Zero-to-one product delivery in D2C digital healthcare

Welzo’s mission is to simplify healthcare by making testing, treatment and advice more accessible and affordable through smart, digital-first experiences.

Welzo is an early-stage D2C health startup operating in a regulated, high-trust domain, with ambitious timelines and limited capacity. The priority was to ship a credible MVP fast, without over-investing in the wrong product shape.

The challenge wasn’t a lack of ideas. It was deciding what mattered most, sequencing work under pressure, and getting something live that users could actually complete end-to-end.

The challenge

We needed to launch a minimum viable product quickly to validate demand, user behaviour and operational feasibility.

Constraints included:

• Tight delivery deadlines
• A large, pre-defined backlog
• Regulatory and clinical considerations
• High expectations around trust, clarity and conversion

The core risk was building too much, too early, without evidence.

Product approach

I stepped in with a hands-on product management role, owning prioritisation, flow definition, validation and delivery sequencing.

My focus was on:

• Reducing scope to what was truly required for an MVP
• Aligning the founder and team on clear trade-offs
• Ensuring the product could support a complete, compliant user journey

Key actions:

• Ran a prioritisation workshop using MoSCoW to cut the backlog down to a focused MVP scope
• Mapped the critical end-to-end journey, from entry point through checkout and fulfilment
• Defined milestones around learning and delivery, not just output

Solution

Rather than jumping straight into high-fidelity build, I created a low-fidelity prototype that mirrored a familiar eCommerce flow. This allowed us to:

• Align quickly with the founder on product direction
• Test assumptions around trust, clarity and progression
• Validate the journey before committing engineering effort

The prototype became a shared artefact for:

• Founder alignment
• Early user testing
• Engineering handover

This reduced rework and helped the team move faster with confidence.

Outcomes

• A clear, prioritised MVP scope aligned to business and delivery constraints
• A validated end-to-end user journey suitable for a regulated D2C health context
• Faster decision-making by anchoring discussions in concrete flows, not opinions
• A product foundation that could be iterated post-launch based on real usage

Result

Welzo launched successfully and quickly scaled to over 3.6 million customers. It was named the #1 Hottest Tech Scaleup in Europe and ranked as Forbes’ #1 Next Billion Dollar Startup in 2024.