Changing sports nutrition from the product side

INDYA had already come a long way when I joined, in January 2022. It had started as a nutrition clinic in Valencia: the founders saw they could deliver a better service if they monitored their clients' day to day, and commissioned the first version of the app from an external agency. It worked (it proved the service improves when the nutritionist sees the day to day) and on the back of that they hired an internal team and closed the first round, which put the app in the hands of the first clients outside Valencia and unconnected to the physical clinic. That is where INDYA stops being a service's software and becomes a product.

I joined with the brief of professionalising it (product, methodology, data and scalability) to turn it into the reference nutrition app. It had customers, it monetised and it had careful design, and that is exactly what made it hard to see what was missing: a goal system that did not order decisions, biweekly sprints that did not fit in two weeks, a high level of bugs and (most striking in a company with a very good data structure) very little conversation with users.

Focus before cadence. I inherited biweekly sprints that existed but never closed. What I changed was not the length: a sprint with fifteen open initiatives is not a sprint, it is a wish list with a date. We moved from Trello to Jira and, with the change, task management gained explicit criteria (definition of ready and definition of done), which is what lets you discuss whether something is finished without discussing it with whoever built it.

The retro as team maintenance, not as a verdict on the sprint. I introduced them as soon as friction between design and engineering became recurring. The rule that made them useful: we do not talk about what went well or badly, or about who; we talk about what each person will bring to the product next time.

From install data to product data. With the CPO pushing, we moved from Firebase's basic metrics to Amplitude. The effect was not having charts: it was that we stopped looking only at business metrics and started genuinely understanding the user.

And talking to users, which was the thing nobody did. I came in through the churn door (a problem with an owner opens a door that a research initiative does not) and out of it came four permanent inputs: post-churn (why they leave), power users (what keeps them and what they need), new users (what activates them and what blocks them) and general surveys for the pulse.

The pairing with the product designer was one of the pieces behind the jump, and it did not take long to be noticed from outside: Apple spotted the app and brought us into Apple App Store Foundations, its mentoring programme. We came out of it as one of the first companies in Europe to ship widgets (a feature Android had had for years and that was just launching on iOS) and featured on the App Store: for the user, sorting the day's nutrition without opening the app; for us, visibility money cannot buy.

And we integrated where the user already was: Apple Health, Health Connect, Strava and TrainingPeaks. The direct benefit was not having to log the same thing twice, but the big one was for the service: the nutrition team began planning on real performance, not on what the client remembered.

All of this marks a path of work done well, and that pays off: with clients, and in the kind of partner who comes to you. Shortly after, none other than Pau Gasol became a shareholder. What mattered was not the amount: it was what it meant to a client who trains.