Portfolio · 2026 · 0-1 builds
From a blank page to a launch-ready product.
Product manager specializing in taking ambiguous, regulated consumer problems from 0 to 1: health, intimacy, parenting. I find the problem, decide what the product must never do, scope the first version hard, and build it myself with AI coding agents until it can be argued with.



Product philosophy
How I build new products
Four positions I take on every 0-1 build. They are the reason the three products in this deck reached a working, reviewable state without an engineering team.
- Discovery is reading the problem, not confirming the brief.The brief for Lull said "sleep tracker"; the parent's day did not. The brief for Nire said "marketing site"; the problem was that nothing on it could be substantiated. I start from what the person would say out loud, and from what the category forbids.
- The "never" list is the strategy.In health-adjacent categories the product is defined by what it refuses to do: no invented proof, no claims the business cannot back, no advice that needs a clinician. I write that list before the feature list, and I turn it into tests.
- Scope to the hypothesis, cut everything else.V1 exists to test one belief. Anything that does not test it, or that would hurt a family or a patient if wrong, is out and written down as out, with the reason.
- Speed comes from building the thing, not the ticket.AI coding agents are my engineering capacity. I spec, build, review and QA in one loop, walk every changed flow in a real browser, and distrust the output on purpose: rules become tests, claims are read against the code.
Snapshot
Three 0-1 builds, one method
Each was taken from an ambiguous brief to a working product in six to twelve weeks, as the sole product manager and the builder. Click into any of them below.



Case study 1 · 0-1 build · Direct-to-consumer telehealth
Nire: a regulated site nobody could ship, launched clean in six weeks.
Compounded GLP-1 weight care, hormone therapy, sexual health. The brief was "we need the marketing site live for paid traffic". The reality was a site that could not legally go public.
A. Executive summary
Nire, in one screen
B. Phase 0 · The ambiguity and the problem space
A site existed. Nothing on it could be defended.
Nire's public site was a Framer export: unmaintainable, with placeholder social proof and health claims counsel had never seen. Paid acquisition was budgeted. The question underneath the brief was not "how do we launch" but "what are we allowed to say, and how do we know it stays that way".
The spark
- Mandate"Get the marketing site live for paid traffic." The pipeline had just been switched to deploy straight to production; the staging gate was removed in the same week.
- What I sawSix regulatory requirements from counsel, and a site that described compounded drugs as "safe" and "evidence-based", promised "the same active ingredient" as branded drugs, and showed a 4.7-star rating from 2,400 reviews that did not exist.
Customer discovery
- Structural read of the existing product36 captured surfaces at three breakpoints, decomposed into a component inventory (62 recurring pieces) before writing a line.
- Regulatory readCounsel's six-requirement baseline, FTC substantiation and fake-review rules, Florida's weight-loss advertising rule, and the recent FTC action against a telehealth brand for exactly this pattern.
- Audit as discoveryEvery page checked against the six requirements; every finding a screenshot with route, rule and file. Four of six failed.
Why now
- MoneyPaid social spend was budgeted and waiting on the site.
- ExposureEvery prohibited claim was one merge from being public under the brand's name.
- TrustIn a medical purchase the words that create legal risk are the same words that decide whether a patient trusts the brand enough to start.
C. Phase 0.5 · Vision and strategy
Compliant and convincing are the same thing here
D. Phase 1 · Ruthless scoping
What the first version had to do, and what I said no to
Prioritized by exposure: P0 blocks any public deploy, P1 blocks marketing spend, P2 is hygiene. The P0 list was short enough to finish in days, which is what made launch-on-time credible.
The MVP
- 36 routes on one design systemHome, four treatment areas with one page per medication, how it works, who we are, FAQ, contact, six per-product safety pages, and the complete legal set.
- Static, no backendA single-page app with two calls to action that hand off to the partner. Nothing to secure, nothing to keep up.
- Compliance built inShared disclaimer component, claims lint in CI, review checklist next to the code.
What I cut
- The in-house backend and in-app flowsThe first commit shipped a frontend and backend. Ten days later I stripped login, quiz, checkout and patient portal: the partner owns them, and every regulated event lives there.
- Testimonials and ratingsRemoved, not replaced. No real reviews existed. The section returns the day verified ones do.
- Trust sealsLegitScript, HIPAA and pharmacy seals removed until the certifications exist.
- Blog and "in the news"Nothing to publish yet; a dead link is worse than no link.
Constraints
- No engineersI was the team. AI coding agents were the capacity; the browser was the QA lab.
- Counsel and client decide wordingEvery patient-facing sentence was proposed with the rule it satisfies; the client chose the disclaimer placement on 17 August and I shipped it the same day.
- Two inputs I could not producePharmacy contact details and the substantiation file are business items. Tracked with owners, explicitly not launch blockers.
The product
What patients see
Desktop pages of the launch build, sliding inside one screen. One hero message per treatment area, clinician-led claims only, and the mandated disclosure where the client directed it.
Scoping in practice
Claim the process, not the outcome
Problem: "evidence-based" is an efficacy claim, and no clinical studies exist on compounded semaglutide. Decision: say what actually happens to the patient. A licensed clinician prescribes and oversees treatment, which is a real differentiator. "Individual results vary" under the call to action.

