How to Do Clinical Customer Discovery (CCD): A Practical Guide for Clinical Product Managers
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This is Clinical Product Thinking đ§ , your weekly newsletter featuring practical tips, frameworks and strategies from the frontlines of clinical product.
Good afternoon friends, this is issue No. 015. This week weâre continuing our theme of Clinical Customer Discovery, shifting from the âwhyâ to the practical âhowâ.
Youâve probably read The Mom Test. You may have done user interviews before.
But healthcare is not consumer tech, and the usual discovery playbook doesnât work the same way.
Patients arenât âusers.â Clinicians arenât regular âcustomers.â And every stakeholder lives inside a different set of incentives, fears, risks and constraints.
CCD is the discipline that accounts for all of that.
Below is a practical, step-by-step guide to conducting clinical discovery safely, ethically and effectively, shaped from hundreds of interviews with patients, clinicians and others across the value chain.
1. Define Your Stakeholders (Properly)
Clinical products often donât serve a single user. They serve an ecosystem.
Before starting interviews, map:
Patients
Carers (family or informal caregivers)
Clinicians (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, other allied health professionals)
Operational and administrative staff
Procurement teams and Trust decision-makers
Each group has different needs, blockers and definitions of success.
CCD is about understanding those differences and avoiding the trap of projecting one groupâs worldview onto another.
2. Find Your Users (Beyond the Obvious Places)
If you already have active users, thatâs a start. But you often need:
A different patient demographic
Non-users
Users with different severity, stage or lived experiences
For net-new discovery, try:
Your personal network: LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp.
Patient forums & community groups: always with respect and a clear value exchange (resources, early access or simply being heard).
Events & meetups: particularly for clinicians.
A simple email course: deliver value over 10 days, then invite research calls.
âĄď¸ In the UK, cost per scheduled call is often ÂŁ10â15 with a simple funnel.Condition charities or advocacy groups: underused and full of motivated participants.
And remember, CCD isnât limited to patients and clinicians. Operational staff, procurement teams and Trust decision-makers often need a different recruitment approach. Warm introductions via clinicians, service managers, transformation teams or existing NHS networks work far better than open outreach. These groups rarely respond to public calls; they respond to relevance and trust.
Bonus points if you automate your recruitment and cadence Ă la Teresa Torresâ Continuous Discovery Habits.
3. Set Expectations (Especially Around Medical Advice)
If youâre a doctor or clinician, your conversion rate to interview will likely be higher, as people naturally trust you. But that trust also creates some risk.
You should explicitly set expectations upfront:
âThis call isnât for medical advice.â
âI canât diagnose or give medical advice, but I can signpost useful resources.â
âThis session is for understanding experiences, not providing care.â
And hereâs the interesting part:
Many patients just want to be heard.
Many experience catharsis simply from being asked about their story with genuine curiosity, rather than looking for you to diagnose them.
If youâre non-clinical, donât worry, you can still conduct excellent CCD. Just be clear on boundaries and safety.
4. Use the Right System for Your Audience
One of my most painful lessons:
I built a beautifully automated discovery system: Gmail sequences, Calendly, reminders, Zoom links.
No one showed up.
When I did meta-discovery on why, the answer was obvious:
đĄ Many patients donât use Google Calendar. They donât check their personal email regularly.
Instead, these worked better:
Use SMS (especially in the US) or WhatsApp reminders
Offer phone call options
Warn if youâre calling from a withheld number
Simplify everything
Tech-led does not equal patient-ready.
These small format changes solve a huge percentage of no-show problems, especially in patient-heavy discovery.
5. Create Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is your number one job in an interview.
If people feel judged, they censor. If they feel unsafe, they perform. If they sense a power dynamic, they withhold.
Offer:
Transparency about confidentiality
Whether youâre recording
Why youâre taking notes
How insights will be used
Space for emotion
Permission to ânot knowâ
When people feel safe enough to share what they consider their âembarrassing truthsâ, thatâs when discovery magic happens.
đ Finding this post useful? Please consider restacking it to help build the Clinical Product community. đ
5 Common Failure Modes (and How To Avoid Them)
These are common patterns that can derail clinical discovery:
1ď¸âŁ Relying too much on your own assumptions
Especially if you are the patient or clinician in question. Your experience is one data point, not the dataset.
Avoid it: Treat your instincts as hypotheses to validate, not truths to build from.
2ď¸âŁ Ignoring non-clinical stakeholders
Admin, ops and coordination staff often determine whether a product is adoptable at all. If it creates friction for them, it likely wonât land.
Avoid it: Bring operational voices in early, understand the real workflow constraints.
3ď¸âŁ Only speaking with âeasyâ users
Friendly clinicians and early adopters are useful but biased. They donât represent typical users or the system at large.
Avoid it: Intentionally recruit sceptics, non-users and quieter voices.
4ď¸âŁ Treating discovery as a one-time phase
Healthcare shifts constantly: workflows, regulations, pressures, incentives. One round of interviews isnât enough.
Avoid it: Make CCD a continuous habit, not a project milestone.
5ď¸âŁ Doing far too much⌠or far too little
Too few interviews = misleading signal. Too many = diminishing returns.
Avoid it: Stop when themes repeat across groups. If interviews are still surfacing new learnings, keep going.
Conclusion: CCD Is the Foundation
Clinical Customer Discovery isnât ânice to have.â It is the foundation on which great products are built.
đŤ Skip CCD â risk building the wrong product
⨠Nail CCD â everything downstream becomes easier.
Wishing you great clinical discovery conversations for the week ahead!
Hiring Spotlight đ
Dr Declan Kelly, founder and CEO of Eolas, is hiring a Head of Product.
I caught up with Declan about the role. Eolas is a global clinical knowledge platform that organises both external guidelines (e.g. NICE, BNF) and unique internal hospital content into an AI-powered answer engine for clinicians. This position would be perfect for an experienced, product-leaning CPM. đ Apply here.
From the Community đĄ
A few highlights from the Clinical Product community this week đ
Podcast | Build Better Products with Continuous Product Discovery: Teresa Torres for Lennyâs Podcast. A masterclass on embedding weekly customer touchpoints into product teams. Essential listening for CPMs translating clinical complexity into buildable workflows.
Resource | FHIR Fundamentals Course (Beginner-Friendly): An introduction to FHIR essentials. Parts 1â2 are ideal for Clinical Product Managers who want to understand interoperability without getting lost in too much technical detail.
Post | Product Market Implementation Fit: By Brigette West, DrDoctor. A visual framework explaining why PMF isnât enough in healthcare and how PMIF layers in operational feasibility, safety and revenue model viability.
Thatâs all for this week. See you next time! đ
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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 (âŚobviously). Based in London. You can find me on Linkedin.
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