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Designing products for women and people with female bodies comes with layers of trust, vulnerability, and lived experience that don’t always show up in polished screens. A portfolio can show visual skill, but it rarely tells you how a designer thinks, how they handle sensitive contexts, or how they make decisions when real users, real constraints, and real consequences are involved.
Femtech products don’t live in a neutral space. They often sit close to people’s bodies, health, identity, and deeply personal life experiences. That alone changes what “good design” needs to do.
In many femtech contexts, users are not browsing casually. They may be anxious, overwhelmed, in pain, navigating uncertainty, or carrying years of medical mistrust. Design choices shape how safe a product feels, how seriously it is taken, and whether users are willing to return. This isn’t just about usability. It’s about emotional load, clarity, and respect.
That’s also why femtech design tends to be scrutinized more harshly. Investors look closely for credibility and rigor. Users are quick to disengage if something feels dismissive, patronizing, or overly polished without substance. A small misstep in tone, language, or flow can quietly erode trust long before metrics make it obvious.
This is what makes femtech design different. The goal isn’t to impress. It’s to earn belief. And that requires a kind of thinking that goes far beyond what most portfolios can show.
Portfolios are not useless. They can show visual craft, consistency, and a baseline level of experience. The problem is treating them as a proxy for everything else that matters.
Most portfolios are curated highlight reels. They show final screens, not the uncertainty, constraints, or trade-offs that shaped them. They rarely reveal how much research informed the work, how user feedback changed decisions, or what happened when business pressure conflicted with user needs. And in femtech, those moments are often where the most important design decisions live.
A portfolio also can’t tell you how a designer collaborates. How they listen. How they respond when assumptions are challenged. How comfortable they are saying “this might not be right for your users” instead of defaulting to what looks impressive.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore portfolios. It means you should stop there last, not start and end there. The real signal comes from understanding how a designer thinks, what they prioritize, and whether their approach aligns with the level of care and responsibility your product requires.
Once you move past the portfolio, the question becomes less about taste and more about judgment. In femtech, the right designer is not just someone who executes well, but someone who can navigate nuance, responsibility, and real-world complexity. And while it’s not a requirement, it can be a meaningful bonus when a designer has lived experience that overlaps with the people the product is for, whether that’s being a woman, a person with a female body, or someone who could realistically be a user themselves. That proximity often brings a level of intuition, care, and sensitivity that’s hard to fully replicate from the outside.
In femtech, trust is not a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation everything else sits on.
A strong designer understands that conversion-focused patterns can easily backfire if they feel pushy, dismissive, or overly optimized. They think carefully about language, tone, pacing, and moments where users may need reassurance rather than persuasion. They know when clarity builds confidence, and when restraint matters more than cleverness.
This kind of thinking rarely shows up as a single screen in a portfolio. It shows up in how designers explain their decisions and how they talk about users.
Femtech users don’t show up as clean personas. They show up tired, overwhelmed, in pain, confused, or skeptical. A good designer doesn’t design for ideal behaviour. They design for real conditions.
Look for someone who is comfortable acknowledging messiness. Someone who doesn’t default to averages or simplified flows, but asks questions about edge cases, life stages, and emotional states. This signals maturity and respect for the people using the product.
Not every startup can run formal research. That’s expected. What matters is whether a designer knows how to listen, observe, and adapt with what’s available.
The right designer doesn’t treat research as a checkbox or a luxury. They treat it as a way of grounding decisions and reducing risk. They’re curious, reflective, and willing to change course when assumptions don’t hold up.
Strong femtech designers understand that design is not separate from growth, retention, or credibility. They can explain how UX decisions support long-term trust, adoption, and sustainability, not just short-term metrics.
They think in systems, not just screens. And they’re comfortable partnering with founders to make trade-offs that align with both user care and business reality.
Once you know what to look for, the challenge becomes how to surface it in conversation. The right questions won’t sound like a design quiz. They’ll invite reflection, values, and decision-making logic.
One useful place to start is asking designers to talk about trust explicitly. Questions like, “Can you walk me through a project where building user trust was more important than driving quick conversion?” often reveal how they balance business pressure with care. Pay attention to what they emphasize and what they gloss over.
It’s also worth exploring how they approach sensitive or uncertain contexts. Asking “How do you think about designing for users who might be anxious, overwhelmed, or skeptical?” can quickly show whether they’re comfortable engaging with emotional complexity or prefer to design for ideal scenarios.
Because research is rarely perfect in early-stage femtech, you can learn a lot by asking how they work with limited information. “How do you make design decisions when user insight is incomplete or messy?” is often more telling than asking about formal research methods. You’re listening for curiosity, humility, and adaptability, not rigid process.
Finally, invite them to talk about disagreement and trade-offs. “Tell me about a time you challenged a founder or stakeholder because something didn’t feel right for users” can reveal whether they see themselves as a thoughtful partner or purely an executor.
These conversations aren’t about finding perfect answers. They’re about noticing patterns. How designers talk, what they prioritize, and whose interests they naturally center will tell you far more than another polished case study ever could.
Sometimes it’s easier to spot misalignment than excellence. When you’re talking to designers, there are a few signals that should give you pause, especially in a femtech context.
One of the most common red flags is an overemphasis on trends and aesthetics without much depth behind them. If a designer talks mostly about what looks modern, clean, or eye-catching, but struggles to explain why certain choices were made or how they serve users, that’s worth questioning. In femtech, visual polish without substance can actively undermine trust.
Another warning sign is dismissiveness toward user emotion or lived context. If concerns about sensitivity, language, or emotional states are brushed off as edge cases or “overthinking,” that usually points to a shallow understanding of the space. Femtech products often live in those so-called edge cases. Treating them as secondary is risky.
Be cautious, too, of designers who apply rigid frameworks or one-size-fits-all processes without adaptation. Femtech rarely fits neatly into generic growth playbooks. A lack of curiosity about your specific users, life stages, or ethical constraints can lead to design decisions that feel misaligned or even harmful.
Finally, pay attention to how a designer talks about users in general. Do they speak with respect and care, or with distance and assumptions? Do they show humility about what they don’t know? Another subtle but telling red flag is when users barely come up at all, when conversations revolve around aesthetics, systems, or personal preference, with little reference to the people actually using the product. In a space built on trust, attitude and values matter just as much as skill.
Avoiding these red flags won’t guarantee the perfect hire. But it will significantly reduce the risk of choosing someone who looks impressive on paper yet struggles to design responsibly for the people your product is meant to serve.
Hiring a designer in femtech is not just a resourcing decision. It’s a signal about what you value and how seriously you take the responsibility of building for people’s bodies, health, and lived experiences.
A strong portfolio matters. Visual clarity, craft, and polish absolutely play a role in credibility. But the designers who create the most long-term impact in femtech don’t stop there. They combine strong aesthetics with sound judgment, ethical awareness, and a deep respect for users. When those qualities come together, design doesn’t just look good, it earns trust and sustains belief.
When you choose a designer who understands trust as a design outcome, who respects complexity rather than smoothing it over, and who sees themselves as accountable to users, you’re not just investing in better UX. You’re investing in credibility, sustainability, and belief, from both users and investors.
In femtech, that kind of alignment is rarely obvious at first glance. But it’s what allows products to earn their place in people’s lives, and stay there.
