Ideal Protein: a PE turnaround, rebuilt around the patient journey
Head of Product Innovation, Squat New York · client: Ideal Protein
Qualified leads up 40 percent and program adherence at 73 percent, after we rebuilt how patients found a clinic, qualified, and booked, for a PE-backed medically supervised diet program ($350M ARR, 64 countries, 3,500+ clinics, under HIPAA).
Three things that moved the numbers
Qualify before you ask. Turned the highest-traffic unbranded page, a BMI calculator, into step one of a two-step qualification flow. Qualified leads rose 40 percent.
Nearest clinic first. 70 percent of clinic-finder traffic was mobile. Re-sorting results by distance, not clinic age, lifted booking success 63 percent for patients within five miles.
Test the path, not the page. Split-tested a simplified patient and clinician journey; clinic-finder leads and clinician form fills rose 30 percent.
Why this matters for a multi-location, PE-backed platform
Same shape of problem: a newly PE-acquired business with a new board, a network of more than 3,500 locations in 64 countries, a trusted professional between the company and the end customer, and a regulated flow. The levers were operating ones: a single qualification flow, one journey across the whole clinic network, and measured experiments.
The situation we walked into
Newly PE-acquired, with new sales, marketing, and board leadership; a full rebrand, redesign, rebuild, and relaunch.
Traffic was not segmented by patient versus clinician, conversion goals were out of date, and there was no behavioral data to prioritize with.
Technical debt, a high API failure rate, WCAG and HIPAA blind spots, and no roadmap.
What I owned
Four phases: research and discovery, strategy and org alignment, rebrand, redesign and relaunch.
The roadmap, set with the aligned stakeholders; persona and journey mapping; the two-step lead qualification process.
Rebuilt front end and publishing, accessibility and HIPAA-safe form handling in the design system, peer code review, New Relic monitoring, and a tighter QA cadence.
All the results
73 percent program adherence rate.
40 percent increase in qualified leads.
63 percent higher booking success within five miles.
30 percent more clinic-finder leads and clinician form fills.
Website NPS up 23 points; new-clinic growth of 15.8 percent a year.
Condensed from the original 18-slide deck, which was marked confidential while Ideal Protein was an active PE investment; the company has since been sold. Names in the deck are anonymized.