GLP-1 hero. "Evidence-based GLP-1 treatment, reviewed by a licensed clinician and delivered to your door."

Shipped. "GLP-1 treatment prescribed and overseen by a licensed clinician, delivered to your door." plus "Individual results vary."
Scoping in practice
Trade invented proof for real information
Problem: a 4.7-star rating, "2,400+ reviews", five placeholder quotes and a dead "View reviews" link, in a category where fake reviews carry per-violation penalties; and "important safety information" promised but rendered as plain text. Decision: remove the social proof entirely and spend the effort on six per-product safety pages.

Home. Invented rating and review count with placeholder quotes.

Safety pages. What the medication is, who should not take it, side effects, and when to seek care.
E. Go-to-market and launch
Launch gate, hand-off, and the moment the floor moved
Nire's traffic is bought, not grown: paid social to a treatment page to the partner's free evaluation. So the launch strategy was a gate, not a campaign.
F. Results and learnings
Launch-ready, verifiable, and it stays that way
Pre-launch by design: the metrics below are validation of the build, not vanity traffic. The partner controls the moment paid traffic starts.
F. Results and learnings
What V1 taught me, and what I would do differently
Case study 2 · 0-1 build · Consumer subscription · Sexual health
IntimPath: a clinician's plan, in a few private minutes a day.
Nobody books an appointment about this. The brief was a web-only product under a new brand. The problem was making people who will never see a doctor start, pay and come back tomorrow.
A. Executive summary
IntimPath, in one screen
B. Phase 0 · The ambiguity and the problem space
Ordinary problems that almost nobody gets help with
The company owned a library of programme content and quiz funnels from an earlier, app-store product. The mandate was a web-only product under a new brand. What it should be for, and why anyone would pay, was open.
The spark
- The gapSexual problems are common and treatable, yet a clinic means saying it to a stranger's face, pills treat the symptom, free content contradicts itself and is never sequenced. So people do nothing, for years.
- The reframeThe missing thing is not information; there is plenty. It is a private, paced, personal plan that says what to do in the next ten minutes and makes you better at it over weeks.
Customer discovery
- Voice of the customerCollected the sentences people actually say about this (next slide) and mapped each to the alternative that failed them: clinic, pills, free content, generic fitness apps.
- Content auditWent through every lesson and workout of the inherited library: what was educational, what was a supplement pitch, what could not be claimed. The pitches went; the education stayed.
- Category rulesSensitive-data consent, what a wellness product may claim versus a medical one, and what an app store would have refused.
Why now
- Web-onlyA browser product avoids app-store review of sexual-health content and the platform fee, and reaches a phone without an icon to explain.
- Platform readyThe company's payment and account platform could be reused through its SDK, so V1 could spend its weeks on content and funnel.
- Content exists376 programme days could be rewritten as original material rather than commissioned from zero.
Customer discovery
Who buys this, and what actually hurts
Every product decision traces to one of these sentences. The alternatives fail them in predictable ways: a clinic costs a conversation, pills teach nothing, free content is endless and never sequenced, fitness apps treat the pelvic floor as an afterthought and ignore the head.
He says
"I finish too fast and I've started avoiding sex because of it."
"It works sometimes and not others, and I never know which tonight will be."
"I'm not going to my GP about this. I'm not taking pills forever either."
"I read that Kegels help. I have no idea whether I'm doing them right."
She says
"I love my partner and I just don't want it any more. I feel broken."
"I've never really known what works for my own body."
"Menopause changed everything and no one prepared me."
"Every article says something different and none of it tells me what to do today."
C. Phase 0.5 · Vision and strategy
These are trainable problems, not fixed traits
D. Phase 1 · Ruthless scoping
Seven programmes live, two hidden, and a short list of things I refused
One plan for everybody would be wrong for almost everybody, so V1 needed separate programmes per situation. Everything else was judged by one question: does it help someone come back tomorrow?
The MVP
- Today, and nothing elseThe home screen shows two short lessons and one or two sessions. No library to browse, no backlog to feel guilty about. Progress is one dial and a stage name.
- The workout playerA ring that expands and contracts at the exact tempo, a voice, an optional vibration. Ten levels mapped day by day, so the load climbs on its own.
- Nine programmes, assessed at both endsLasting longer, erection quality, pelvic strength, rebuilding desire, learning your body, menopause, and a version written for queer women. Each starts and ends with the same self-assessment.
- Three quiz funnels, one checkout, two offers52 to 60 screens from symptom to programme; three plans; one upgrade sold at two price points, prices editable without a deploy.
What I cut
- Unfinished programmesTwo men's programmes with no days authored stay hidden until they are genuinely done, decided from the content registry, not a flag.
- Supplement and cream pitchesStripped from every lesson; the education stayed. A wellness product does not sell you a cream mid-lesson.
- Named specialists and app-store referencesPortraits and names we could not vouch for were dropped; the legal text lost every app-store clause.
- A native appBrowser only, by design. No icon to explain, no review board, no waiting.
Constraints
- A strict reviewerEvery merge request read line by line by the CTO. I ran a review and browser-QA pass before each one, and wrote the MR descriptions by hand.
- A shared SDK I could not changePayments and accounts behave the way the platform decides. When it was wrong, the fix could not live in my repo.
- Five languagesAbout 20,400 strings per language, with grammatical agreement correct per audience, so a German woman does not read a sentence written for a man.
The product
What the customer sees
Captured from the running application at phone size.





