A workshop business becoming a product platform.
I led Sukhi's transformation from high-touch wellness workshops into a measurable, habit-forming product business. As the team and product evolved, my role expanded from design into product strategy, product management, and code.
- Role
- Head of Design
- Scope
- Design → product → strategy → code
- Worked with
- CEO · marketing · engineering
- Focus
- AI · 0→1 · Systems
completion
overhaul
production cost
01 — THE SETUP
From workshops to a product people would actually return to.
workshops→Content
platform→Habit
system→AI wellness
ecosystem
When I joined, Sukhi ran wellness workshops and coaching, but already had plans to become a scalable product business. I was brought on to help make that transition real.
Through its EAP partners, Sukhi had the potential to reach more than 200,000 employees. Those partners cared about one thing: utilization. Not how much content existed, but whether members actually showed up and came back.
The uncomfortable part was learning, then having to tell the team, that the content Sukhi had spent years building would never be the moat. It was expensive to produce, quick to age, usually consumed once, and could never compete with YouTube on volume. The potential audience was large, but actual usage, we soon learned, was not.
02 — THE CHALLENGE
Strong early engagement was hiding a retention problem.
I led the team toward a harder bet: build repeatable habits instead of more content, even while content produced the stronger early numbers.
Content drove more early usage, but the retention curves told a different story.
Research and product data showed that journeys attracted more people at first, then dropped off quickly. Daily activities started smaller but retained more people over time. This was the behavior we chose to build around.
THE CLINICAL PATH
Along the way, we also considered moving further into 1:1 clinical and physician services. Those services could create more value per member, but they brought compliance and legal complexity, were harder to scale across EAP populations, and demanded more than our team could responsibly support. We chose to focus on repeatable daily engagement instead.
03 — WHAT I DID
Fix the foundation. Test before investing. Build where the behavior lasted.
03.1
Made the product measurable.
Replaced home-built reporting and email with Mixpanel and Brevo. Core instrumentation took two weeks; the full rollout took a month. The team got accurate, real-time dashboards, and EAP partners got customized reports showing their own utilization.
03.2
Deconstructed, trimmed the excess, then reconstructed it all.
Cut comments, ratings, and dead engagement mechanics, then rebuilt the IA, navigation, and content hierarchy. The visual restraint was intentional: every hour of outsourced development had a direct cost.
03.3
Rebuilt content as an operation, not a pile of videos.
Created the production playbook, recording standards, review process, and coach onboarding, then sourced a new editing vendor. Cost fell from roughly $400–600 per journey to $50–80, and turnaround moved from weeks to days.
03.4
Designed a "ritual" people could repeat.
Found a way to test the idea cheaply before investing in a full build: curated Pomodoro videos for productivity, repurposed existing yoga content as a wind-down, and a lighter Daily Pulse for users to check their mood at the end of the day. These experiments became a loop: measure emotions, stay active, and reflect.
03.5
Encouraged consistency over intensity.
Designed and introduced Sukhi Points and Sukhi Score, with tiered leaderboards, grace periods, and community features. The system was built to foster positivity and encourage progress without punishing people for having a difficult week.
04 — WHAT HAPPENED
The foundation moved. So did the numbers.
+200%Sign-up completion
+100%Retention
3 monthsPlatform overhauled hands-on
~10×Lower content-production cost
80.34%Sign-up → first video watched completion rate
Now: Sukhi 3.0 — a completely overhauled wellness ecosystem with Ana, our AI wellness guide, at its center. Launching August 2026.
“Allen brings the thinking of a product leader, the craft of a designer, and the resourcefulness of a builder, all in one person. He has been instrumental in transforming Sukhi into the platform it is today and has consistently stepped beyond his role to move both the product and the company forward. He is one of the people I trust most to take on a difficult, undefined problem and carry it through.”
SOURABH S. · Founder & CEO, Sukhi
SELECTED ARTIFACTS
Inside Sukhi.
05 — LOOKING BACK
Early engagement showed us what people would try. Retention showed us what was worth building around.
Content generated the better launch numbers, but daily activities were the behavior that lasted. Choosing the more durable signal gave the team a clearer direction for the product.