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. 61 of Clinical Product Thinking. This week, we’re looking at five very different jobs that sit under the same clinical product title.
In September 2025, I analysed clinical product job descriptions from UK healthtech companies. It is one of the most-read CPT issues.
Since then, many new roles have been posted, ranging from mid-level all the way up to Chief Clinical Product Officer.
When you compare them, it’s clear how differently companies define clinical product. Some focus almost entirely on clinical safety. One involved managing more than 50 prescribers. Others were senior product leadership roles.
Here are the five clinical product archetypes that emerge from the data. Perhaps we’ll see more in future.
This analysis is based on publicly listed clinical product job descriptions collected from UK and US employers. Many of these roles are no longer open.
1. The pathway builder
Designs clinical care journeys and works with product teams to turn them into functioning services.
Numan’s Clinical Product Lead role covers patient journeys from onboarding and triage to prescribing and follow-up, including clinical logic and decision support.
Paloma’s Senior Clinical Pathway & Product Manager owns its autism and ADHD pathways, including KPIs and financial targets. Hertility’s role covers telemedicine, follow-up and prescription journeys, with performance measured against clinical outcomes and retention.
What to show: A clinical journey you’ve designed or improved, including what changed for patients, clinicians and the business.
2. The safety lead
Responsible for managing clinical risks arising from the product.
Semble’s Clinical Product Manager leads clinical safety activities under DCB0129, maintains safety documentation and coordinates release sign-off with an external Clinical Safety Officer (CSO).
Sanome’s role included CSO responsibilities, while Nourish Care lists hazard identification and clinical risk assessment.
These roles require specialist clinical safety expertise as well as clinical product knowledge.
What to show: Clinical safety training, experience with hazard logs and safety cases, and examples of influencing release decisions.
What to ask: Would you be the named CSO, and who makes the final decision if clinical safety and product priorities conflict?
3. The clinical operator
Runs the clinical service alongside the technology supporting it.
AIOS’s UK Head of Clinical Product leads more than 50 prescribing pharmacists and the medic team, covering staffing, capacity planning and clinical performance with a potential path to CPO.
AIBODY’s Clinical Product Owner similarly focuses on deployment, coordinating rollouts across clinics and helping clinical teams adopt the product.
What to show: Experience managing clinical capacity, quality or performance, and how you’ve used data to improve service delivery.
4. The domain specialist
Brings deep expertise in a particular clinical area, sometimes with product experience as a secondary requirement.
InStride Health seeks a psychologist or licensed therapist to own clinical protocols, provider guidance and training for anxiety and OCD care.
CoordinateX, from First Databank, prioritises medicines management experience, ideally from a pharmacist. Headway’s Principal, Clinical Product role requires an experienced behavioural health clinician.
What to show: Your specialist expertise and examples of translating it into products, clinical pathways or service improvements.
5. The product leader
Owns product strategy and delivery, often across multiple teams.
Dyad’s Chief Clinical Product Officer leads product strategy for its healthcare AI products, with the VP of Engineering reporting to the role. A medical qualification is strongly preferred rather than mandatory.
Other employers describe routes into broader product leadership. Paloma identifies Lead and Director as progression opportunities, while AIOS mentions a potential path to CPO.
What to ask: Which product decisions would you own, and how are responsibilities divided between clinical and product leadership?
How to tell which role you’re looking at
If you’re interviewing for a clinical product position, consider these three questions:
Who will I report to? A CPO, CMO or Operations leader can indicate very different expectations.
What will I be measured on? Clinical outcomes, product adoption, safety, service performance and revenue point towards different responsibilities.
Which decisions will I own? Will you set the roadmap, manage clinicians, design pathways or be accountable for clinical safety?
For hiring managers, be explicit about which responsibilities the role includes. If you’re expecting someone to manage a clinical service, own the roadmap and oversee clinical safety, explain how their time will be divided and what support they’ll have.
The takeaway
Clinical product is becoming a broader category of work, with quite different responsibilities sitting under similar titles.
For clinicians moving into healthtech, that creates opportunities across pathway design, clinical safety, operations and product leadership. But it also means the job title alone tells you surprisingly little about what you’ll actually be doing. Make sure you interview the interviewer for clarity on the role you’re taking.
That’s all for this week. See you next time! 👋
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Written by Dr Louise Rix, Clinical Product, AI, doctor and ex-VC. Passionate about all things healthcare, healthtech and clinical product (…obviously). Based in London. You can find me on LinkedIn & Instagram.
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