Canadian localisation of Babylon
While at Babylon, I led a complete localisation of Babylon's product for the Canadian market, in partnership with Telus.
Colin Wright
Product Leader. Builder. 2x Founder. Ex-Babylon, Ex-MSF.
Expert in Digital health, practical usage of AI, humanitarian operations, have founded two startups.
About
I'm a senior product leader with over 15 years of experience building and scaling digital health products and the organisations that deliver them. Track record spans co-founding a VC-backed healthtech startup, directing product for one of the UK's largest health insurers, and scaling digital health services to millions of users across emerging and established markets. Known for combining strong product craft with operational rigour while equally comfortable defining product vision, restructuring teams, and coaching organisations to build better products.
These days I split my time between leading product transformation at Bupa and building my own side projects. It's pretty clear that the best product leaders should themselves be the best builders. Scroll down to check out some of the projects I've worked on.
Work
Festable
I love music festivals, but discovering new ones is a challenge. I built an AI-powered recommendation engine and festival directory with a set of autonomous AI research agents to keep it current.
Red Eye Cookie Company
I had some spare time before starting grad school, and cofounded a rapidly successful late-night cookie, coffee, and milk delivery business.
Case studies
01Case study
Babylon Health Rwanda - AI powered digital health
Problem
When I joined Babylon in Rwanda in 2017, the telehealth service ran about 5 consultations a day. Real medical guidance was largely inaccessible outside major hospitals, and nothing in Babylon's product had been built for a market like this.
Approach
I killed underperforming pilots (pharmacy phone booths, an early app) and reframed the goal as operational, not product: scale the core service and get more people real access. I integrated with 500 existing health centres, where people already went for care, building the infrastructure and regulatory relationships to make it work. AI triage came later, once that base was solid, kept deliberately narrow so results went to the clinician, not the patient.
Shipped
- Grew consultations from 5 to 6,000+ a day, and registered users from 500,000 to over 2 million, in two years
- Delivered the world's first localised medical AI triage service in Rwanda
- Worked with the government regulators to help craft Rwandan digital health policy and support our bid for a long term government contract
- Led programmes supporting $10M+ in ARR, backed by funding from the Gates Foundation and others
Learned
This was pragmatic product management, rejecting flashy technology in favor of the platform and related operations to scale the service people actually needed. Ultimately Rwanda was never going to be self-sustaining on its own balance sheet, it was closer to a mission-driven extension of the wider business. I learned to juggle that business success metric with the more traditional customer indicators of a loved product.
02Case study
Noetic Health - founding an AI health startup
Problem
My co-founder had lived it: diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, after a process that made getting there needlessly difficult. Getting answers and support should be seamless.
Approach
Applied to Antler's ten-week accelerator and came out as one of the funded companies. Built the team and product from zero, then raised beyond that first round.
Shipped
- Delivered v1 of our AI-driven assessment platform end to end, and began selling assessment reports to early users.
Learned
We'd found signal, but my co-founder and I had different visions for where to take it from there, and eventually went our separate ways. Major takeaway from this was just to ship - we waited too long to get something to market.
03Case study
Festable - an AI-native product, built solo
Problem
Planning around UK festivals is scattered across dozens of sites, and existing aggregators are cluttered and missing the data that matters most: registration deadlines, ticket sale dates, whether it's already sold out. It was also an exercise in building with AI.
Approach
Built solo on Next.js, Supabase, Tailwind, and Vercel. The core bet: could an LLM research agent keep festival data accurate and current without manual upkeep. Structured the build to prove that first, then layered the browsing and monitoring experience on top.
Shipped
- A filterable festival directory with a milestone timeline showing every key date at a glance
- An autonomous research agent that discovers new festivals and keeps data fresh, every change logged for review
- A favourites-based monitoring dashboard for tracking multiple festivals together
- Festival Match, a quiz-based recommendation feature with Spotify integration
Learned
It proved people will use something that solves a real, if occasional, problem, and that's a good signal on its own. But an occasional problem doesn't automatically make a good business: most festival-goers only plan two or three times a year, so turning this into more than a fun side project means simplifying the feature set down to what people would actually pay for, and shortening the path from discovery to ticket purchase to capture revenue along the way.
Experience
Bupa
Product Principal, UK Market
Jun 2024–Present
Led the transition to a product operating model across an 18-squad, 300-person digital team; later expanded UK-wide. Trained 500+ people across product, design, engineering, and commercial.
Noetic Health
Co-founder & CPO
Antler EIR Oct 2022, Noetic Jan 2023–Feb 2024
See case study above.
Babylon Health
Product Director, Global B2B
Aug 2017–Jun 2022
Joined as Senior PM in Rwanda, moved to the UK to run international expansion, progressed to Director. See case study above.
EarthEnable
Product Director
Aug 2016–Aug 2017
Led product for a 100+ person social enterprise building sustainable low-income housing in Rwanda. Helped scale the operation from 5 sectors to 18 sectors across 3 districts, and into Uganda.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
Senior Logistics Manager
Feb 2011–Sep 2013
Ran hospital logistics and operations across Haiti, Chad, Ethiopia, and Malawi, including a 120-bed trauma hospital in Haiti and a 30,000-patient HIV programme in Malawi.
Earlier career
Biomedical engineer at Omniguide (MIT spinout medical device company), with early stints in solar energy and, briefly, cookies, before moving into international development and product.
Education - MA, International Relations & Economics, Johns Hopkins SAIS. BS, Integrated Science & Technology, James Madison University.