Stage
Series A
Type
B2C
Role
Director of Product & UX
Deliverables
The vision
Nutrisense started with a narrow focus on glucose control, and was primarily used by people managing (pre-)diabetes and those trying to lose weight.
The ambition was to build a health platform that would help monitor nutrition, activity, sleep and stress — broadening our focus from people with metabolic disorders to health enthusiasts and enabling all our members to achieve lasting behavior changes for healthier lifestyles.
My role
I joined the team shortly before Series A fundraising as the first full-time product hire, with my focus spanning UX & product strategy, building an in-house product team and operationalizing a customer-centered innovation and product development process.
"Alla is one of the most thoughtful and forward-thinking UX leaders I’ve worked with. Her blend of strategic thinking, user-first mindset, and incredible attention to detail make her a force in digital innovation. She leads with empathy, clarity, and a deep understanding of what it takes to drive product-led growth."
Clemens W. Janssen
Lead UX Researcher at Nutrisense
Approach
Revamping customer segmentation with behavior-based approach
When I joined, Nutrisense already had user personas — a historic artifact that was developed at the very early stage of the company and not updated since.
The problem was that they were narrowly focused on a limited set of attributes (health condition + goal/JTBD) and the team found them not actionable.
65,5% of the сore team found them to be only somewhat useful
>50% admitted they
rarely refered to personas in their work
I wanted us to look at our users holistically. That means understanding their needs and attitudes from a multidimensional perspective, beyond just their health condition or usage of our app.
Much of my focus from the get-go was on building strong cross-functional relationships with the customer-facing teams (Nutrition, Ops) and setting up research infrastructure that is automated and scalable.
Key outcomes:
Implementing customer insight-driven product strategy
Based on the collected research data a thorough outcome analysis was completed, resulting in clearly defined measurable outcomes that formed the foundation of our product roadmap. We also tried to keep our ICP as a stable focal point of all product initiatives.
Improving engagement and member outcomes
From the high-level standpoint our objectives were to lower the adoption barrier for a data-heavy product with a steep learning curve, optimize app experience for periodic use — for members who are not ready for a commitment, and improve the overall retention.
Key launches
App membership
We've lowered entry barrier for the new members to discover our app by eliminating a paywall monthly plan and replacing it with app membership. Members got all the meal and macro tracking, wearables insights, and education while being able to easily purchase hardware, lab tests, or dietitian support as needed.
This also helped us optimize the experience for periodic users.
In-app subscription management
We’ve fully automated subscription management and brought it into the app, reducing the load on our Ops team that was handling it manually, and enabling us to split pauses from cancellations in our tracking system — to understand real churn.
Insights
A key feature of the app that was designed to automatically find correlations in the health data being streamed by our members and deliver actionable insights — has significantly increased engagement of our members with the data.
30% more members
engaged with their data in the app after Insights launch
Integrations
Integrations with popular wearables like Oura, Google fit and calorie tracking apps like MyFitnessPal allowed us to enrich the data to track cause and effect relationships between foods and daily activities, as well as win over some of these products' users to switch to NutriSense.
Comprehensive meal tracking
Polished micro-UX and AI-powered capabilities allowed us to create a truly low-effort logging of the food intake, which was key to experiencing the full potential of our product in terms of monitoring metabolic markers.
Improved onboarding an in-app learning
We've launched the "In-Range" course — our first structured & guided learning experience to help members get up to speed with glucose management and using their CGM. This created a platform for the roll-out of more targeted courses later on.
Separately, we fully revamped onboarding, making an emphasis on capturing member's goals — enabling us to tack their progress.
Close to 80% of the new members
on average took the "In-Range" course
06
05
04
03
02
01
06
In order to improve productivity of our Nutrition and Ops teams, we've built Health Portal — an internal member management platform.
Prior to this both teams heavily relied on external tooling for managing onboarding, surveys, shipping, and other operational data. Our goal was to consolidate the back-office flow into the web portal so we have full control over the data and experience.
Key outcomes:
Leveling up the game with product design
Combining creative decisions with quick iterations we've taken Nutrisense app through an evolution from overwhelming data views to intuitive charts with clear guidance and progressive increase in complexity; from FAQs as onboarding resource to guided goals-based learning programs; from suboptimal use of colors and lack of visual aesthetics to a top-notch product with a strong brand and sharp UI.
We paid particular attention to dozens of micro-interactions, optimizing for usability on mobile devices.
Following a brand redesign led by our Marketing Design team, my team set out to bring the new look and feel into our product. Everything was revamped: typography, iconography and spacing; contextual menus and multiple alerts and notifications; as well as all the different charts and data views that our app was abundant of.
Impact
With most of my focus being directed at building a strong foundation for a scalable customer-centric process, we were able to approach our next growth phase with a comprehensive customer segmentation, automated research and product discovery process, fully productized Nutrition and Ops teams workflows and complete consumer-facing product redesign.
1 → 10
product team
>2x growth
of the active user base
80:1 → 120:1
member-nutritionist ratio