I take pre-product health startups to their first clinical pilot.
One person doing the work of four — product strategy, design, user research, and shipped software. Former founder. US healthcare regulation in-house.
At pre-seed, you need four people and can afford one.
You need someone to set product strategy. Someone to design it and test it with users. Someone to actually build. And someone who knows US healthcare regulation before it becomes a fire.
That's four hires. On a pre-seed budget, it's usually zero — so the founder does all of it at once, badly, at night.
I'm the one person who does all four. Not a strategist who hands you a deck. Not an advisor who talks. Not a project manager who runs the board. I set the strategy, design the product, research it with your users, ship the front end, and find the regulatory floor you actually need — so you move.
What I do
Product strategy
What to build first, and what to cut. Roadmap and prioritization. Pilot and experiment design — cohorts, endpoints, success criteria. Beachhead and go-to-market. The product story that lands with investors and clinics.
Design & user research
The product, designed and prototyped — not just described. Interface design, information architecture, UX copy. Continuous discovery and usability testing with real users, turned into decisions instead of a deck that sits on a shelf.
Building with AI
I ship front-end code through AI coding agents, and I write the requirements and acceptance criteria your engineers build the backend from. I know where agents help — generating from a clear spec — and where they don't: holding scope, catching edge cases, making the clinical call. I build the human-in-the-loop so agentic delivery is safe.
Healthcare regulation
HIPAA readiness — technical safeguards, policy layer, BAA scoping. FDA SaMD and clinical-decision-support boundaries. State consumer-health privacy. I translate regulation into engineering requirements without over-building — the floor for where you are now, not the enterprise checklist.
You're a founder with strong vision or deep clinical knowledge, and you need a product partner who can actually run with it.
You're pre-seed or seed, pre-product or early-product, in US healthcare — digital health, femtech, or clinical AI. You're moving from an idea, or from a services model, toward a real product: a first clinical pilot, a move into clinics or payers. And you're staring at a regulatory surface — HIPAA, FDA, SaMD — that you don't have in-house yet.
If that's you, this is the exact stretch I'm built for.
Book a callI take on very few engagements, so I'm honest about fit. This probably isn't right if:
You want a deck and a disappearance.
I build with you, not for you. If you want strategy handed over and no one on the hook to execute it, that's a different hire.
You want to be told only what you want to hear.
I optimize for your business, and I'll give you the honest read even when it's not the answer you were hoping for.
You just need a backlog run.
I'm not a project manager. My value is judgment — what to build, what to cut, what's safe to ship — not moving tickets across a board.
You're past product-market fit with a full product team.
At that stage you need specialists. I'm the person for the ambiguous, pre-pilot phase where one generalist beats four.
Fractional, senior, embedded.
I'm not overhead in the middle of your team — I'm throughput. I work as a part of your team, part-time, at a senior level, and I leave you stronger than I found you. The goal of a good fractional engagement is to work myself out of a job: mature the product function enough to run in-house.
Fractional retainer
Ongoing product leadership, a set amount of my time each week, for as long as it's earning its keep.
Project-based
A defined outcome with a clear scope and end: a pilot designed, a compliance floor mapped, a patient app shipped.
I scope engagements with clear ownership boundaries and honest estimates — including what depends on you. We'll figure out the right shape on the first call.
Book a call“The best I've ever seen of anyone I've ever worked with — proactively making sure work didn't stall in your absence. This is the standard everyone in any company should be doing.”
She credited a pivotal customer meeting largely to my preparation and the demo narrative.
She named scope discipline — keeping the team out of scope creep — as one of my superpowers.
I've sat in the founder's seat. I know US healthcare. And I build.
I'm a full-stack product leader with more than eight years in healthcare and SaaS — and a background as a founder, a data scientist, and a user researcher before that. I come from a family of physicians, and healthcare is the only place I've ever wanted to build.
I've founded a company. I built an eldercare startup from zero to 30,000 users in under a year, and to breakeven within eight months. I've raised, watched runway, and made the hard scope-versus-cash calls. So I think about your business, not just your backlog.
I know the regulated side cold. At Techcyte I led FDA 510(k) clinical validation for an AI cervical-cytology system across four lab sites, and took the product to a CE-marked commercial launch in Europe. I was the first product hire at Nurx (YC W16), a hyper-growth telehealth startup. And at DexCare I owned patient-facing scheduling integrated with Epic for large health systems like Kaiser Permanente and Providence, and sat on the data-governance team building HIPAA-compliant analytics. I know the floor you can't go below and the ceiling you don't need to build yet.
I build in the AI era. I use AI coding agents heavily and I'm clear-eyed about their limits. They generate from a clear spec; they don't hold scope, catch edge cases, or make clinical judgments. My value is the judgment that makes them safe to use — then I ship through them. Judgment is the moat. Agents are the multiplier.
Earlier: Head of Product at Oivi, building AI diabetic-retinopathy screening; data scientist on search quality at OpenTable. MSc, Imperial College London. BSc, Toulouse School of Economics.
Real deliverables from healthcare engagements — available redacted, or walked through on a call.
Product state & roadmap deck — status, engineering-throughput analysis, path-to-pilot with dates, and a prioritization-and-cut framework.
Clinical pilot definition — cohort sizing with a capacity model, endpoint selection, staged compliance plan, and success criteria across operations, clinical, product, and adoption.
Pilot readiness assessment — capability-by-capability ratings and the digital / human-in-the-loop / human-only delivery map.
HIPAA technical-safeguards baseline — engineering requirements with acceptance criteria and verification steps, split into cross-cutting constraints, discrete tickets, and human-owned legal items.
HIPAA compliance-floor analysis — real regulatory requirements separated from customer vendor demands, with a minimum-commitment list and a negotiation list.
Statements of Work — how I scope and price, with conditional estimates, dependencies, and clear ownership.
No pitch deck. No RFP. No hard sell — I turn down work that isn't right.
We'll talk about your users and the specific problem you're solving. I'll tell you honestly whether a fractional partner is what you need right now — and if I'm the one. If we're a fit, I'll outline what a kickoff looks like.
Book a callYou'll hear from me within one business day.