Healogix’s previous W. Insights article highlighted how the success of companies leading in women’s health is often attributed to their investment in customer insights to inform strategic business decisions. This theme was reinforced across Women’s Health Week (WHW), where stakeholders emphasized that understanding the customer is central to how products are developed, positioned, and brought to market.
What emerged from conversations and panels throughout the week is clear: customer insights are not just about understanding users – they are a critical input into go-to-market (GTM) strategy
One key takeaway across sessions was that many companies in women’s health are still navigating fundamental GTM questions:
Investors are looking for companies that can clearly answer these questions. Innovators who deeply understand their users are better positioned to articulate value, segment their audience, and design a GTM strategy grounded in real-world behavior rather than assumptions.
One of the most tangible examples discussed at WHW was Teal Health’s at-home cervical cancer screening kit. Rather than starting with product development alone, Teal anchored its approach in design and user research. They first sought to understand why one in three women were not up to date on Pap screenings, then expanded their study to explore the demands and preferences among the remaining two-thirds who were seeking a better experience.
These insights reframed the opportunity as not just a screening gap, but also a product-market fit gap. The findings validate that access, along with patient experience, comfort, and autonomy, are critical drivers of adoption and engagement.
This example reinforces that customer insights should not sit downstream of strategy. They should be generated early and used to shape it.
Another key theme was the disconnect that can occur after innovation is achieved. Many founders underestimate the importance of clinical integration, education, and commercialization. As stated by panel moderator Jodi Neuhauser, “FDA approval is not the finish line”.
Companies invest heavily in R&D, but often lack the insight needed to drive provider adoption, patient engagement, and reimbursement success. Customer insights play a critical role in bridging this gap by:
Strong science alone does not guarantee adoptio
Several sessions highlighted the limitations of existing data in women’s health. Data remains fragmented and siloed, EHR systems are designed primarily for billing rather than research, and many AI models are trained on incomplete datasets, leading to unreliable outputs.
Within this context, customer insights are not simply outputs. They are part of the foundational infrastructure required to build better products, more reliable models, and more effective strategies. As innovation expands into increasingly complex and under-researched areas, where market understanding is often fragmented, the role of customer insights becomes even more critical to de-risk investment and guide decision-making.
The overarching lesson from WHW is that the most successful companies are those that treat insights as a strategic input. Customer insights enable
Importantly, they also enable companies to move faster and with greater confidence in an increasingly competitive and rapidly evolving landscape.
Product success will depend not only on innovation, but on the ability to bring that innovation to market effectively. Customer insights are central to that effort.
For the next wave of women’s health companies, the question is no longer whether to invest in insights, but how early and how strategically they can leverage them.
