Joanna Strober is the co-founder and CEO of Midi Health, a virtual menopause and perimenopause care company serving patients in all 50 states, covered by insurance. She spent 15 years as a venture and private equity investor, then founded and sold a digital health company called Kerbo, before her own perimenopause experience made the care gap impossible to ignore. When she finally found a clinician who understood what she was going through, that expert was an hour away and cost a fortune out of pocket. In 2021, she co-founded Midi with Sharon Mears to bring expert menopause and perimenopause care to every woman virtually, in 50 states, covered by insurance. In this episode of Product Talk, host and Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Joanna to talk about what her investor background gave her as an operator, how Midi thinks about trust as a product decision rather than a brand value, and what it actually looks like to scale care quality to hundreds of thousands of patients without letting it slip.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:22) What 15 years of investing taught Joanna about building product, and what pure operators miss
(3:46) What tells her a product org is healthy, and the CEO/product leader tension she manages every day
(9:29) What trust actually looks like inside a product decision at Midi, and where they fell down early
(13:24) MIDI University: how they scaled expert clinical knowledge to hundreds of nurse practitioners
(16:39) Why AI models are often wrong about women’s health, and what that means for Midi’s care protocols
(18:13) How Midi uses AI to scan charts and identify which providers have patients who keep coming back
(21:40) What Midi will and will not do, and how they decide where the scope ends
(26:25) Why insurance coverage was non-negotiable from day one when cash pay would have been so much easier
(28:35) How the equity mission holds up inside commercial decisions
(31:02) The AI advisory board: AI John Doerr on OKRs, AI Dan Ariely on text message rewrites
(32:36) How Midi uses AI without recreating the feeling that got women dismissed in the first place
(37:23) Lightning round: prevention over optimization, and what the next generation of women’s health founders should build
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
