Rethinking mental health technology — and what it takes to design tools that genuinely help people.
Every therapy session produces clinical signals about alliance, symptoms, and progress. The entire industry builds tools that ignore them. Here's what happened when I designed a system to surface what notes were never built to capture.
Most mental health apps were built like tracking systems. The problem was that tracking behavior and changing it were different things — and the gap was where most products quietly fail.
Seed-stage health tech founders make a rational bet: clinician and engineer first, designer later. But in products where the experience is the clinical outcome, that bet compounds in ways nobody sees coming.
Most product teams think they know what's broken. After mapping 60+ pain points on a global compliance platform, I found that the problems worth solving were the ones the team couldn't see.
Almost everyone building clinical AI is focused on the session. There's a higher-leverage layer nobody is working at.
If you're building in mental health, digital health, or regulated care and don't have a product function yet, or have one that's not working, I'd love to hear about it.