Summary

<aside> ℹ️ HealthCaters (healthcaters.ai), a digital health startup founded in 2020, enhances personal health with data-driven, personalised programmes. The product enables individuals to assess their health status on their own, utilising a unique digital model of validated medical research. It provides evidence-based personalised programmes that lower the risk for major disease groups with just up to 15 minutes of daily commitment. HealthCaters enables users to “unblackbox” their health and adopt sustainable, healthier behaviours that fit both their health profiles and lifestyle preferences.

Old World vs. New World

• Company Stage: Seed (10.8 M€ – led by Holtzbrink Ventures & Barmenia)

• Executives: CEO (co-founder), Chief Medical Officer (co-founder), CTO, and myself; co-founders also responsible for marketing, sales, finance, ops

• ICs working in product: 2 full-stack developers, junior product designer, junior user researcher, founder's associate (marketing, ops) </aside>

• TL;DR (click the triangle to open)

As HealthCaters’ first product executive, my mission was clear: chart a course to product-market fit and ready the company for scaling. My approach? Embedding a culture of business-wide agility and customer-centric thinking deep in the company’s DNA while crafting a resilient product strategy.

With a full mandate from the founders I led with vision and purpose, instituting a regimen of democratised continuous discovery and experimentation, operationalising agility, drastically reducing both time to insight and time to value from weeks down to few days, reimagining the customer journey to remove a critical growth bottleneck, refocusing our executive team on coherent high-leverage activities, and steering a company-level strategic pivot that kickstarted previously languishing B2B sales via B2C market entry. The comprehensive transformation with its concurrent streams amplifying each other worked as intended: Not only did it secure 1.2 M$ extended seed funding – it sparked significant growth across both B2B and B2C landscapes.

My tenure, while impactful, was cut short by the joyful arrival of a new family member. Balancing the setup-specific extensive demands of my role with parenting a newborn turned out unattainable. I focused my presence where it was most needed and set up the team for further success without me.

<aside> <img src="/icons/chat_gray.svg" alt="/icons/chat_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Lily Kruse (Co-Founder), December 2023:

it's a really exciting time right now, (…) the sales exploded in both B2B and B2C and you are definitely a major reason that it happened!

</aside>

Female-led HealthCaters nets $1.2M to expand physical health screening stations across Germany — TFN

2023-10-19: Extended seed funding

How this Berlin startup deploys AI to make preventative healthcare accessible

2023-10-24: Press coverage

✨Sascha Brossmann on LinkedIn: Utterly proud to share this! 😊 Opening the product to everyone was a…

2023-08-17: Milestone announcement

Key Achievements

1. Transformed HealthCaters for business agility and coherent effective action

<aside> <img src="/icons/chat_gray.svg" alt="/icons/chat_gray.svg" width="40px" /> We went from big initiatives with high conviction and little data to ruthlessly prototyping ideas with users early and often for rapid learning, shipping fast in small increments, evidence-based decisions etc.

— Tatyana (Co-founder/CEO)

</aside>

• Initially, HealthCaters was hindered by slow adaptation processes and a lack of responsive mechanisms. While the team had transitioned to using more rigorous OKRs with RICE scoring for initiatives in the last quarter they still struggled with prioritisation and rapid coherent action. ⇒ To enhance overall business responsiveness and innovation capability we had to embed agile methodologies and structures across the company, not just within the product development teams.
• Actions: Implemented comprehensive agile practices, including Flight Levels, Kanban, rightsizing, and continuous improvement cycles, across the business. Facilitated workshops to embed agile thinking and established cross-functional collaboration end-to-end without handovers. Directed comprehensive overhaul of the digital workspace to minimise friction in the workflow, ensure visibility, discoverability and accessibility of work and knowledge, and eliminate redundancies.
• Outcome: Time to insight and time to value reduced by approximately 80% (days instead of weeks), enabling the team to adapt strategies and develop solutions at a 5-10x faster pace with higher predictability. Investments into options are rapid and incremental. Habitually starting together now creates immediately shared context leading to coherent action while increasing team cohesion and employee satisfaction. Operationalisation guided by remote-first principles improves collaboration, transparency, and trust while enabling high autonomy and rapid action.

2. Established customer centricity at the heart of the company

<aside> <img src="/icons/chat_gray.svg" alt="/icons/chat_gray.svg" width="40px" /> You made us realise how important it is to regularly speak to our users, put ideas in front of people for feedback early on, and extract the right information for making better product decisions.

— Tatyana (Co-founder/CEO)

</aside>

• Prior to the transformation, the voice of the customer was not systematically integrated into the product development process, limiting the alignment of products with user needs. The resulting lack of situational awareness constituted an even bigger threat, leading to high risk initiatives with business-critical amounts of waste while degrading team morale. ⇒ To truly deliver value, a deep, continuous engagement with customers was essential, beyond periodic market research or isolated feedback loops.

• Actions: Democratised customer research within the company, ensuring regular, high-frequent, and meaningful customer interactions by all team members and market-facing employees (e. g. we also kicked-off a community for corporate health managers to build relationships and inform both sales and product). Built required capabilities from qualitative research over product analytics to evaluative prototyping. Laid groundwork for operationalising silo-breaking integrated business intelligence. Integrated customer insights and other BI into every phase of product development and strategic planning.

  

  HealthCaters’ new model for turning data into well-informed action (excerpt – comprehensive situational awareness requires more than the voice of the customer)