How to Build a Women’s Health Product Inside a $B+ Digital Health Company

XX Behind the Build: Lessons from Women's Health at Hinge Health, with Inessa Lurye

I’m excited to kick off a new Operator Series—XX Behind the Build—aimed at helping more women’s health builders actually build (not just fundraise!),

This series will spotlight killer operators inside companies doing the work of turning bold ideas into tangible products and businesses. These are the people navigating org charts, aligning stakeholders, designing pilots with rigor, launching and iterating and scaling on a daily basis. My goal is to use this space to shine the spotlight on their playbooks, frameworks, and hard-won lessons to help all of us build better.

For the first edition, it felt fitting to go deeper on one of my most popular posts to date: what Hinge Health’s IPO can teach women’s health founders and funders.

Just a few weeks ago, Hinge Health officially went public—ending the long digital health IPO drought. What’s especially compelling is how women’s health emerged as a key part of its story: not just an add-on, but a strategic growth driver embedded in the care model.

That shift didn’t happen by accident; it was made possible by people like Inessa Lurye—former Senior Director of Product at Hinge Health, who saw an opportunity to make women’s health core to their larger strategy, growth trajectory, and outcomes story.

In this first post for XX Behind the Build, Inessa takes us inside the zero-to-one journey of designing and launching Hinge Health’s Women’s Pelvic Health program. Her piece is a masterclass in intrapreneurship—and essential reading for anyone trying to bring women’s health to the center of a larger platform.

xx. Carolyn

When one of our earliest pelvic health members told her physical therapist, “I’ve never talked to anyone about this before,” I knew we weren’t just launching a new product; we were opening a door to care that had been closed for too long.

Between 2021 and 2025, I led the new product teams at Hinge Health, which built and scaled multiple new software and hardware products, including a program focused on Women’s Pelvic Health.

It wasn’t easy. Building women’s health inside a fast-scaling MSK company meant navigating both organizational complexity and deeply entrenched societal biases. However, the learning and the tremendous patient impact made it all worthwhile.

Five core learnings from this journey

1. Make the Case for Women’s Health

The idea for Hinge Health’s women’s pelvic health program was entirely bottom-up. No buyers were asking us to build a product to address pelvic health needs. Not a single one. But we saw the need and tailwinds clearly, specifically:

• A huge demand from women seeking pelvic health care. We saw it in the questions and advice in Mom’s Facebook groups, in the discussions on Instagram, and crucially in our own lives and experiences.

• Hinge Health physical therapists (PTs) were increasingly consulting pelvic health PTs on the team to help customize member care, given co-occurring conditions and requests specific to pelvic health.

• The wait times for pelvic PT care were tremendously long. It took over 3 months in most geographies to see a pelvic PT, and women waited an average of 6.5 years from initial symptom onset to seeing a provider.

• A growing body of literature and practice, buoyed by the COVID pandemic, was emerging and showing that pelvic floor physical therapy could be effectively delivered virtually.

Fueled by these insights, a small tiger team, including leads from product, business operations, physical therapy, and product marketing, committed to making the case internally and with our customers. We mapped out the business opportunity to develop a virtual pelvic physical therapy (PT) program for women, sizing the market, evaluating the clinical literature, estimating the return on investment (ROI) and enrollment, engaging medical providers and pelvic PTs to inform the clinical approach, and exploring member needs. With this info, we put together a press release and a pitch deck for what this offering would look like. Then, we took it to our customers' benefits leaders.

When we started explaining what the offering entailed and how it could integrate with the Hinge Health product benefits leaders already had, they viscerally got it. We heard so many stories: "my mother always taught me that you need to cross your legs before you sneeze," stories of post-C-section recovery that was never adequately treated, and frequent incontinence during menopause. Health benefits leaders understood the problem once the discussion was normalized.

Moreover, this was a natural connection to the Hinge Health offering. We provided care for the whole person and the whole body that could be effectively treated with physical therapy and behavioral modifications. Pelvic health is exactly that, and it impacts an astounding 1 in 3 women, even more during pregnancy and menopause. We were able to turn the conversation from a one-off, narrow issue to a foundational part of MSK care.

