Building Women's Health Products: From Validation to Scale with Inessa Lurye
Host: Melissa Perri
Guest: Inessa Lurye, former Senior Director of Product and Head of Women's Health, Hinge Health
Date: January 2, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode is a deep dive into the process of creating, validating, and scaling zero-to-one healthcare products within a large organization, focusing specifically on women's health. Host Melissa Perri is joined by Inessa Lurye, who led the development and scaling of Hinge Health’s comprehensive Women’s Pelvic Health Program, recognized as a world-changing idea by Fast Company. The discussion spans Inessa’s career journey, the need for domain expertise, building a business case, piloting within constraints, scaling, and insights into the future of women’s health technology.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Melissa’s "Dear Melissa" Segment: Internal vs. External Product Management

[02:00 – 08:10]

• Main Point: Melissa answers a listener question about whether building internal products for employees differs from building B2B or B2C products.
  • Core product management processes should remain the same—focus on measurable outcomes, user needs, and organization value, even for internal tools.
  • Internal products often get less design attention, but poor UX can affect employee satisfaction, retention, and business outcomes.
• Quote:
  • “Just because it’s internal doesn’t mean that it doesn’t contribute to the success of your company.” (Melissa, 05:20)
• Advice:
  • Experimentation may be faster for internal tools, but discovery and user research remain crucial.
  • Internal tool strategy needs equal attention to avoid inefficiency and waste.

2. Inessa Lurye’s Professional Journey & HealthTech Origins

[08:13 – 10:54]

• Started as a political appointee in Washington, DC, building tech for chronically homeless services, which inspired her to use technology for complex social issues.
• Attended Harvard Business School and Kennedy School for Public Policy, merging policy and business innovation.
• Shifted to product leadership at venture-backed startups, specializing in health and wellness tech.

3. Mission Alignment in Product Leadership

[11:28 – 13:12]

• Deep personal and academic immersion in women’s health shapes Inessa’s intuition and resilience in the field.
• Quote:
  • “I will read the content, I will study the landscape, I will immerse myself in the space, whether I’m working in it or not.” (Inessa, 12:18)
• The mission-driven approach drives motivation, perseverance, and informed decision-making.

4. Domain Expertise – Danger of Over-indexing on Personal Experience

[13:33 – 16:20]

• Personal experience can lead to bias in understanding the actual user base.
• Upon scaling, discovered pregnant/postpartum women were less than 10% of pelvic health program users—insight from actual usage data, not initial assumptions.
• Quote:
  • “Sometimes that intuition is right and sometimes that intuition is wrong.” (Inessa, 13:54)
• To immerse: follow startups, research, academic literature, social/policy context, and understand both the buyer and the end-user perspectives.

5. Building and Scaling Hinge Health’s Women’s Pelvic Health Program

[16:20 – 26:11]

• Phases:
  • Early market discovery and validation (building the business case)
  • Early product build-out and testing (innovation partnership, MVP)
  • Nationwide launch (to employers, plans)
  • Continuous product and clinical innovation (including adding connected hardware)
• Key Discovery:
  • Huge supply/demand gap: many women need pelvic floor PT, but providers are scarce.
  • Hinge Health had a digital PT platform—opportunity to extend into pelvic health.

Building the Business Case

[19:54 – 23:51]

• Spent months on discovery: user research, physician interviews, buyer interviews (employers).
• Internal review of org capabilities and alignment with company strategy.
• Evaluate revenue potential and organizational readiness.
• Quote:
  • “What capacities, capabilities and differentiators do you uniquely have that are going to make it easier for you to build this…that someone else may not have?” (Inessa, 21:42)

Early Solutioning & Validation

[23:51 – 26:11]

• Gathered a cross-functional team early—PT specialists, engineering, clinical coaching, product ops.
• Piloted with 10 motivated employer partners and several hundred members.
• Heavy use of user research at each program phase to inform rapid iteration.
• MVP was manual and high-touch to focus on clinical outcomes and user feedback while skipping technical automation where possible.

Experimentation & Risk Mitigation in Healthcare

[27:25 – 31:19]

• Never shortcut clinically critical aspects; manual/operational complexity elsewhere is acceptable.
• Example: manual onboarding vs. automated, but retain core clinical integrity and safety.
• Early program was more selective for lower risk users.
• Manual, high-touch approach allowed rapid learning, faster than waiting for tech build-outs or internal platform dependencies.
• Quote:
  • “100,000% worth it…We were able to learn from real users faster and get outcome data that we could then use when we were approaching health plans, employers and others.” (Inessa, 29:53)

Scaling, Buy-in, and Employer Partnerships

[31:19 – 35:01]

• Carefully selected pilot employer partners with mutual interest in women’s health.
• Used strong organizational credibility and past similar offerings to lower risk for buyers.
• Direct involvement of product and sales in pitching and onboarding early partners.

