How to Land Your First Clinical Product Role with Danielle Brightman of Numan

Your weekly newsletter on all things clinical product and building better healthcare 🏥

Nov 02, 2025

This is Clinical Product Thinking 🧠, your weekly newsletter featuring practical tips, frameworks and strategies from the frontlines of clinical product.

Hello friends, this is issue No. 010. Today, we’re discussing how to land a Clinical Product role, how to ace the interviews and what makes a great CPM.

Danielle Brightman, Clinical Director at Numan, leads one of the largest clinical product teams in the UK. Few people have hired more CPMs or thought more deeply about what makes them successful.

If you’ve ever wondered what employers are actually looking for… here it is straight from the source.

Dani’s take: It isn’t about credentials. It’s about curiosity.

Let’s dive in.

The Right Mindset: Constant Curiosity

Dani’s superpower is seeing how things connect, from clinical flows to product architecture to commercial strategy. This is driven by a constant desire to understand why. She thinks from first principles and rebuilds experiences from the ground up.

She’s looking for that same instinct in candidates, people who go beyond ‘how to use it’ and want to know why it works that way in the first place. She’s looking for people who never accept ‘that’s just the way it is’ as an answer.

The Core Skill: Systems Thinking

If curiosity is the fuel; systems thinking is the outcome.

When she interviews, she’s not just testing skills; she’s checking whether you can think in systems. If you can look at a product, and see:

How it works now
Where it breaks
And what would make it better

She looks for people who can delve deep into a user flow, analyse the gaps, spot edge cases and suggest improvements that don’t just fix problems today, they prevent headaches tomorrow.

What Great Looks Like

Ask Dani what makes a great CPM, and she’ll tell you it’s someone who:

Can present clearly to an engineer, a clinician, and a product lead
Understands risks and mitigations
Can zoom in on a feature, then zoom out to product strategy
Can map the patient or system flow end-to-end
Knows how and when to strip an idea back to a minimum delightful product

And, she said this twice, someone who will catch risks. That’s the trust she’s hiring for.

How Dani Tests Candidates

Every interview includes a practical scenario:

‘You’re on a team launching a new test. Walk me through the user and clinician journey.’

She’s watching for whether you can:

Map the workflow
Identify open risks and mitigations
Decide what’s an acceptable level of risk
Update the hazard log
Work with the CSO
Define MVP → V1 → V2
Measure clinical and commercial impact
And, crucially, show how it scales safely

The best candidates do all this while keeping a clinician’s empathy in the room and a product manager’s pragmatism on the table.

📌 Finding this post useful? Please consider restacking it to help build the Clinical Product community. 🙏

Tips for Success

Once you’re in the role, Dani’s advice is simple:

‘Become best friends with your PM and tech lead.’

Work with them to master user interviews and data analysis. Get comfortable with tech infrastructure and scalability. Understand procurement and partnerships, know which questions to ask and how to assess potential partners or suppliers.

The best CPMs she’s worked with went into staging, ran through every flow alongside the SOPs, and came back with a list of questions that made the product stronger.

And don’t stop there. Develop a genuine interest in how technology is evolving across healthcare. It’s a fast-moving market, and if you’re not actively learning, your product will be left behind while everyone else moves forward.

That’s curiosity in action.

Be the Translator

Curiosity alone isn’t enough; you have to make it land with product and engineering.

Clinical product is bilingual. You have to be able to speak clinical and product natively, and know how to translate between them.

That means taking clinical ideas and framing them in product language:

Clinical language: ‘We should tighten our triage criteria.’
Product framing: ‘We need to refine our marketing messaging. We’re paying to acquire too many unsuitable users. Qualifying earlier will lower CAC and improves conversion to consult.’

That’s how you get clinical priorities onto a product roadmap. Not by pleading for patient safety, by showing the impact on engagement, utilisation or CAC.

Getting in Without Product Experience

No product experience? No problem, if you’ve done the thinking.

Dani will consider clinicians without product backgrounds if they can show:

Audit or QIP work with clear outcomes
Process mapping or service improvement projects
Evidence of asking why things work the way they do, and how they could be better
Something you’ve built yourself, even if no one uses it. A prototype, a side project, or a small workflow improvement shows you can translate ideas into reality.

Breaking into Clinical Product is often the hardest step, but the good news is, this means you can start building relevant experience in your clinical role today.

Final Take

If you want to work in Dani’s world, or any serious clinical product role, here’s the checklist:

💡 Learn the system before you fix it
💡 Translate clinical impact into product metrics
💡 Think in flows, not silos
💡 Catch risks before they catch you
💡 And above all, stay curious

Because as Dani put it:

‘Experience matters, but mindset wins.’

💭 What do you think, can clinical curiosity be taught, or is it something you’re born with? Let me know in the comments.

Join the Next Event 🎇

📆 12th November - Clinical Product Dinner: Regulation Without Killing Innovation

With Dr Dom Pimenta, CEO & Founder of Tortus AI, empowering clinicians with advanced AI through their Class I medical device. Sign up here. (Now sold out!)

Hiring Spotlight 🚀

The Beyond Group is hiring a Clinical Product Lead.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a leading London-based health platform. The Clinical Product Lead will shape how speciality care is designed and delivered, ideally bringing GP experience (with a focus on obesity or diabetes) and a background in digital product development. 👉 Apply via email to David: david@thebeyondgroup.uk

From the Community 💡

A few highlights from the Clinical Product community 👇

6 Nov | From Pilots to Practice: Safe Deployment of AVT in Clinical Setting | London, UK: Hosted by Tortus AI, this event will cover case studies and use cases for the safe deployment of clinical AI.
15 Nov | AI in Medicine Conference | Glasgow, UK: Hosted by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, this event explores real-world applications of AI in diagnostics, clinical decision-making and medical education.
25 Nov | Hash It Out: Regulating AI in Healthcare | London, UK: Hosted by Hale House, in partnership with Assuric. This event will cover the future of AI healthcare regulation. (👋 Say hi to me there!)
Post | Beyond the Clinic: How GenAI is Reimagining Healthcare Operations: By Sevi Uras and Charlotte Barttelot at MMC Ventures. A deep dive into GenAI use cases in the healthcare setting.

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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