Noom: Product, brand, and experience segmentation move through the organization on the wings of rich, lived‑life stories.
The need: Noom was in the middle of a big evolution—from “weight loss app” to something closer to a digital health clinic—at the exact moment their customers’ lives were getting more crowded, more caregiving-heavy, and more fragile. Health wasn’t a single goal they could “opt into”; it was whatever survived after night shifts, side hustles, and broken sleep had taken their cut. The team didn’t need another attitudinal tracker study that asks people what they think about health in the abstract. They wanted to ground product, brand, and experience decisions in real, lived days—especially the wobble points where good intentions quietly fall apart.
The approach: For two weeks, we effectively moved in with six women across life stages, using text threads, voice notes, quick videos, and Zoom calls to sit inside their actual rhythms. Instead of asking them how they feel about “health,” we watched it show up in the wild: the skipped workouts, small resets, late-night scrolling, surprise moments of ease, and the quiet negotiations they make with themselves. From that body of material, we built two layers: Insight Spaces—emotionally-charged conditions people are trying to work through—and Masks, the adaptive modes they slip into to survive those conditions. One example, “The Cobbler,” pieces health together from fragments she’s edited herself; for each, we paired the emotional logic (tensions, struggles, delights) with very specific levers Noom could pull to feel more modular, more forgiving, and more life-aware.
The result: The work gave Noom a way to talk about their people that felt truer than “segments” and more usable than another wall of stats, and it’s since shown up in how teams brief product, experience, and marketing around real conditions rather than generic “motivation.” It landed as both strategically sharp and deeply human. Their head of insight called it “smart, fresh, and inspiring." Even as the company has restructured and leaned harder into GLP‑1 and clinical offerings, this work has continued to travel internally as a reference point for what it looks like when behavior change is designed from the inside of real lives.