From Complexity to Clarity: Research-Driven MVP for a Healthcare SaaS

We turned a bloated, confusing product into a lean, usable MVP by grounding decisions in real user insight. What started as a visual redesign brief became a strategic research engagement that redefined the product’s direction, reduced surface complexity, and prioritized real workflows.

Context

Escala Médica is a platform for managing hospital duty schedules. The original brief was to “modernize the interface,” but early internal assessment revealed deeper issues: the product had over 150 screens, many redundant or underused; core workflows were misaligned with user expectations; and despite a rich feature set, the experience lacked clarity and usability.

Challenge

The team needed to reposition the product based on evidence rather than assumptions. The core problems were identifying actual user pain points, distinguishing essential versus superfluous functionality, simplifying the experience, and improving operational efficiency to surface value early.

Approach

The engagement began with a structured research process that aligned stakeholders, surfaced real needs, and translated those into a focused MVP:

• Alignment workshop with stakeholders to define objectives, user profiles, and initial hypotheses, and to prepare research instruments including interview guides, empathy maps, and heuristic analysis plans.
• In-depth interviews with 10 participants spanning shift coordinators, physicians on duty, and internal stakeholders. These captured diverse work contexts, surfaced usability gaps, and revealed friction points in existing flows.
• Mapping real user journeys and documenting stress points and disconnected workflows.
• Co-definition workshop to align product priorities based on research findings, leading to a clear decision path for what the MVP should include.

Key User Segments

• Shift Coordinators responsible for scheduling, coverage, and team communication. They were overloaded with fragmented tools like Excel and WhatsApp, causing coordination breakdowns.
• Physicians on duty facing administrative burden, lack of schedule control, last-minute changes, and unpredictability in income. They needed structure, autonomy, and financial visibility.
• Internal Stakeholders who provided product history, constraints, and strategic context.

Key Actions Taken

• Identified and prioritized the most critical pain points for each persona, such as untracked duty swaps, fragmented communication, and lack of reliable backup professional data.
• Reduced product surface from 150+ screens to a lean MVP of 80 essential screens, focusing on value delivery and removing noise.
• Defined and built core MVP features including official traceable duty swaps, calendar integration (Google Calendar), clear and updated duty dashboards, automated alerts for unfilled duties or pending confirmations, a financial assistant for physicians on duty, intelligent multi-institution onboarding with reusable data, and WhatsApp integration to support existing communication habits.

Impact

• Interface complexity was reduced by 46%, making the product more approachable and maintainable.
• MVP surfaced 80 essential screens instead of the original 150+, centering the experience on what actually drives value.
• The research process produced a product better aligned with real routines, clearer navigation, improved usability, and less rework for design and development teams.
• The resulting MVP was validated against real user needs instead of internal assumptions, which also reoriented the team, reduced internal uncertainty, and delivered a roadmap aligned with user value.

What We Learned

1. Surface modernization without deep user insight fails to address underlying operational misalignment.
2. Mapping real workflows uncovers hidden dependencies and failure modes that heuristic or aesthetic audits alone miss.
3. Cutting scope based on actual usage patterns yields a stronger product faster than adding more features.
4. Building with existing habits in mind (for example integrating with WhatsApp instead of replacing it) reduces adoption friction.
5. Co-defining the MVP with stakeholders ensures that insights translate into prioritized product decisions, not just reports.

Who Led the Work

• Domenica Ferreira — Research lead and product strategist driving the methodology and synthesis
• Sintetizo - The Consultancy
• Cross-functional team, stakeholders including coordinators, and internal product stakeholders (facilitated alignment and validation)

If your product feels bloated, misaligned with real user workflows, or you need to shrink complexity while increasing clarity and adoption, let’s design a research-driven MVP that surfaces and delivers the right value.