Researching People Who Don't Feel Sick

The trickiest assumption I had to unlearn on Movement was that I was designing for patients. I wasn't. Ichilov's corporate checkup service reaches people through their employer as a benefit — they aren't ill, they're showing up for a routine they didn't choose for themselves. Research had to start there. Talking to these users, I kept hearing the same tension: they wanted to know 'where am I in this' without feeling pulled into a clinical system. That insight reframed the whole product. For a PM, that's the part that protects the roadmap — it tells you the dashboard isn't a feature list, it's an answer to a single anxious question: what's done, what's next, what did my body just say. Research also exposed where the experiential questionnaires would either delight or get abandoned, since completion is the metric we actually live or die by. I treat research less as validation and more as scope defense: it's how I tell a stakeholder which 'nice to have' is actually load-bearing, and which polished idea quietly solves a problem nobody we interviewed actually has.