How are women navigating menopause?

A US health network wanted to grow in the midlife women's health market, newly crowded with well-funded entrants like Midi, Elektra, etc. competing on access and symptom relief. I helped the team design and build a new menopause-focused community from scratch, and led ethnographic fieldwork and strategic research to shape brand and go to market strategy.

The insight: midlife care is complicated by the competing logics of Health and Wellness that pull women in opposite directions. The work reshaped the client's brand strategy and creative direction, converted community members into paying patients, and produced the strategic thesis that served as the foundation for a cohort-based education program the client launched subsequently.

The midlife women's health market was growing as well-funded entrants and VC-backed players entered to compete on convenience, access, and symptom relief. However, clinical awareness of women’s midlife remained underserved with ~69% of OB/GYN programs lacking a menopause curriculum¹. The client had a growing national presence, but lacked primary consumer research and a differentiated right to win in the category.

The question: How do you enter a category with growing demand and intensifying competition?

I took a dual track approach that combined go-to-market efforts with strategic research. For initial go-to-market, I helped build a whatsapp based community for women navigating midlife - including perimenopause and menopause, where they could access both medical expertise from certified practitioners (nurses, doctors) as well receive peer guidance and support. As the community grew its membership, it became the site for ethnographic fieldwork and also served as a recruitment channel for in-depth interviews.

• Community Growth: I designed the community architecture and worked with external partners to grow membership. After shaping the engagement logic and practitioner involvement model, I supported the client’s marketing team to drive member growth. The community grew to several hundred members within a few weeks and became both a research site and a commercial channel.
• Consumer Ethnography: in-depth interviews with women in key regional markets, including both members and non-members. The group itself became a source of data, surfacing how shared spaces shape information seeking, and how peer and practitioner interactions shape decisions. I led research end-to-end including research design, sampling, screener development, fieldwork, and synthesis.
• Commercial Landscape: to complement consumer research, I led the competitive analysis of the category, mapping emerging offerings to surface whitespaces and structural gaps.

I led all workstreams end-to-end: research design, fieldwork, synthesis, strategic framing, and product development.

Women don't arrive at menopause as a resolved category - they negotiate their way into it. Their journey is shaped by relational, emotional, and identity factors (not just symptoms), complicated by competing logics of "Health" (restoration, expert authority, reactive) and "Wellness" (optimization, self-authority, proactive) that pull in opposite directions.

Additionally, they encounter ongoing frictions that shape behavior: Accidental Points of Entry (women arrive through adjacent frames, unsure the category applies), Constant Triangulation (no single source is trusted; women cross-reference everything), Validation Before Action (the problem must be recognized before a solution can be sought), and Portfolio Assembly (women stack clinical, wellness, and self-directed interventions simultaneously).

Communities, regardless of their form - group chats, online social platforms, or in-person friend groups - are spaces that facilitate demand formation - where undecided consumers triangulate, validate, and move toward action.

The work shaped three distinct commercial outcomes:

• Growth Channel: The community grew to several hundred international members in the first weeks and operated as top of funnel for the broader clinical business as members converted directly into paying patients. Insights from the fieldwork also reshaped the client's ad creative, replacing generic symptom-relief messaging with claims grounded in how women actually describe the transition.
• New Product Offering: I directly worked with senior leadership to incubate a new service offering based on research - an educational bootcamp serving as the bridge between community membership and a mature clinical relationship. The bootcamp prototype established the conceptual and analytical underpinning of what an education-to-conversion offering in this category needs to deliver. The client productized insights from this research into a cohort based education program, now live in the market.
• Brand Strategy: The client's unique functional + integrative approach was reframed around a unique brand truth that can hold both Health and Wellness logics together, and shaped creative direction and actual advertising assets and landing page design.