What does it take to build digital health products that center care, clarity, and trust?

In this episode, I talk with Ambreen Molitor, a product leader working at the intersection of reproductive health, equity, and digital access. At Planned Parenthood, where she served as National Director of Product Innovation, Ambreen helped launch and redesign award-winning tools like Roo, an AI-powered chatbot for teens, and Spot On, a bilingual birth control and cycle tracker that prioritized user trust before it became a tech talking point. Her work helped Planned Parenthood win Webbys, Effies, and the VIVE Techquity for Health Champion Award, while quietly reshaping how digital care shows up in people’s lives.

She strives to support users navigating trauma, surveillance, and stigma with empathy and precision. Now as a Principal PM at Zocdoc, she continues to build with a sharp eye on who health tech serves, and how.

We unpack how her team at Planned Parenthood shifted from building in-house to partnering with pre-seed startups, and what that evolution revealed about urgency, alignment, and power. Ambreen also walks us through a revealing experiment: testing LLMs against their own content to evaluate not just accuracy, but tone and trust. The results opened up deeper questions about emotional safety, care at scale, and what readiness actually means when AI enters the room.

_____

What we explore in this episode

* What people still get wrong about nonprofit innovation

* Why trust shapes product architecture in digital health

* How Planned Parenthood designed for tone, clarity, and care

* The real gap between LLM output and emotionally safe content

* What vetting a startup partner looks like when values are at stake

* Why tone isn’t a polish layer, it’s an equity decision

* Building through legal gray zones, shifting policy, and urgent timelines

* Why impact is a long game, but direction starts now

_____

Shownotes, takeaways & resources: https://unmissables.substack.com/p/bbfd4292-fc3f-48db-908e-ecd9a8225d89

_____

Follow Along

00:00 – Introduction to show + Guest Introduction

01:56 – Meet Ambreen Molitor

03:45 – How Planned Parenthood scaled innovation under constraint

06:00 – Roo and Spot On: Designing for clarity, care, and context

09:00 – Partnering with startups (and protecting values)

12:00 – Testing LLMs against real-world content

15:00 – Why tone is an equity issue in health tech

18:00 – Tech’s role in care: assistant, not provider

20:30 – Policy, urgency, and real-time scenario planning

23:30 – Closing reflections + unmissable signals

_____

Mentioned on this episode

* Spot On – Planned Parenthood’s bilingual, inclusive birth control & period tracker

* Roo – The AI-powered sex education chatbot launched in 2019

* Autonomy – Startup helping patients get matched to federal/state/local abortion funding

* VIVE Techquity for Health Champion Award – Award recognizing equity-first innovation in healthcare

* StereoSet – A benchmark for measuring bias in language models

* Frost & Sullivan’s Femtech Market Forecast – Femtech projected to hit $103B by 2030

Update: Since recording the episode, 19 states have some form of abortion bans, 12 have total bans.

_____

Where to find Ambreen Molitor

* LinkedIn : /ambreenmolitor

Where to find Ariba Jahan

* Linkedin: /aribajahan/

* Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/ariba.jahan

* Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC61NDFgqsM02-wtE1PrZOsw

Enjoying Unmissables? Leave a 5-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It helps us reach the right listeners.

Thanks for tuning in!

Would love to hear from you, tell us what this episode made you think about? Is there a health tech app you love using, why?

Get full access to Unmissables with Ariba Jahan at unmissables.substack.com/subscribe