Building Wellness as a Habit System, Not Just a Health Feature

Wellness products often fail because they treat health as information.

Give users articles.
Show them step counts.
Offer a one-time consultation.
Send a few reminders.

Then engagement drops.

When I moved into BFHL’s Wellness cohort, the challenge was to build something more durable: a system that could help users stay active, get expert nutrition support, build healthier routines, and give corporate clients a credible wellness proposition.

The work covered activity, step tracking, gamified challenges, diet and nutrition, weight management, and fitness. But the real product challenge was deeper:

How do you turn wellness from a passive feature into a repeatable engagement and care-delivery engine?

The situation

BFHL had a strong opportunity in corporate wellness.

GMC customers and corporate clients were looking for more than insurance or one-time health benefits. They wanted engagement, prevention, lifestyle support, and visible employee participation.

At the same time, users needed help with basic but difficult behaviour change:

• walking more,
• staying active consistently,
• improving diet,
• losing weight,
• getting expert guidance,
• following up after a consultation,
• staying accountable beyond the first few days.

The Wellness cohort had to serve both sides of the problem.

For users, it had to feel motivating and useful.
For corporate clients, it had to show engagement and business value.
For BFHL, it had to support GMC retention and corporate wellness revenue.

What was actually broken

The wellness problem was not lack of content.

Most users already know they should walk more, eat better, manage weight, and follow healthier routines. The issue is that knowing does not create behaviour change.

The actual gaps were different.

Activity tracking was too passive

A step count by itself is not enough. Users may check it for a few days, but without goals, competition, rewards, themes, or social triggers, the habit fades.

The product needed to create a reason to come back.

Diet support was too dependent on external vendors

Nutrition and weight management required expert support, but relying on external dietician vendors created cost, dependency, and limited control over the service experience.

BFHL needed its own dietician-led operating model.

Consultations needed structure

A diet consultation cannot be treated as a one-off call.

A meaningful nutrition journey needs:

• assessment,
• medical context,
• 24-hour diet recall,
• food preferences,
• lifestyle understanding,
• diet-plan creation,
• follow-up scheduling,
• reminders,
• chat support,
• missed-consultation recovery,
• progress records.

Without this structure, diet programs become fragmented and difficult to scale.

Corporate wellness needed engagement proof

For GMC retention and corporate wellness revenue, the product had to show that employees were actively participating. That made active users a key metric for activity challenges.

The product insight

The key insight was simple:

Wellness is not a content problem. It is a habit, motivation, and guided-care problem.

That changed the product direction.

Instead of building disconnected wellness features, the cohort had to create two connected engines:

1. An engagement engine through gamified activity challenges.
2. A guided-care engine through an in-house dietician platform.

One created participation and movement.
The other created expert-led support and continuity.

Together, they helped move Wellness from a feature bucket to a business cohort.

What I shaped

I led the full BFHL Wellness cohort from January 2024 to September 2024, covering Activity, Step Tracker, Diet & Nutrition, Weight Management, and Fitness.

The team included Maaz Modak, Saumya Shukla, Pragya Kumpawat, Aditi Rana, and Mahak Sonekar reporting to me.

The work had two major product tracks.

Track 1: Gamified activity and step-tracker challenges

The first part of the wellness strategy was to make activity more engaging.

Plain step tracking gives users data.
Gamified challenges give users purpose.

We designed activity journeys where users could participate in themed challenges, complete daily tasks, compete on leaderboards, earn rewards, and progress through virtual routes.

The experience included:

• step challenges,
• Everest-style virtual journeys,
• Kilimanjaro-style challenges,
• team challenges,
• rewards,
• leaderboards,
• milestone-based progress,
• themed routes,
• social competition.

The goal was not only to count steps.
The goal was to make movement feel like progress.

How activity challenges changed the experience

Before this, the user experience was closer to:

Open app → check steps → maybe participate → forget after a few days.

The new experience moved toward:

Join challenge → complete daily goal → see progress → compete with others → unlock rewards → stay active with team/social motivation.

That shift mattered because behaviour change needs reinforcement.

A leaderboard creates social pressure.
A themed route creates narrative progress.
A team challenge creates accountability.
A reward creates a visible completion loop.

Active users became the primary metric for this stream because the business needed proof that users were not just enrolled but actually participating.

Track 2: Building the in-house dietician platform

The deeper transformation was in Diet & Nutrition.

BFHL had been paying external vendors for dietician services. That created cost and limited control. The opportunity was to build an in-house dietician capability with a dedicated platform and operating model.

We built a custom platform for in-house dieticians and launched it with 3 dieticians initially.

The platform served all wellness users and replaced external dietician vendors completely, creating a saving of ₹95 lakhs.

But the important part was not only cost saving. The bigger product shift was that BFHL now controlled the full dietician journey.

