Most digital health products measure activation like a consumer app does – account created, onboarding finished – and overlook the moment that truly predicts whether a patient stays: a synced device, a completed care plan, a first meaningful interaction with a care team. Without a growth PM function to define that moment and shape the roadmap around it, product decisions are driven by whoever brings the loudest feature request, while growth remains completely reliant on paid acquisition. We embed a growth product management practice that addresses both.
The Challenge
Sales and clinical ops requests drive the roadmap, while growth has no voice at the prioritization table
In most digital health companies, the product roadmap fills up with whatever the last enterprise deal needed to close and whatever clinical operations flagged as a workflow gap – both legitimate inputs, but neither weighted against what would actually move activation or retention. Growth ends up running campaigns to compensate for a product experience nobody is systematically improving. Without someone accountable for growth-weighted prioritization, the roadmap optimizes for the squeakiest stakeholder, not the biggest lever on the metrics the business is actually judged on.
Activation is defined incorrectly, leading the team to optimize the wrong part of the funnel
Signup and onboarding completion are easy to track and commonly mistaken for activation, but in digital health the real activation moment is usually further downstream – a first completed care plan, a first synced biometric reading, a first message exchanged with a care team. A product team optimizing onboarding completion while ignoring that deeper moment can improve their dashboard while retention stays flat, because they've been polishing a step that was never the one predicting whether a patient stays engaged.
There is no owned growth loop, making scale entirely dependent on paid acquisition spend
Patient referral, provider-to-patient invite flows, and care-team-driven engagement are all natural loops in digital health products, but they rarely get built intentionally – they're left as a byproduct of the core product experience instead of a designed mechanism. Without an owned loop, every new patient or member has to be paid for individually, which caps gross margin and means growth stalls the moment acquisition budget tightens. Companies with strong organic and referral loops have a structural cost advantage that paid-only competitors can't match.
Retention efforts are reactive – a churn-save campaign after the fact – rather than embedded in the product
When there's no growth PM function connecting retention data back to product decisions, the standard response to a churn problem is a win-back email campaign or a discount, treating a product problem as a marketing problem. That approach can slow the bleeding temporarily but doesn't fix why patients or providers disengaged in the first place, so the same cohort churns again next quarter. Structural retention work – fixing the product experience that caused disengagement – requires a growth PM translating churn data into specific roadmap bets, which most digital health product teams don't have staffed.
What We Do
We begin by assessing your current activation definition and product analytics – what the team presently considers 'activated,' whether that definition truly correlates with retention, and what data is available to test a stronger one.
Based on that assessment, we define activation moments for each user segment – patient, provider, payer-side administrator – because these are functionally distinct users with different routes to value, and one blended activation metric conceals more than it shows.
To execute, we embed a growth PM function that handles roadmap prioritization alongside your current product team – not replacing product management, but introducing the growth-weighted perspective that's often absent. That means scoring roadmap candidates by their expected effect on activation and retention alongside the clinical and sales-driven requests already in the backlog, giving growth-moving work a genuine seat instead of allowing it to be continually deprioritized.
For retention specifically, we move the team away from reactive churn-save campaigns and toward structural product bets: applying churn and disengagement data to pinpoint where in the product experience patients or providers fall away, then prioritizing improvements to that experience over generic win-back messaging. Results take longer to emerge than with a discount campaign, but that's the distinction between addressing a symptom and resolving the underlying product gap.
For measurement, we monitor activation rate by segment against the newly defined moment, loop performance (specifically referral and invite conversion), and retention curves from cohort to cohort. This lets the team determine whether product changes are moving the metrics that forecast long-term revenue, rather than only short-term signup totals.
What distinguishes this from hiring another feature-focused PM is that the function is directly accountable for growth outcomes – activation, loop performance, retention – working alongside your <a href="/services/product/">product</a> team rather than within it as another voice fighting for the same roadmap slots. It is also directly tied to <a href="/services/strategy/">growth strategy</a>, ensuring product bets and go-to-market bets move in the same direction rather than operating on separate tracks.
What we deliver
- Segment-specific activation moment definitions for patients, providers, and payer-side users, validated against retention data
- Growth loop map scored by plausible reach and build effort – referral, invite, and care-team-driven loops
- Growth-weighted roadmap prioritization framework run jointly with your existing product team
- Structural retention initiative backlog built from churn and disengagement data, not generic win-back campaigns
- Activation, loop, and retention reporting tied to segment-level cohorts
Most digital health products don't suffer from a retention problem – they suffer from an activation-definition problem. When the metric labeled 'activated' fails to predict who remains six months later, every roadmap choice based on it optimizes the wrong thing, regardless of how strong the execution is.