E. Go-to-market and launch
From a symptom to the right programme, and to the offer
Acquisition is the quiz. Three funnels of 52 to 60 screens turn a symptom into a programme and an email into an account with no password; a parent of two or a man at 1 a.m. does not create passwords. Then checkout, consent, and a fixed ladder of offers with a decline path that never loses the first purchase.




E. Go-to-market and launch
The launch plan, and the day the payment callback lied
F. Results and learnings
A full product on the development environment, and the metrics that will judge it
IntimPath is complete and reviewed but not yet exposed to paid traffic, so the numbers below are what shipped and what I would measure, not vanity traffic.
Case study 3 · 0-1 build · Consumer subscription · Parenting
Lull: one honest companion for a baby's first year.
The brief said "sleep tracker". The parent's day did not. Ten weeks from that sentence to a beta a stakeholder can walk end to end on a laptop in a minute.
A. Executive summary
Lull, in one screen
B. Phase 0 · The ambiguity and the problem space
It is 3 a.m. and the app just lied.
The mandate was a sleep tracker with a paid funnel. Reading how parents actually use these products changed what the product had to be: not more precise, but never wrong in a way that loses trust.
The spark
- The brief"A baby sleep tracker, with courses, and a quiz-to-checkout funnel."
- The problem underneathWhen should the next nap be? The app says 14:20 as a fact; the baby disagrees; the parent stops trusting the app. Is this a regression? Every rough week is labelled one. What is normal at this age? Six sources, six answers.
Customer discovery
- The parent's daySleep, feeds, nappies, first foods and allergens, health, dressing for outside, growth, the parents themselves: split today across four tools and a group chat. The tracker had to hold the day, not one column of it.
- The evidence basePublished age norms for wake windows and total sleep, month by month; which regressions the literature recognizes (four months biological, eight to ten developmental) and which it does not (twelve months is a schedule problem).
- Competitors' trust failuresConfident times, invented "% of parents" proof, safe-sleep advice buried behind a paywall.
Why now
- A category built on borrowed credibilityRatings and testimonials convert once; when a tired parent notices the numbers were invented, everything else the product says becomes suspect. Honesty was the open position.
- Platform and funnel readyThe company's quiz-to-checkout pattern and payment platform meant V1 could spend its weeks on the engine and the content.
C. Phase 0.5 · Vision and strategy
Trust was the product. Everything else was derived from that.
D. Phase 1 · Ruthless scoping
What I kept out mattered as much as what went in
Every "out" is a place where being wrong would hurt a family. Those are not features to ship fast.
In, for the first version
- The tracker and the engineTen kinds of entry on one timeline; 28 monthly bands of published norms; per-slot learning; a transition declared only after seven days of evidence; tagged sick, travel and teething days shown but not learned from.
- Two coursesSleep and starting solids, staged by age, audio first for a parent who cannot read right now.
- Solids planner and allergen ladder100 first foods with age-banded preparation, nine allergens one at a time.
- Dressing by weather, age-filtered guidanceAnd a quiz-to-checkout funnel that runs end to end, in a simulated mode before any payment processor exists.
Out, on purpose
- Prescribing a sleep-training methodThe course explains the methods and the evidence; the app never asks you to do one.
- Assessing any symptomThe reaction logger records and pauses; it never triages. Severe signs go to the emergency number, never to a form.
- A community feedPeer advice about babies is a liability the product cannot moderate honestly.
- Anything needing a clinician in the loopUntil a clinician has reviewed the age table and the allergen method, the product says less, not more.
Constraints
- Solo, ten weeksAI coding agents as the team; a brief and rules written before the first line of code so the agents built against something.
- Health-adjacent claimsEvery number the product shows had to come from one table, so a public page can never quote a wake window the app disagrees with.
- Pre-processorNo payment provider yet, so the whole funnel had to run in a simulated mode for copy review and walkthroughs.
From why to what
A window, not a time. An engine built to be honest about it.
- Start from published norms.Age minus weeks premature picks one of 28 monthly bands; day one gets the population's answer, labelled as such. No empty state.
- Learn this baby, slot by slot.Each wake window is learned separately; the first window and the run-in to bedtime behave differently.
- Never let one bad day move the estimate.Outliers dropped, recent days weigh more, the norm keeps a hand on the result.
- Change regime as the baby changes.Under six months wake windows drive, from nine months the clock; a nap drop needs seven consecutive days of evidence.
- One table of truth.Engine, public age guides and course text read the same per-month table.

