Starting a new endeavor is always a mix of excitement and fear! 🚀 

For this first newsletter, I’ll lean into excitement as well as information.

Strategic Customer Insights for Medical Product Success - I am Here to Support Your Organization!

With two decades of experience building customer insights capabilities that drive product-market fit, I help medical product and service teams make smarter strategic decisions faster. I built the customer insights practice at Hinge Health during their path to IPO, creating the research infrastructure that supported their growth and market leadership in digital musculoskeletal care.

My work at Dexcom and Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield taught me how to establish insights practices that navigate the complex intersection of regulatory requirements, clinical adoption, and patient behavior.

Whether you're an early-stage company seeking product-market fit or a scaling organization needing to formalize your insights capabilities, I focus on creating strategic research frameworks that answer the critical questions: Are we building the right product? For the right users? At the right time?

My personal experience as a patient gives me unique insight into where medical products succeed and fail in real-world use. Rather than lengthy academic studies, I develop targeted insights strategies that help teams pivot quickly, validate assumptions, and build products that clinicians actually adopt and patients actually use—turning user understanding into competitive advantage and sustainable growth.

Wearables Are Finally Getting Interesting (And It's About Time)

Remember when fitness trackers just counted your steps and made you feel guilty about taking the elevator? Those days are mercifully behind us. At a recent industry talk hosted by MATTER , panelists including Sam Propis (Product Manager at WHOOP ), Amy Kruse of Satori Neuro , and Rob Milnes of viO Health Tech and Sonda revealed how wearables are finally cracking the code on what we actually want: real answers to why we feel like garbage some mornings and superhuman others. Propis shared how WHOOP's behavioral journaling feature, combined with continuous monitoring of heart rate variability and sleep, creates those "aha!" moments—like discovering that your late-night ice cream habit is absolutely destroying your recovery, or that getting morning sunlight genuinely improves your sleep quality.

But let's be honest about the current state of things: most wearables are still pretty dumb about where they measure stuff. We're cramming sensors onto wrists and foreheads not because they're the best spots, but because that's the only real estate we can easily strap a device to. It's like trying to take someone's temperature by touching their elbow—technically possible, but probably not giving you the full picture. Even continuous glucose monitors, which provide genuinely useful data, are a pain to use because you have to swap them out regularly. The winners in this space will be the devices that actually work with how people live, not against it.

Here's where things get wild: some panelists predict eyewear will become the ultimate health monitoring device. Imagine glasses that can diagnose 50 different conditions just by looking at your eyes—detecting everything from glaucoma to diabetic retinopathy without a trip to the doctor. It sounds like science fiction, but the technology is nearly there. Of course, nobody wants their smart glasses crying wolf about medical conditions, so getting the accuracy right will be crucial.

The real test for all these fancy devices comes down to cold, hard economics and accessibility. Milnes pointed out that women trying to conceive will pay for specialized wearables—they're already spending thousands on fertility treatments, so what's another $150? This tracks to their 97% engagement rates. But for broader adoption, Amy Kruse emphasized that wearables focused on sleep and stress relief need to prove genuine value to the user and eventually the provider. They have to demonstrate they're not just expensive gadgets but tools that actually save money and improve health outcomes for everyone, not just those already motivated to spend big on their health.