FemTech products deal with intimate, sensitive health data and high-trust user journeys. Compliance and quality are not checkboxes you add right before launch. They are product requirements that protect users, protect your brand, and make partnerships possible.
This guide explains how to think about compliance and quality in FemTech from MVP to scale, including privacy, risk management, software lifecycle discipline, testing evidence, and operational readiness.
If you’re building or scaling a women’s health product, AIMDek supports FemTech & women’s health software and hardware development with design-led engineering for apps, platforms, devices, integrations, quality, and scale. Learn more by clicking here.
Table of contents
- Step 1: Clarify product intent and risk level
- Step 2: Privacy and consent as core product requirements
- Step 3: A practical quality system approach from MVP to scale
- Step 4: Risk management for FemTech products
- Step 5: Software lifecycle discipline and V&V evidence
- Step 6: Security baseline and incident readiness
- Step 7: Documentation and audit-ready habits
- Common mistakes to avoid
- How AIMDek can help
Step 1: Clarify product intent and risk level
Before you pick a framework, answer one question: what are you promising the user?
In practice, many FemTech products fall into one of these buckets:
- Wellness and education tools (low clinical risk, still high privacy risk)
- Behavior change and coaching flows (medium risk depending on claims and escalation)
- Decision support or medical-purpose software (higher risk)
- Device-connected workflows and monitoring (risk depends on what decisions are enabled)
If your software is intended for a medical purpose, SaMD concepts become relevant. The FDA points to the IMDRF definition of SaMD as software intended to be used for one or more medical purposes that performs those purposes without being part of a hardware medical device.
FDA also publishes guidance on clinical evaluation for SaMD, which outlines a structured way to think about evidence and performance expectations.
What to do at this stage:
- Write down your intended use and intended users (one paragraph each)
- List all product claims (marketing, onboarding, in-app)
- Identify “harm scenarios” if the product is wrong, late, or misused
- Decide whether you need a regulated pathway, or a conservative “wellness posture” with strong disclaimers and escalation
Step 2: Privacy and consent as core product requirements
FemTech products often process sensitive data about health and sex life. If you serve EU/UK users, GDPR treats health and sex life data as highly protected categories, and consent is frequently the practical legal basis.
A privacy-forward FemTech product should implement:
- Privacy by default: the safest settings are the default
- Purpose limitation: users can understand what data is used for, and it is not reused silently
- Data minimisation: collect only what you truly need for the outcome
- Consent UX that is granular: avoid all-or-nothing consent when possible
- Transparent third-party sharing controls
Why this matters in the real world: consumer health apps have faced scrutiny and litigation tied to sharing sensitive menstrual data through third parties.
There is also growing public attention to privacy risks in period tracking ecosystems, which is shaping expectations around consent and governance.
Practical implementation checklist:
- Inventory all data types collected, derived, and shared
- Audit all SDKs (analytics, crash reporting, ads, attribution)
- Provide in-app controls: export, delete, opt-out of non-essential tracking
- Log consent state and changes over time
Step 3: A practical quality system approach from MVP to scale
You do not need “enterprise QMS bureaucracy” to build a high-quality MVP. You do need consistent habits that create evidence as you build.
Think in two modes:
MVP mode: QMS-lite
Focus on repeatable basics:
- Requirements captured (even if in tickets)
- Versioned releases and change logs
- Definition of done that includes security and test evidence
- Bug triage process with severity and resolution criteria
- Basic documentation for key decisions and assumptions
Scale mode: ISO 13485-style maturity
As you enter regulated markets, pursue clinical partnerships, or scale device-connected workflows, a structured medical device QMS becomes important. ISO 13485 is widely used as a quality management system standard for medical devices and is linked with other standards like IEC 62304 and ISO 14971 in regulated contexts.
A practical approach is to evolve your system:
- Start with lightweight templates and strong engineering discipline
- Add formal traceability and risk documentation as risk rises
- Move from “testing as an activity” to “evidence as an output”
Step 4: Risk management for FemTech products
Risk management is not just about physical harm. In FemTech, privacy harm and inference harm can be just as serious.
ISO describes risk management as a lifecycle process that applies from initial conception through decommissioning and includes risks related to data and systems security and usability. ISO
Your FemTech risk file should consider:
- Incorrect insights causing unsafe actions
- Missed escalation for urgent symptoms
- Data leakage exposing intimate health information
- Re-identification risk in “anonymous” datasets
- Bias and uneven performance across cohorts
- Abuse and coercion scenarios (shared devices, partner surveillance)
Risk control examples (practical and implementable):
- Conservative language and uncertainty framing for insights
- Escalation pathways and “seek care” prompts where relevant
- Privacy features: passcode, hiding sensitive notifications, discreet app surfaces
- Least-privilege access and strong audit logs
- QA focus on edge cases and failure modes
Step 5: Software lifecycle discipline and V&V evidence
If you are in medical-purpose territory, you need a software lifecycle approach that can produce evidence. IEC 62304 is commonly used for medical device software lifecycle processes and can be mapped to the lifecycle model you use, including Agile, as long as you meet the requirements and maintain traceability.
What to include in your V&V approach:
- Requirements and acceptance criteria (clear, testable)
- Unit, integration, and system testing strategy
- Regression testing for core journeys
- Risk-based testing (tests mapped to hazards and controls)
- Traceability: requirement → test → result
Minimum evidence pack you should have by “scale stage”:
- Product requirements and change history
- Risk analysis and risk control verification
- Test plans, test results, release approvals
- SOUP and third-party dependency decisions (where relevant)
- Post-market monitoring plan
Step 6: Security baseline and incident readiness
Security is a quality attribute in FemTech. Treat it as part of “definition of done.”
Baseline controls to implement early:
- Strong authentication and session handling
- Encryption in transit and at rest
- Secure key management
- Audit logs for sensitive actions
- Rate limiting and abuse prevention
- Vendor risk checks for SDKs and service providers
Also consider breach obligations. Many health apps are not covered by HIPAA, but the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule can apply to vendors of personal health records and related entities and requires consumer notification following certain breaches.
This is why your incident readiness matters:
- Incident response runbook
- Security monitoring and alerting
- Breach notification workflow and templates
- Regular security reviews for SDK changes and new data flows
Step 7: Documentation and audit-ready habits
Documentation does not have to be heavy, but it must be reliable. The goal is simple: if someone asked “why did you do this, what did you test, and what changed,” you can answer with evidence.
Operational habits that create evidence automatically:
- Ticketing discipline with acceptance criteria
- PR templates that include risk and test notes
- Release checklists and rollback plans
- Decision logs for sensitive features and integrations
- Post-release monitoring and support dashboards
Common mistakes to avoid
- Treating privacy as a legal page instead of a product experience
- Over-collecting data “just in case”
- Adding third-party SDKs without understanding data flows
- Weak escalation handling for urgent or high-risk scenarios
- No traceability between requirements, risks, and tests
- Shipping fast without a post-market monitoring loop
How AIMDek can help
AIMDek helps FemTech teams build quality and compliance into delivery, without slowing engineering velocity. We support privacy-first architecture, risk-based QA, V&V-oriented testing evidence, integration readiness, and scalable delivery practices across software and hardware.
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