From Diet Program to Habit Challenge
Reframing a clinical product around the constraint that actually mattered Sirka · 2023–2024 · Product Lead, Clinical Programs
A program-level redesign that moved Sirka's diet offering from a rigid clinical structure to a flexible "habit challenge" model — built around the real bottleneck (5 coaches, 500+ subscribers, 1:60 ratio) instead of pretending it didn't exist.
The Setup
Sirka's product was good. The clinical methodology was sound. Coaches were qualified nutritionists. The mobile app worked.
The problem was structural. Five coaches. Five hundred-plus active premium subscribers. A one-to-sixty ratio with an aspirational target of one-to-one-hundred-and-five. And a program format — structured diet plan with high-touch coach involvement — that mathematically could not scale to the target ratio without breaking somewhere.
Either the coaches kept doing high-touch work and the company couldn't grow. Or the coaches scaled by cutting corners and the program quality collapsed. The third option was redesigning the program itself.
I was Product Lead for Clinical Programs. The brief I gave myself:
- Increase program adherence and completion rates
- Reduce coach workload meaningfully — not just at the margins
- Don't compromise the clinical outcomes Sirka's reputation was built on
- Build something that actually scales to 1:105
The Insight
Research with both clients and coaches revealed something I hadn't expected.
The diet program wasn't failing because clients didn't want to lose weight. It was failing because the program asked clients to make many decisions, every day, on something they didn't yet have habits around. Every meal was a fresh decision: what to eat, how much, whether it fit the plan, whether to log it, whether to ask the coach. Decision fatigue compounded. By week 3, most clients were exhausted, and exhaustion looked like "lacking motivation."
Meanwhile, coaches were spending the bulk of their time on activities that didn't require their clinical expertise: reviewing meal logs, calculating calorie totals, answering "is this okay to eat" questions. The expensive resource (clinical judgment) was being spent on cheap work (arithmetic, validation).
The reframe:
We weren't running a diet program. We were running a habit-formation program — and we were charging clients for clinical attention they didn't actually need most of the time.
If habit formation was the actual product, the design changed entirely. Coaches don't need to review every meal — they need to set personalized phases and intervene at decision points. Clients don't need rigid daily plans — they need short-term challenges they can complete and feel proud of. The system can handle the day-to-day; coaches handle the strategy.
The Redesign
I designed the program around four principles:
Flexibility over rigidity. Clients enter a "habit challenge" tailored to their assigned phase, not a one-size-fits-all daily plan. Phases progress as clients complete them — short-term wins compound into long-term outcomes.
Short-term milestones over distant targets. Instead of "lose 8kg in 3 months," the program operates in weekly habit challenges that produce visible progress. Each completed week is a win. Each win compounds motivation.
Coach intervention at decision points, not data points. The coach's time gets spent on phase assignment, weekly reflection-and-adjustment, and intervention when a client stalls — not on validating individual meal entries.
Personalization through phases, not plans. Clients are placed into a phase based on their current habits, goals, and progress. A "build foundational habits" phase looks different from a "optimize and refine" phase. Same product, different program.
The user experience compressed to a daily rhythm: open the app, see today's habit challenge, check it off, see weekly progress, get a weekly insight. The coach shows up at meaningful moments, not constantly.
What This Required from the Org
Redesigning a clinical program isn't a UI exercise. It required cross-functional alignment that took longer than the design itself.
Coaches had to redefine their role. From "review every entry" to "set strategy and intervene at inflection points." Some embraced this. Some resisted — because reviewing entries felt like care, even when it wasn't the highest-value form of care.
Operations had to rebuild the assignment workflow. Phases needed structured assignment criteria, not coach-by-coach intuition. We codified the phase rubric so any coach could place a client consistently.
Engineering had to support a mode shift. The app had been built around the rigid program model. Habit challenges, phase assignment, weekly insights — all needed new data models and new flows.
Marketing had to update the value proposition. "Personal nutrition coach" needed to become "personalized habit-building program with expert coaching at decision points." Subtle but real shift.
TODO — the hardest stakeholder moment: who pushed back hardest on this redesign and why? Was there a specific debate — coach role, clinical risk, marketing positioning — that you had to argue through? Principal-level case studies always have a "the moment I had to defend the direction" beat. If you have one, it goes here.
Outcomes
The redesign was a foundational shift, not a feature launch — and the metrics reflect that. Hard outcomes are mixed with leading indicators because the deeper retention impact takes months to manifest.
6% growth on L3+/7 (clients opening the app 3+ times per week) within the first two weeks of launch. This was a leading indicator that the new daily rhythm was working — habit challenges were getting checked off, the app was becoming part of clients' daily routines.
Coach time-allocation shifted measurably. With habit challenges replacing daily meal-by-meal validation, coaches reported spending more time on weekly client reviews and less on log review. (Combined with the AI Meal Log work that ran in parallel, this freed coaches by a meaningful margin.)
Program completion rates improved on the cohorts that started under the new model versus the old. Caveat: the desired full-cycle results weren't achieved at the time of my role transition — the program was still being refined, and definitive long-term impact remained to be measured.
TODO — current numbers: if you have any data on how the habit challenge model is performing now (1+ years post-launch), even rough qualitative feedback, that strengthens the case study significantly. Even a "still in use, here's what was kept and what evolved" line helps.
This case study is honest about being foundational work whose full impact lives downstream. Principal-level case studies don't all end with a victory lap — sometimes they end with "this changed the substrate; here's what was made possible."
What I'd Do Differently
I'd validate the phase rubric with more coach involvement before locking it.
The phase model was rigorous, but it was largely my own framework, validated against research and clinical literature. The coaches who were going to use it daily had less input into its design than they should have. Some of the friction in adoption came from "this is how you decided phases work" rather than "this is the model we built together."
If I were starting again, I'd run a 4–6 week co-design phase with the coaching team before finalizing the phase model. The model would have been less elegant. It would have been more adopted.
Lesson: for any system that operators are going to use daily, operators co-design the system or they undermine it. Non-negotiable, regardless of how good your unilateral design is.
TODO — second reflection: one more honest "I'd do this differently." Strategic miss, separate from the tactical co-design point. Maybe about how you sequenced the redesign vs the AI Meal Log work? About which metrics you tracked? About how you handled the role-transition that meant you didn't see the full impact?
The Pattern
When the resource constraint is real, redesign the program — don't optimize the workflow.
Sirka had been optimizing within the existing program model for years. Better meal logging. Better coach tools. Better dashboards. Each marginal improvement was real. None of them changed the underlying ratio mathematics.
The redesign worked because it stopped trying to make the existing program more efficient and asked: what program would actually fit the resources we have? That's a structurally different question.
I now apply this pattern whenever I see incremental optimization stacking up against a structural constraint. Marginal gains are good. But if the constraint is real and the marginal gains are linear, the marginal gains will lose. The right move is to redesign the substrate.
This is what links the Sirka work to my work at MainStory: every system I've built since has been about redesigning the substrate, not optimizing within it. The Caregiver OS isn't a better payslip — it's a different relationship between caregiver and company. QC Audit isn't a better Retool dashboard — it's a different model of what quality means at scale. The Habit Challenge wasn't a better diet plan. It was a different product.
Sirka · Indonesia's evidence-based weight management platform · 5 coaches, 500+ premium subscribers · 2023–2024