The problem
Phable connected patients with doctors for chronic-care management. Patients kept churning — and the interviews told us why: the experience around waiting was broken. Patients had no visibility, doctors had no predictability, and every side of the marketplace blamed the other.
What I did
Started with the users, not the roadmap. I ran 40+ user interviews across both sides of the marketplace and used them to define the consumer product strategy.
Managed the marketplace tension. Doctors (supply), patients (demand), ops, and leadership each had competing priorities. I shipped a patient queue experience that gave patients visibility and doctors predictability — without asking either side to absorb the other’s pain.
Kept shipping on the money path too. In parallel, I built a payments product that cut Ops turnaround time from 66s to 28s, driven by data analytics and iterative delivery.
The impact
Weekly retention grew 6.5× — from 10% to 65% — a direct measure of engagement and delight at scale, in a category where users only return when the product actually earns it.
What this says about how I work
Retention problems are rarely feature problems. The queue experience won because the research pointed at the emotional core of the churn — uncertainty — and the product removed it for both sides of the marketplace at once.