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Product & Management Stage

Transforming a Health Marketplace into a Product-Led Organization

September 17, 2025 11:50 AM
Case Study
🇬🇧 English
Bratysława 1

About

A hands-on story of how we reshaped uPacjenta’s strategy—from rapid COVID-fueled growth to a long-term, scalable product. I’ll share practical insights on navigating complexity, building trust through user research, designing around constraints, and creating meaningful digital health experiences that start at home—but don’t end there.

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Talk by

Photo of Marcin Zaremba, Head of Product at Livespace
Marcin Zaremba
Head of Product at Livespace

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From the recording

Talk in brief

In this WaysConf presentation, Marcin Zaremba, Head of Product at Livespace, shares a case study of his time leading the product transformation at uPatient, a home-based medical testing startup. Initially scaling rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company faced a decline in product-market fit as lockdowns ended. Zaremba details the challenges of managing a hybrid marketplace that combines scheduled booking with on-demand physical logistics. He explores the paradox of a highly complex, 26-step digital checkout process coexisting with an exceptional 98 Net Promoter Score, proving that outstanding offline service can overshadow digital friction. To survive post-pandemic market shifts, the team transitioned from demographic to behavioral segmentation, focused on user agency over fear-based triggers, and utilized the Three Horizons framework to pivot. This strategic shift led to the creation of a simplified digital health results portal and a B2B corporate wellness model that improved their unit economics.

Key takeaways

  1. 01

    The Product-Service Scaling Tension

    While services rely on manual, high-touch delivery to prove initial value, scaling requires automating and productizing these processes. This transition decouples revenue growth from headcount expansion, allowing the business to grow exponentially.

    Watch from 4:51
  2. 02

    The Paradox of High Friction and High NPS

    A highly complex 26-step checkout process did not deter uPatient's customers because the offline service experience was so exceptionally stress-free. The physical value delivered in the home completely overshadowed the digital friction of the ordering path.

    Watch from 10:12
  3. 03

    Conversion Begins Before the Analytics Funnel

    Traditional product analytics only track users once they land on a page, but true conversion decisions happen much earlier. This decision-making occurs in a pre-product cloud of motivation driven by real-world context, urgency, and emotional triggers.

    Watch from 17:26
  4. 04

    Designing for Agency Over Fear

    Instead of relying on fear-based marketing common in healthcare, uPatient found success by focusing on user empowerment. Giving patients control over when, where, and how their tests occurred established a sense of partnership and agency.

    Watch from 24:27
  5. 05

    Pivoting to B2B to Solve Logistics Costs

    High operational costs of sending nurses to individual homes in low-density areas led uPatient to pivot to B2B corporate wellness days. This model significantly improved unit economics by allowing a single nurse to service dozens of employees in one location.

    Watch from 42:41
Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

The Core Tension Between Product and Service

Marcin describes a long-standing debate with his wife, a service designer, regarding the boundary between products and services. From a service design perspective, a digital product is merely an enabler within a much larger end-to-end customer journey. Conversely, Marcin's product management view is that a service proves initial customer value manually, which must then be automated and scaled exponentially through a digital product to allow revenue to grow faster than headcount.

Watch from 4:10

The Complexity of Hybrid Marketplace Patterns

Combining a scheduled booking system like Docplanner with an on-demand, location-based service like Uber creates a highly confusing user experience. At uPatient, this hybrid model was further complicated by location-based pricing, diverse patient types ranging from newborns to adults requiring specialized nurse certifications, multi-basket family orders, and strict healthcare data regulations that limited session tracking.

Watch from 6:34

The 98 NPS Paradox and the Transformative Experience

Despite a grueling 26-step ordering process that took some users up to 45 minutes to complete, uPatient maintained an astonishing Net Promoter Score of 98. Marcin realized that the digital friction was eclipsed by the offline experience of a patient, smiling nurse drawing blood in the comfort of the user's home. This represents a transformative experience: once a customer undergoes it, their perception shifts entirely, making them highly loyal returning users.

Watch from 11:23

The Invisible Pre-Product Conversion Funnel

Drawing on his past experience at Pizza Portal, Marcin explains that conversion often happens before a user ever interacts with a digital product or registers in analytics. Traditional funnels measure actions from the landing page to the thank-you screen, but the actual decision-making occurs in a fuzzy, unmeasurable cloud of real-world motivations and situational contexts that product teams must learn to influence.

Watch from 17:26

Leveraging the Three Horizons for Post-Pandemic Survival

During the COVID-19 pandemic, uPatient experienced massive 10x year-over-year growth, but as lockdowns ended, their product-market fit began to slip. Facing a limited runway of six to eight months, the team utilized the Three Horizons framework to identify incremental adjustments that could bridge their current declining growth engine to a new, sustainable future model centered on comprehensive health insights.

Watch from 28:20

Improving Unit Economics Through B2B Corporate Wellness

To address the high customer acquisition and logistics costs of sending individual nurses to remote locations, uPatient pivoted toward the B2B market. By partnering with corporate HR departments to host on-site health days at offices and factories, a single nurse could draw blood for dozens of employees in one visit, dramatically improving the company's unit economics and unlocking a massive new revenue stream.

Watch from 42:04
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