ESNTL Wellness — Paige Jensen

Overview

An enterprise wellness platform built with Apple

ESNTL Wellness is an enterprise wellness platform built for iOS, WatchOS, and desktop. It helps individuals and organizations understand correlations between their mental and physical health — passively aggregating biometric data from the Apple Watch and connecting it to workplace patterns.

Funded by Concentrix and built in direct collaboration with Apple, ESNTL was an ambitious product in a space with no clear incumbent. I stepped in to lead the product and design direction, inheriting an early-stage product and taking it through launch — ultimately selling it into 20+ enterprises worldwide.

The Challenge

Connecting health data to workplace wellbeing — at enterprise scale

Organizations — especially first responders, healthcare workers, and school administrators — struggled to understand the impact of work stress on their people. The data existed (heart rate, sleep, activity), but no tool was connecting it to workplace patterns in a meaningful, actionable way.

ESNTL needed to be that tool, while navigating Apple's stringent privacy requirements and the complexity of enterprise deployment across very different organizational contexts. The technical constraints were real, the stakes were high, and the timeline was aggressive.

The ESNTL problem space

My Role

Product vision, roadmap, and a team of 15

When I stepped into this role, I inherited three compounding problems at once: no clear product vision or roadmap, a strained relationship with Apple stakeholders, and a team that was struggling. I fixed all three.

As Product Design Director, I owned the full product vision and design direction for the platform — setting the roadmap, making the key prioritization calls, managing the Apple partnership directly, and driving alignment across Concentrix leadership and Apple partners. I also made the hard call to reshape the team and step fully into a leadership role, creating the conditions for good design to happen at all.

I built and led a cross-functional global team of 15 — spanning product, design, engineering, and research. The executive team at both Concentrix and Apple consistently noted that the team exceeded expectations.

Process

From early-stage product to enterprise deployment

Team structure

"Building this team brought me the most joy of my career so far."
— Paige Jensen, on leading the cross-functional global team of 15

Team building: Recruited and led a cross-functional global team of 15 across product, design, engineering, and research — building culture and clarity around a shared mission.
Problem definition: Defined the core problem space — connecting passive health data (Apple Watch biometrics) to work patterns and organizational wellbeing — in a way that was actionable for both individuals and administrators.
Roadmap and prioritization: Led product roadmap decisions against Apple-mandated timelines, balancing feature depth with the need to ship and learn quickly.
Design decisions: The design work I'm most proud of is the correlation insights UI — surfacing connections between users' health metrics in a way that felt meaningful, not overwhelming — and the administrator dashboard, which gave managers an aggregate view of team wellbeing that hadn't existed before. But my most impactful decision wasn't a UI choice. It was making the call to change the team shape and step fully into a leadership role, so that good design had a real chance of happening at all.
Executive alignment: Drove stakeholder communication across Concentrix leadership and Apple partners, translating ground-level insights into strategic decisions at the executive level.

User responding to heart rate notification

A user responds to an elevated heart rate notification, prompting a reflection exercise

Insights show correlations between health metrics

Administrator dashboard — aggregate wellbeing view for staff

Pushing for What Was Right

Human-centered process over building to spec

One of the most important contributions I made wasn't a design decision — it was a process one. Apple came to this partnership with strong ideas about what to build. They're a highly motivated, opinionated partner, and honoring that relationship while pushing back against it took real judgment. I made the case, consistently, that going through a proper product design process — research, validation, iteration — would produce a better product than building to anyone's instincts alone.

To make that possible, I escalated to Concentrix's executive sponsors to reorganize the team so we could make user-centered decisions. The structure we had inherited wasn't set up to do that. The structure we built was. Apple ultimately recognized that push as a key driver of the product's success.

I also championed the elevated heart rate notification feature early in the roadmap. The reasoning was straightforward once we listened to users: ESNTL's first target audience was law enforcement, and officers were deeply concerned about heart health. The feature gave individuals real-time awareness — and gave administrators something that had never existed before: visibility into which events were most physiologically stressful for their teams. That data changed how organizations understood their people.

Outcomes & Impact

Measurable results across three deployment verticals

20%

Increase in user retention over 6 months

60%

Of law enforcement personnel reported improved self-awareness

91%

Of officers found heart rate data useful

55%

Of healthcare workers changed physical activity habits

35%

Of healthcare workers changed sleeping habits

19%

Increase in physical activity among school administrators

ESNTL was deployed with three landmark organizations: the San Diego Sheriff's Department (the first emergency responder organization in the nation to pilot the platform), UC San Diego Health, and the TASA school administrator network. The team surpassed all expectations held by Apple and the Concentrix executive team.

"The [ESNTL product] has benefited immensely as a result of Paige moving into the director role."
— Stuart McDiarmid, Apple

The hardest part of managing Apple wasn't the technical constraints — it was the dynamic of a highly motivated, opinionated partner with specific ideas about what to build. The work was holding that relationship with care while simultaneously making the case that our process would get us somewhere better than their instincts alone. We succeeded, and Apple's team ultimately recognized that leadership as a key driver of the product's outcomes.

The program was paused in July 2024 due to Concentrix business restructuring — not performance. The product, the team, and the outcomes spoke for themselves.