Product management consulting

Context

CuidaSalud was a new company built from the ashes of Asistensi, an earlier digital health venture in Venezuela. The business model changed with it: Asistensi sold insurance, while CuidaSalud offered prepaid medicine. For a monthly fee, members got telemedicine, medication delivery and direct access to emergency rooms.

The product could change overnight; the inherited onboarding could not. Asistensi's sign-up was long and hard to complete. It also depended on a chain of manual steps from Operations before anyone was actually covered. A brand that planned to grow through paid digital campaigns could not afford that, because every extra field and every hand-off showed up directly in the cost of acquiring a member.

The challenge

We set out to build an onboarding a person could finish on their phone in one sitting, with no human in the loop. Three constraints made that harder than it sounds.

• Regulation. Health products in Venezuela are regulated, so every field we wanted to remove had to be legally optional, not just inconvenient.
• Integrations. A new member only counts once the bank confirms payment, SAP registers them with the care network and the CRM knows who they are. Each of those had been a manual step.
• Growth pressure. Acquisition ran on performance marketing, so friction in the funnel was not a UX detail. It decided whether campaigns paid for themselves.

What we did

We started from what the law requires, not from what the old form asked. We audited every field in the inherited sign-up and sorted each one: legally required, operationally required, or simply habit. Habit went. Cutting fields in a regulated health product is never only a design call, so we reviewed every removal with Compliance, round after round, until the flow was both lean and fully legal.

We turned manual steps into system events. Under Asistensi, a sign-up often waited on someone in Ops to validate data, confirm a payment or register the member with the service network. We redesigned the flow so each of those became an automatic event:

1. Payment confirmed by the bank and recorded without anyone matching receipts.
2. The member registered in SAP, so the care network could serve them straight away.
3. The CRM record, welcome messages and follow-ups triggered in Zoho.

Operations stopped processing every new member and started handling only the exceptions.

We owned the experience end to end. We made every product design decision, from information architecture and user flows to UI. Visual work from the in-house designer was produced against our direction. New flows were prototyped before they reached engineering, which kept sprints focused on building rather than debating.

We applied the same principle beyond the first sign-up. Once the core path was zero-touch, we used the same playbook on the journeys around it:

• Adding family members to an existing plan from the app.
• Corporate and group affiliations, which had required engineering tickets, became a tool Operations could run directly.
• Payments inside the mobile app, so members could stay current without calling anyone.
• A minimal-data beneficiary form for CuidaSalud Familiar, a family plan distributed through Mercantil.

Results

CuidaSalud went from zero to more than 1,000 new subscribers a month, building a portfolio of roughly 10,000 members.

• Zero-touch by default. The standard sign-up, from first visit to active coverage, ran without a single manual step from Operations.
• Ops redeployed to exceptions. The team's time moved from processing every member to resolving the cases systems cannot, such as payments the bank fails to notify.
• Group sales unlocked. Corporate and group affiliations no longer queued behind engineering, opening a direct channel for company-wide plans.
• Recognised by the backer. Mercantil Servicios Financieros featured CuidaSalud as a success story in its 2025-26 annual report.

What we learned

• Frictionless is a compliance project as much as a design one. The biggest gains came from questioning which fields were truly required. That only worked because Compliance sat inside the process rather than signing off at the end.
• Zero-touch describes the path, not every case. Banks occasionally fail to notify a payment, and some data still needs correcting. Designing the automated path well meant designing the exception path just as deliberately, so Ops could resolve the edge cases quickly instead of firefighting.
• Growth and onboarding share one funnel. Changes to sign-up pages also change what ad platforms learn about who converts. We shipped funnel changes gradually and in step with the performance marketing team, so improvements in the flow did not set back campaign performance.