Breaking Into Clinical Product
What to unlearn, what to show and where to start
This is Clinical Product Thinking 🧠, a weekly newsletter featuring practical tips, frameworks and strategies from the front line of clinical product.
Welcome, friends, this is issue No. 048 of Clinical Product Thinking. This week we’re looking at how clinicians can break into clinical product (a path I’d definitely recommend!)
In the recent Clinical Product Thinking × Numan webinar, co-hosted with Dani Brightman, Clinical Director at Numan, one question surfaced a lot:
How do I break into clinical product… especially without existing experience?
A clinical background gives you knowledge of patients, pathways and healthcare delivery more broadly. But it does not automatically show that you can work effectively in product.
Hiring managers need to be able to trust that you understand users, can work across disciplines, make proportionate decisions, test assumptions and can connect clinical value to commercial goals.
Our panel: Alice McGee, Senior Medical Advisor at Flo Health; Jamie Webb Smith, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Numan; and Lorenzo Espinoza, Director of Product at C the Signs, have all hired, interviewed and mentored clinicians making this transition.
This is what they advised clinicians to unlearn, demonstrate and practice if they want to be successful in getting a clinical product role:
1. Unlearn Deference
Alice had an interesting answer on what clinical people need to unlearn in order to be successful in clinical product:
“The biggest one is hierarchy. In hospitals and clinics there’s a very clear structure, you might be the most junior person on the team, and what the consultant says usually goes. In clinical product, that’s not the case. Sometimes the best ideas come from the person who’s just walked in the door with fresh eyes. You need to speak up and show your contribution.” Alice
Medicine can still default to deference, but clinical product requires the opposite: you need to contribute your perspective, challenge assumptions and definitely say when you think the team is heading in the wrong direction!
A clinical product team where everyone agrees too easily is unlikely to be examining the risks, trade-offs or alternatives closely enough.
👉 What to do about it:
In your next meeting, ask the challenging question you’re tempted to swallow.
Practise disagreeing constructively: “Here’s a risk I’d want us to consider” is more useful than staying silent.
Stop waiting to be the most senior person in the room before you contribute.
2. What hiring managers are looking for
Lorenzo is currently hiring a Clinical Product Lead, so his screening criteria are worth writing down. Beyond the obvious clinical background relevant to the domain (for C the Signs, that means GPs, because they build for primary care), he described three qualities:
Pragmatism. Clinical product is about finding safer and better options that the team can work on, not simply identifying reasons why something can’t be done. The best clinical product people understand risk, explain it clearly and work with the team to find a proportionate way forward.
Commercial awareness. Clinical product shapes not just what gets built, but how it reaches people. You should understand who pays for the product, why customers choose it and what drives adoption.
Collaboration. Across product, engineering and commercial. Clinical product is a team sport, not single player mode.
And the bar is rising. Jamie has interviewed clinical product candidates for four years and has watched the pool mature:
“In the early days you saw a lot of clinicians who didn’t understand product and couldn’t express things in a customer-focused way. That’s changed a lot, people frame problems really well now, and the storytelling is getting better and better: using data, market understanding, telling a story about why something matters.” Jamie
What’s still rare, and therefore what sets you apart, is an experimentation mindset and genuine commercial understanding.
👉 What to do about it:
Prepare a pragmatism story before your interview: a time you found a safe-enough path instead of blocking.
Learn the commercial model of any product you talk about: who pays, how it’s adopted, why it wins. (Check out my commercial cheatsheet for CPMs here)
Show an experimentation instinct: how you’d test a risky assumption cheaply, not just assess it.
3. Think like a product person
Building product nous is probably the number one priority for aspiring clinical product people. The panel’s recommended resources:
📖 Inspired by Marty Cagan. Lorenzo’s first product book and still his top recommendation.
📬 Lenny’s Newsletter. Jamie’s go-to. Deep, practical and absolutely tons of content to sink your teeth into!
🧑🏫 Consider getting a coach. Although not the cheapest option, it can super speed your learning:
“A few sessions with someone who’s lived it will crack your head open in a different way, very quickly, and show you different patterns of thinking.” Jamie
👉 What to do about it:
Read Inspired this month. It’s the fastest way to learn the language of product.
Subscribe to Lenny’s Newsletter and work backwards through the archive.
Consider a few sessions with someone who’s done clinical product (not a generic careers coach)
4. Get your first bit of experience, even if small
The hardest part is the cold start: no clinical product experience, so no one hires you for clinical product. Alice’s advice is to create the experience for yourself:
“Try to get some type of advisory work, even if it’s voluntary, a few hours giving feedback, testing a feature. And think about all the health products you already use: your Apple Watch, your Oura ring, Apple Health. Reflect on the decisions behind those features, what you like and don’t like, and translate that into how you think.”
— Alice
You are more likely already surrounded by clinical products. Start critiquing them like you would if you were building them.
The good news is that these opportunities are becoming easier to find. Alice, who curates a weekly healthtech jobs roundup, has seen clinical product roles become far more clearly defined:
“We’re seeing more and more clinical product roles, head of clinical innovation, even chief clinical product officer. Before, those would have been called something else, or just ‘medical’. Now they’re better defined, with a clear scope and a clear value-add.” Alice
👉 What to do about it:
Offer some voluntary advisory hours to a health tech startup: feedback, feature testing, a clinical sanity check.
Do a product teardown of an app you use (Oura, Apple Health, a symptom checker).
Follow Alice’s weekly roundups on Linkedin for current opportunities.
The takeaway
Breaking into clinical product is about showing how you can take your clinical knowledge and use it to understand users, identify risks early, work through constraints and help a multidisciplinary team make better product decisions. You do not need the title before you begin developing and demonstrating those skills.
If you’ve been thinking about making the move into clinical product management this might be your sign to take the leap.
Welcome to Subscriber Perks 🤩
I’m very excited to introduce subscriber perks: a growing library of resources for clinical product managers and people building clinical products or health tech companies.
What you’ll find:
Deep dives on breaking into clinical product, embedding clinical safety into product decisions, building commercial knowledge and more
Masterclasses on building safe clinical AI systems
A guide to writing clinical product manager job descriptions that people can actually fill
A database of European health tech VCs, grants and other funding opportunities
A 30-minute clinical product advisory session with me for founding subscribers
👉 Check them out here.
That’s all for this week. See you next time! 👋
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Written by Dr Louise Rix, Head of Clinical Product, doctor and ex-VC. Passionate about all things healthcare, healthtech and clinical product (…obviously). Based in London. You can find me on LinkedIn.
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