What the dietician platform enabled

The custom platform supported the full nutrition-care workflow:

Consultation booking

Users could be scheduled for dietician consultations through a structured flow instead of ad-hoc coordination.

First consultation

The first consultation was designed as a comprehensive assessment, not a generic diet discussion.

Dieticians captured:

• health history,
• current health status,
• medical condition,
• 24-hour diet recall,
• food preferences,
• food patterns,
• daily schedule,
• user goals,
• restrictions and lifestyle context.

This gave the dietician enough context to create a useful plan.

Diet-plan creation

Dieticians could create and assign personalized diet plans after consultation.

The expectation was that the diet plan should be created within a defined TAT, rather than being left open-ended.

Follow-up scheduling

The platform supported follow-up scheduling so that users did not drop off after the first consultation.

Follow-ups were critical because diet and weight management need iteration. A plan rarely works perfectly on day one. It needs review, adjustment, and accountability.

Chat support

Users could ask diet-related questions after receiving the plan.

This mattered because diet adherence often fails in small daily moments: what to eat outside, what to replace, what to do when cravings happen, how to manage meals during travel, and how to adjust to routine changes.

Automated reminders

The platform supported reminders for upcoming consultations and follow-ups.

This reduced dependency on manual chasing and helped maintain continuity.

Missed-consultation handling

Missed consultations were not treated as dead ends.

The workflow included rescheduling and follow-up communication so that users could be brought back into the journey.

EMR and progress records

Consultation notes, dietary plans, progress records, and user interactions were maintained so that dieticians had continuity across sessions.

This turned dietician support from isolated calls into a managed care journey.

How the dietician journey changed

Before the in-house model, diet support was vendor-dependent and less controlled.

The experience looked closer to:

User needs diet support → external dependency → consultation happens → limited continuity → follow-up depends on process discipline.

The new model moved toward:

User enters wellness journey → consultation booked → dietician assesses context → plan created → reminders triggered → follow-up scheduled → chat support available → progress recorded → plan adjusted.

This changed the operating model from outsourced service access to owned care delivery.

What made this hard

The difficulty in this project was not only building a platform.

The harder problem was designing a service model that could scale.

A dietician platform is not like a pure software feature. It sits at the intersection of product, operations, healthcare expertise, scheduling, communication, and user behaviour.

There were several product challenges.

Standardization without making care generic

Dieticians needed a standard SOP, but users still needed personalized care.

The platform had to standardize the process while allowing dieticians to adapt plans based on user context.

Capacity planning

When service is delivered by human experts, scale depends on availability, consultation duration, follow-up frequency, and operating cost.

The product had to account for dietician capacity and consultation load.

Continuity of care

The first consultation was not enough. Follow-ups, reminders, chat support, and progress records were needed to maintain engagement.

Behaviour change

Users do not improve diet just because they receive a plan. The system had to support habit-building through nudges, communication, and repeated interaction.

Business viability

The model had to reduce external cost while improving service quality and engagement.

Replacing vendors with in-house dieticians solved both cost control and experience control.

What this delivered

The Wellness cohort delivered two connected outcomes.

1. Stronger user engagement through activity challenges

The Step Tracker and gamified challenge formats went live, including step challenges, Everest/Kilimanjaro-style journeys, team challenges, rewards, and leaderboards.

The primary metric was active users.

This supported GMC retention and corporate wellness revenue by giving corporate clients an engagement-led wellness proposition.

2. A scalable in-house dietician platform

The custom dietician platform went live with all major capabilities:

• consultation booking,
• diet-plan creation,
• follow-up scheduling,
• chat support,
• automated reminders,
• EMR/progress records,
• missed-consultation handling.

BFHL onboarded 3 in-house dieticians initially.

The platform fully replaced external dietician vendors and saved ₹95 lakhs.

Engagement and repeat consultations improved, though consultation volume, utilization rate, and NPS numbers are not available.

Why this mattered for BFHL

This project strengthened BFHL’s wellness proposition in three ways.

It improved control

BFHL no longer had to depend fully on external dietician vendors for nutrition support.

It improved economics

Replacing external vendors generated ₹95 lakhs in savings.

It improved product depth

Wellness became more than challenges or content. It now included guided nutrition support, activity engagement, follow-ups, and habit-building mechanisms.

This created a stronger foundation for corporate wellness programs and GMC retention.

What this says about my product approach

This project reflects an important part of my product thinking:

A good product does not always replace humans. Sometimes it makes expert-led service scalable.

The dietician platform was not designed to remove dieticians. It was designed to make them more effective, structured, measurable, and scalable.

Similarly, the activity challenges were not built to show steps. They were built to create motivation.

Across the Wellness cohort, the product approach was to combine:

• behaviour design,
• service design,
• platform workflows,
• expert support,
• gamification,
• operational scalability,
• business viability.

The result was a wellness product direction that served users, dieticians, corporate clients, and BFHL’s business goals at the same time.