Organizationally, we built buy-in from commercial and executive leadership because this direction initially allowed us to expand our reach within existing customers and drive deeper value, and aligned with key employer benefits conversations around equity and health benefit parity that were happening at that time. What we needed next was to identify pilot customers, define and build a pilot program, and develop a track record of outcomes.

2. Lean into Your Competitive Advantages

With the business case clear, we asked: what edge did Hinge Health have that a well-funded, brand-new company exclusively focused on this space wouldn’t? Especially given GenAI, it’s essential to hone in on competitive advantages from the get-go.

We leaned into Hinge Health’s core differentiators:

• Go to market channels and scale: By 2022, Hinge Health had partnered with most major US health plans and Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), and had relationships with over 1,000 employers, providing a large, ready audience for new offerings.

• Ability to integrate into a core offering: We decided to position the Women’s Pelvic Health offering as a component of our core MSK offering, not as a stand-alone solution. Thus, it didn’t need a full buy-up sales motion (though approval from existing health plans and clients was still essential). When a new employer purchased Hinge Health, we didn’t offer them care for knee pain, but not hip pain. Why would employees have access to back pain care but not pelvic pain care, especially given co-occurring conditions (at least 66% of women with pelvic health conditions have back or hip pain)?

• Nationwide care: Hinge Health already had orthopedic physical therapists across all states. Some of these therapists were trained in pelvic PT. Coupled with a strong operation to cross-license PTs across states and an effective model to hire and onboard high-skilled PTs quickly, we had a clinical muscle that enabled high-caliber 50-state pelvic PT coverage in a few months. That kind of national coverage isn’t just rare—it’s nearly impossible for a new entrant.

• Foundational tech: Hinge Health already had an app and clinical tooling that allowed highly customized exercise therapy and education. Thus, we could customize existing experiences (application and onboarding, exercise therapy personalization) and build unique experiences (e.g., different exercise progression for pregnant women)—enabling us to get to market faster.

• Data and operational Insights: Years of member data on engagement and outcomes provided us with a strong understanding of user behavior and program performance. This enabled us to predict scale, refine our approach, and focus innovation where it mattered most.

3. Define Your Tenets To Guide You Through the Fog

Leaning into our differentiators, we got clear on what’s important by articulating our core program tenets. Tenets serve as guiding principles that empower teams to make independent decisions and set priorities. They offer a shared framework that helps teams choose the right path when faced with multiple options and ensure alignment. I find it valuable to have tenets serve as living documents that can be systematically revisited and adjusted as new information is found or assumptions are debunked.

Seeking a cross-functional lens, we brought together our team across product, design, clinical, PT, coaching, education, operations, user research, engineering, marketing, and sales over a series of sessions to define, refine, and debate our program tenets. Here’s a snapshot of what we came up with:

• No shame, no stigma: We seek to normalize taboo conditions through clear, validating language and bold human stories. We speak publicly on these topics to increase awareness and decrease shame.

• Build trust: We understand that seeking care for incontinence or sexual dysfunction is tough and sometimes rooted in a trauma history. We prioritize building trust between users, their coach, their PT, and Hinge Health.

• Create emotional support: We believe that how you feel and how you recover are deeply linked. We pair members with certified women’s health coaches and create education and meditation content rooted in the mind-body connection.

• Exceed clinical standards: We have pelvic floor PTs across the entire US - the only program with this scale of coverage. Our care is grounded in top-tier research and practice. Where research is lacking, we define new standards and contribute to science.

• Foster learning in peer groups: We bring together women in facilitated groups to connect, learn from one another, and get support from experts.

• Anchor in MSK pain (but know the context). We understand the context - our members commonly face multiple co-occurring healthcare challenges. We refer out when deeper support is needed (e.g., in-person PT evaluation, mental health assessment).