Our Methodology
We provide growth product management through a 90-day sprint designed to establish an ongoing function. The opening 30 days focus on assessment: we evaluate the existing activation definition against retention data by segment and identify growth loops already latent in the product but never deliberately developed. Days 30 through 60 cover strategy and roadmap integration: we establish the true activation moments for each segment, score growth loop opportunities, and incorporate a growth-weighted prioritization framework into your current roadmap process. Days 60 through 90 turn to execution: the first growth-weighted roadmap bets ship, initial loop improvements launch, and we instrument activation, loop, and retention reporting against the pre-engagement baseline.
Unlike bringing on a generalist product hire, this function is expressly focused on growth outcomes from day one and draws from actual product analytics and cohort data, not opinion. We work within your existing product process instead of operating a parallel roadmap, and define activation and retention around how patients, providers, and payer-side users genuinely navigate your specific product, rather than using a template taken from consumer SaaS.
How We Work
The opening 30 days evaluate what truly drives retention compared with what the team currently measures as activation. We gather cohort-level product analytics, compare the existing activation metric with actual retention curves by segment, and identify the product's latent growth loops. You receive a clear determination of whether your activation metric captures the right thing.
Days 30 through 60 establish the framework: activation definitions tailored by segment, a scored growth loop roadmap, and a growth-weighted prioritization process incorporated into your existing planning cadence. From your team, we require product analytics access, involvement from product and engineering leads during roadmap sessions, and access to churn or disengagement data where available.
Days 60 through 90 transition into execution – the first growth-weighted roadmap items are shipped, the top-scored loop receives its initial iteration, and we implement segment-level activation and retention reporting so the team can observe the impact firsthand. This phase demonstrates that the framework works through an actual sprint cycle, rather than only on a planning document.
We hold a weekly roadmap and metrics review with product and growth stakeholders, supported by async reporting on activation and cohort retention. Initial builds generally run 3-6 months, and many clients continue the embedded growth PM function on an ongoing basis once the framework begins proving itself.
- Activation metrics that actually correlate with retention, by user segment
- A growth-weighted roadmap that competes fairly with sales and clinical ops requests
- Working referral, invite, or care-team engagement loops that reduce paid-acquisition dependency
- Structural retention fixes replacing reactive churn-save campaigns
If your digital health company needs growth product management leadership, we should talk.
Expand your marketing team output with our experts
Let us take a custom approach to your growth goals by assembling and leading the best-in-class marketing team to support your next stage.
Frequently asked questions
What does a growth product management engagement cost for a digital health company?
The initial 90-day build, which includes activation redefinition, loop mapping, and roadmap integration, generally costs $25K-$55K based on the number of user segments in scope and the amount of existing cohort data available. Continued embedded growth PM support following the initial build is offered through a monthly retainer.
How quickly will a growth product management engagement produce results?
The revised activation definition and loop map are generally completed by day 30-45, providing the team with an immediate and more precise view of what truly drives retention. Initial growth-weighted roadmap items and loop improvements usually ship by day 90.
How will the growth PM function work with our current product team?
We operate within your current roadmap and sprint process instead of creating a separate track, and the function is built to bring a growth-weighted perspective to prioritization, not to replace your product managers. Your product and engineering leads need to take part directly in roadmap sessions because the framework works only when growth-scored items compete for actual sprint capacity, rather than becoming an unstaffed side project.
What distinguishes Winston Francois from hiring an additional product manager?
A generalist PM hire divides focus among features, bugs, and stakeholder requests, leaving growth as one of many competing priorities. From day one, this function is specifically focused on activation, loop performance, and retention, using cohort data unique to your patient, provider, and payer-side segments instead of a consumer SaaS template.
How is ROI from growth product management measured?
We measure segment-level activation rate against the redefined moment, loop conversion (specifically referral and invite performance), and cohort retention curves relative to your pre-engagement baseline. We also measure the portion of the roadmap now dedicated to growth-scored work compared with requests driven by sales or clinical ops, because that allocation shift is itself a leading indicator of whether the function is effective.
What kind of digital health company is best suited to this service?
This service suits companies with $5M-$100M in ARR, an established product, and sufficient usage history to produce meaningful cohort data – generally post-Series A with an active patient or provider base. It is not a good fit for pre-launch products without usage data, because activation and retention work requires real cohorts to define against.
