Expanding the consumer product suite of a mental health care company — from vision to executive alignment
AbleTo • 2023 • Product Design Mananger
About AbleTo
AbleTo offered a suite of therapy and coaching programs — internally named Therapy360, Therapy+, and Coaching+ — each an 8-week, provider-led experience combining weekly sessions with a clinician and a digital protocol. They were well-established, operationally mature, and clinically effective.
The ask
In 2022, our product organization was tasked with building a Self Care product which would be for anyone (unlike our clinician-led programs which were recommended based on the severity of their behavioral health condition), and would not include any clinical aspect – just a digital app. This was was initiated by a merge with Sanvello, an app that was focused on Self Care, but had a less mature program for therapy.
The opportunity
There was direction from leadership to ensure that all members have continuity of experience (including access to all activities and tools) before, during, and after participating in one of our clinican-led programs. The question was how we’d offer this continuity.
The expectation was that we’d be rebuilding and reskinning the Sanvello app and releasing it as an AbleTo-branded product, alongside our existing product suite, but making little changes to our existing products outside of pulling in the new content we were building for Self Care. The problem was that our different products were built with such different IAs, so we’d have to find different ways to fit in the new content.
Our product suite had grown over time, through acquisitions of different companies, which led to 3 products with different information architecture and similar but not identical educational content. Historically, this had not caused any user problems since participants would primarily only experience one program. However, the introduction of Self Care gave us an opportunity to support participants before and after their clinically-assisted programs, so now there was value in designing a consistent experience across all products.
I felt that this gave us an opportunity to take a step back from our product offerings and take a more strategic approach.
Making a case
I started by taking time to deeply understand our partnership with Sanvello, our leaderships’ desires, and the complexities of each of our products. I conducted several stakeholder interviews, and documented my learnings.
I crystallized the two different approaches we could take for this partnership: one where Self Care was a separate standalone product (as was initially proposed), and another where Self Care became the connective tissue across all of our products. I presented this deck to our leadership, and discussed the tradeoffs between the approaches.
Sharing a vision
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