The product
The public site, reading from the same table as the app
Courses, age guides and library pages quote the same per-month norms the engine uses. A page cannot disagree with the app.
The product
Inside the app
The course a tired parent can listen to, the log that takes ten seconds, the guide that says what is normal, and the one screen that reads the weather for you.




E. Go-to-market and launch
How a parent arrives, and why the first screen is a question
A three-minute quiz is onboarding and acquisition at once: it opens with the parent, branches on the baby's age, and feeds the answers into setup. The email is the account; sign back in by link. Three plan lengths, a fixed ladder of offers, and a decline path that returns to the exact step.





E. Go-to-market and launch
The launch plan, and the week the food library turned out to be stolen
F. Results and learnings
What shipped in ten weeks
Counts read from the build, not typed in. A working beta: public site, funnel, checkout, app and API, walkable end to end on a laptop in a minute.
F. Results and learnings
What I would measure, what is next, and what I would do differently
Artifacts
Proof of work: the documents behind the decisions.
Sanitized excerpts of the real artifacts from each build: audits, trackers, evidence indexes, journey and state diagrams, handover checklists, devops documents and launch gates. Internal names and hosts removed.
Artifacts · Nire
Audit one-pager, change tracker, evidence index
The audit is written for two readers at once, counsel and engineering. The tracker holds the exact replacement copy per item so fixes apply verbatim. The evidence index makes every finding a file.
Artifacts · IntimPath
Journey map, state diagrams, handover checklist
Diagrams live in the repository next to the code and render in the team wiki. The handover checklist was written so the project could change hands from one page, with assumptions marked as assumptions.
Artifacts · Lull
Devops handover, the licensing fix, launch gates
The build document lets devops run the product without me. The credits file is generated from data, so attribution cannot drift from the images. The gates list is the launch conversation, in writing.
Background
Ten years of getting products to exist
Toolkit for rapid validation and building
- BuildClaude Code and AI coding agents as engineering capacity; Node.js, Express, React, Tailwind; SQL and migrations; git and merge-request flow, reading a diff and a stack trace.
- ValidateQuiz funnels in simulated-payment mode for walkthroughs; preview deploys on Cloudflare Pages; browser QA on every changed flow; A/B testing programs and experiment guardrails.
- Specify and trackMermaid journey and state diagrams; Excel trackers as the single source of truth; evidence indexes; one-page audits; handover checklists.
- GuardRules as tests: claims lint, tone rules, no-social-proof checks, mutation-checked test suites; counts read from the build, never typed in.
- CategoriesSensitive and regulated consumer products: sex, health and the body without shame or clinical distance; consent, privacy and claim discipline.
Contact
Looking for a PM who can take it from 0 to 1?
I am open to product roles where the problem is ambiguous, the users deserve honesty, and a PM who can build and ship the first version is an advantage. Happy to walk through any of the three builds live, including the trackers, the tests and the parts that are not finished.
Esther Mirzakhanyan
Nire screens are from the launch build and the audit evidence set. IntimPath and Lull screens are from the running applications; Lull is pre-launch and prices are omitted on purpose. Artifacts are sanitized excerpts.