In reflecting upon these tenets years later, we kept true to all but the “foster learning in peer groups,” which was perhaps more a tactic than a lasting tenet. We spent a few quarters early on experimenting with enabling group-based learning and support, but it never took off to justify deeper investment. Thus, we made a conscious decision to eliminate this tactic. Overall, the tenets grounded the team’s decisions and created an opinionated point of view when designing the product, marketing, care experiences, and clinical research.

the cross-functional pelvic health team at Hinge Health

4. Pilot Early and Adjust Rapidly

In an established company, it’s tempting to wait until everything is polished before launch, especially when revenue, health outcomes, and reputation are at stake. However, learning fast matters to optimize outcomes and maximize value.

Our earliest Women’s Pelvic Health pilot at Hinge Health was messy by design - we were moving fast. This approach involved testing our riskiest assumptions, gathering feedback on early concepts, and rapidly iterating. Here’s what we did:

• Identified the target customers for the pilot: We identified customers willing to take risks, eager to co-create, and excited about the solution before all the impact data was solidified. These customers are gold for a new product or business. With the support of the commercial team, we pitched to about 20 customers and identified 10 employer partners for our pilot.

• Built user testing and feedback into the pilot flow: During the pilot of the Women’s Pelvic Health program, a tiger team manually reviewed and set up every single member's application. Then, every member got a survey from our UXR lead at each phase of the pilot, and the UXR lead analysed these in batches every week, creating an ongoing stream of synthesized insights. Our clinical team, including a urogynecologist and pelvic PT, reviewed every single case and adjusted care and exercise therapy protocols, if needed. We then internalized these learnings to build them into the next product iteration.

• Brought the team close to customers: The manual and sub-scaled nature of a pilot allows the team to get closer to customers. At Hinge Health, engineers, designers, coaches, and product managers reviewed anonymized member applications, read member feedback, and spoke with members and buyers, building empathy and inspiration.

• Leveraged the pilot data: With real-time engagement and outcome dashboards, we could see how pilot members were behaving and used that data to inform program design and care team capacity planning. We also leveraged the outcome data when presenting the program to health plans and employers, showing early program efficacy.

5. Ensure Science is at the Core

We aimed to have clinical insights and the clinical team deeply involved in the program and experience design, because our product was only as good as our outcomes. Here’s what we did:

• Rooted program design in the latest scientific research and clinical practice: Our clinical team conducted and compiled a meta-analysis of all the literature in women's pelvic health and virtual pelvic health interventions. Even though digital pelvic PT wasn’t scaled when we started designing our program, the body of clinical literature was an active reference point for program design, and the detailed compilation of research insights was a document we shared with health plans and key partners. Then, we built on the expertise of clinical experts in the specific field. We hired a leading urogynecologist specializing in pelvic health and deeply leveraged the expertise of our pelvic floor physical therapists, fully embedding a pelvic PT in the core product team.

• Embedded patient-reported outcomes into the initial experience: We recognized the need to track a series of specific patient-reported outcomes for each pelvic health condition and for each user—both during the application process (at point zero) and at various intervals throughout the member experience— and prioritized this work from the outset of the pilot. This data was key to driving product and service priorities and proved essential for reporting and gaining traction with employers and health plans.

• Designed and published research: Finally, when we had a strong volume of members, the clinical research team led an intervention and control group to study, which would help advance the field of pelvic health once published in a peer-reviewed journal. In this way, we gathered more insights around program impact and contributed to the advancement of this understudied field.

Final Takeaways

In summary, helping to build the Women’s Pelvic Health program at Hinge Health — with an incredible team across product, design, engineering, business operations, physical therapy, coaching, and marketing — taught me that building new products in digital health is about strategy, conviction, iteration, and science.

• Strategy: Make the business case, know your differentiators, and lean into them

• Conviction: Define your tenets and use them as a guide for tough decisions

• Iteration: Pilot early, learn quickly, and adapt

• Science: Leverage the best science that exists, and if it doesn’t exist, generate outcomes and evidence that can advance the standard of care yourself

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If you’re new here, The XX Factor is a curated dose of insights, analysis and conversation shaping the future of women’s health. My goal is to spark questions, challenge assumptions, and foster connections that help us all build smarter, faster, and with greater impact.

To learn more about why I started this, check out my first post introducing The XX Factor here—and some of my most popular deep dive pieces on maternity policy, the growth-stage cliff plaguing women’s health, and the Menopause Paradox.