Defining Success and Moving to Scale

[35:01 – 38:22]

• Data-driven: Clinical outcomes (effectiveness vs. base programs), engagement, member and employer satisfaction, and demand signals used as key indicators.
• Macro trends (e.g., rising national attention to pelvic health) influenced decision to scale.

Resourcing & Team Structure for Scaling

[37:29 – 41:58]

• Started with one dedicated cross-functional team—evaluated scaling to more as product validated.
• Required dedicated commitment from dependent teams for critical technical and go-to-market functions.
• Key to have ‘GM’ role and stable, accountable pod responsible for P&L, not just feature delivery.
• Zero-to-one PMs need different skills than sustaining innovation; they must be nimble, story-driven, market-facing, and scrappy.

Transitioning Teams as Product Matures

[43:39 – 44:39]

• Team structure depends on ongoing innovation rate—continuous innovation keeps product in zero-to-one team; plateau moves it to sustaining org.

Zero-to-One Inside Large Orgs vs. Standalone Startups

[45:14 – 47:53]

• Major advantages: leverage platform, clinical teams, credibility, and sales channels for speed and scale.
• Major challenge: early product’s small impact on revenue makes resource allocation more difficult—requires leadership buy-in and storytelling.

Storytelling and Internal Advocacy

[47:53 – 49:46]

• PM must be “keeper of the flame”—keep the vision alive, rally broad cross-functional support, and regularly share wins and learnings to retain momentum.
• Quote:
  • “It’s really very important that you are the keeper of the flame of this vision … and enlist so many other people within the organization to continue to drive that momentum and that story.” (Inessa, 48:18)

6. Future Trends in Women’s Health (Femtech)

[49:46 – 52:41]

• Expansion beyond core women’s health companies: mainstream digital health companies should offer personalized care for women across domains (e.g., mental health considering menstrual/menopausal context).
• Rise in leveraging wearable tech, new biomarkers (e.g., period blood, vaginal microbiome), and AI-driven care models.
• Societal taboos are being broken: menopause and other topics more openly discussed, opening doors for high-quality, integrated, data-driven care ecosystems.
• Quote:
  • "I'm really hopeful that we will have this integration of high quality, specialized clinical care [...] and ideally wearables to create a comprehensive, data driven ecosystem that helps to elevate the quality and outcomes within the women's health space." (Inessa, 52:17)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On domain expertise:
  • “Don’t let your own experience and your own perspective with a particular issue or condition...become the thing you are uniquely or only solving.” (13:41)
• On manual experimentation:
  • “We learned rapidly...we didn’t have to wait for dependent teams...or be on a queue.” (Inessa, 30:37)
• On team structure:
  • “Having a team that's separate is important. The other piece...the team that does zero to one products and the mindset...is actually quite different than folks that are working on sustaining innovation.” (Inessa, 40:28)
• On scaling from inside a large org:
  • “At the early stages, the number of users, you know, a few hundred users relative to hundreds of thousands of users is just kind of a rounding error....You have to be able to get resources…so you could run forward.” (Inessa, 46:35)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:00 — 08:10: Internal vs. customer-facing products
• 08:13 — 10:54: Inessa’s career background
• 11:28 — 13:12: Mission alignment and women’s health
• 13:33 — 16:20: Caution around domain expertise and learning the field
• 16:20 — 23:51: Building the business case, early market validation
• 23:51 — 29:53: Pilot design, early cross-functional team, UXR, and high-touch MVP experimentation
• 31:19 — 35:01: Engaging employer partners, sales alignment, success metrics
• 37:29 — 41:58: Resource, team structure, and scaling approach
• 45:14 — 47:53: Zero-to-one in large orgs versus startups, benefits and challenges
• 49:46 — 52:41: Future of femtech and integration of tech, wearables, and data

Conclusion

This episode delivers practical, deeply candid lessons on how to build meaningful health technology products focused on women’s health—from immersion and business case validation, to piloting with high-touch experiments, to scaling within a complex organization. Inessa Lurye's experiences highlight the criticality of storytelling, data-driven experimentation, cross-functional teams, and internal advocacy—plus a vision for the next era in femtech.

Contact Inessa Lurye: LinkedIn

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