❤️ When Love Becomes a Strategy: What Todd Park Teaches Us About Product Delight
I listened to Todd Parkn former U.S. CTO and co-founder of Devoted Health, on The Eric Ries Show tell the story of how he helped build a $3B healthcare company on an idea we rarely hear in business: Love.
Not as a slogan.
Not as a metaphor.
But as the operating principle of the entire company.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about how deeply this connects to the heart of Product Delight and emotional connection in product building.
Todd says the philosophy behind Devoted Health was simple:
“Do what you would do for your own family.”
It’s almost disarming in its clarity. In a world where most companies obsess over growth levers, funnels, and efficiencies, Devoted reshaped the entire healthcare experience by asking a human question instead of a business one. And that one shift changed everything, the service model, the operations, the behaviors, the decisions.
What they created wasn’t just better healthcare.
It was care that felt personal.
This is what I call emotional connection: designing not just for what people need, but for how they want to feel. Reassured. Supported. Safe. Understood. The whole person, not just the functional problem.
💜 Love at scale = systems that honor humans
One of my favorite parts of Todd’s story is this:
They didn’t treat “love” as a mission statement. They treated it as an operating system.
Love isn’t a poster on a wall.
Love is:
extra call time
proactive outreach
solving problems that aren’t “in your scope”
eliminating unnecessary stress
removing complexity
making people feel seen
This is what I call Delight Excellence, the place where care, quality, and emotional intelligence shape decisions every day.
Companies lose their magic when they start scaling without grounding their actions in emotional truth.
Devoted Health scaled because they protected it.
They didn’t choose between love and growth.
Love created growth.
When teams anchor on humanity, delight becomes the natural outcome.
And when delight becomes the outcome, differentiation stops being a struggle.
❤️ Measuring Love (yes, really)
Todd didn’t treat love as a fuzzy ideal. He measured it.
Devoted used trust as its core metric, and not the abstract kind. They actively tracked whether members felt genuinely cared for, listened to, and supported. Trust was the barometer for every decision, every interaction, every improvement.
In other words: Love became an OKR.
This mirrors so much of what I teach in Product Delight: that emotional connection isn’t magic, it’s measurable. It shows up in reduced anxiety, increased confidence, higher loyalty, and deeper engagement. It becomes visible when you track the right signals, ask the right questions, and listen beyond the functional layer.
And if you’ve been following my work, you know this is my whole message:
emotional connection isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the strongest advantage you can build.
