What 2025 Revealed About the State of Clinical Product
Six core challenges, hiring signals and what's coming next for the discipline
This is Clinical Product Thinking đ§ , a weekly newsletter featuring practical tips, frameworks and strategies from the frontlines of clinical product.
Welcome, friends, this is issue No. 029 of Clinical Product Thinking. This week Iâm sharing something a little different: a look back over 2025 and a perspective on where weâre heading in 2026. Buckle up as this is a bit of a long one!
I think we can all agree Clinical Product isnât a niche role anymore.
Itâs no longer a clinician who âsomehow ended up in product,â or a product manager expected to absorb clinical risk by osmosis. Itâs a discipline being defined in real time, by people like you, dear gentle reader.
Last year, I spoke with hundreds of people working in the clinical product orbit: founders, Clinical Safety Officers, product leaders, regulators and clinical product managers at the centre of increasingly complex systems.
I asked them all one simple question:
đ What are the biggest challenges faced by Clinical Product Managers right now?
Together they point to a larger picture:
What did 2025 reveal about the state of Clinical Product? And where is the discipline heading next?
Thatâs our topic for today. Specifically, weâll cover:
Pain points: the six core challenges shaping day-to-day clinical product work
The market: what current job descriptions reveal about how the role is being formalised
Whatâs next: where the discipline is likely to evolve over the next 12â24 months
Section 1: The Core Challenges that Defined Clinical Product in 2025
1. Regulation vs innovation (the dominant tension)
This is the single most consistent theme.
CPMs are struggling with:
Balancing regulatory compliance with speed and experimentation
Building AI or data-heavy products under uncertain or evolving regulatory interpretations
Translating regulatory requirements into practical product decisions, not just documentation
This shows up as:
âRegulation vs innovationâ
âAI as a medical device, performance vs explainabilityâ
âEngineering approaches to facilitate regulationâ
Signal: CPMs respect regulation but currently sometimes lack product-native ways of working within it.
2. Influence without authority
A close second.
Many CPMs describe difficulty:
Getting buy-in from engineering, commercial or leadership
Advocating for clinical safety, evidence, or quality when itâs not immediately revenue-generating
Being listened to without being perceived as the blocker
Operating in ambiguous roles where decision rights are unclear
This includes:
âCommunicating clinical needs to other stakeholdersâ
âInfluencing roadmap decisionsâ
âGetting clinical considerations taken seriously early, not at sign-offâ
Signal: CPMs are often senior in responsibility but junior in formal power.
3. Translating clinical reality into product systems
Another strong theme.
CPMs struggle with:
Turning messy, contextual clinical practice into clean product logic
Designing workflows that work across multiple clinician types and care settings
Avoiding over-simplification without building unusable complexity
Making products safe and usable in the real world
This often shows up as:
âProduct touches many cliniciansâ
âHow to represent clinical nuance in softwareâ
âBridging the gap between clinical needs and technical implementationâ
Signal: This is not a ârequirements gatheringâ problem; itâs a sensemaking problem.
4. Clinical safety integration (too late, too bolted-on)
Another frequently described challenge is clinical safety and how itâs integrated into teams.
Challenges include:
Safety being treated as a checklist or gate rather than a design input
Unclear ownership between product, clinical and governance teams
Difficulty embedding safety thinking into agile development
Friction between delivery timelines and safety assurance processes
Signal: Teams want safety by design, but many currently lack shared language, tools and rhythms.
5. Evidence, outcomes and âwhatâs enough?â
A quieter but important thread.
CPMs raised:
Uncertainty around what level of evidence is proportionate
Tension between real-world evidence and formal validation
Pressure to âprove impactâ without being clear on the standards
Confusion over how evidence expectations differ by market (UK / EU / US)
Signal: Evidence strategy is becoming a product strategy, but many CPMs feel a lack of clarity.
6. Role ambiguity and career uncertainty (implicit but real)
Present underneath many responses is uncertainty about what clinical product actually is.
CPMs are operating in:
Poorly defined roles
Organisations that donât yet understand âclinical productâ
Career paths without clear progression or peer benchmarks
Signal: The discipline is still forming and people feel that.
The underlying pattern
Across all responses, the core issue is not lack of skill or expertise.
Clinical Product Managers are often:
Holding risk, safety, evidence and user impact
Moving at startup speed
Operating without shared frameworks, organisational backing or clear authority
In short:
Many Clinical Product Managers are carrying systemic responsibility in organisations that have not yet built systems to support them.
This is Clinical Product as per 2025.
Section 2: The Hiring Market
What UK and US Clinical Product Roles Reveal
As Clinical Product is evolving, job descriptions give clues as to the direction of travel.
Here are insights from analysing job descriptions from the UK, and for the first time, including analysis specifically for friends over in the US (who now account for 20% of readership!) Roles span startups, scale-ups and more established healthcare organisations, published in 2025.
đŹđ§ The UK Market
Across UK roles analysed, there is increasing consistency in how clinical product is defined.
1. Clinical background is expected, not optional
Most UK roles explicitly require clinical training, e.g. doctor, nurse, pharmacist, or other allied health professional, although often with relatively limited patient-facing experience (1â3 years). The emphasis is not on senior clinical practice, but on clinical credibility and systems understanding.
This signals a shift: Clinical Product is no longer positioned as a generic PM role that anyone can move into. It is becoming a clinician-led function by default.
2. Safety, governance and regulation are embedded in the role
UK Clinical Product roles routinely include responsibility for:
clinical risk identification and mitigation
incident investigation and follow-up
integration of clinical governance into delivery
understanding and applying clinical safety standards (e.g. DCB0129)
supporting or leading regulatory activity
In several roles, Clinical Product implicitly absorbs responsibilities that may traditionally sit with dedicated safety, quality or regulatory teams. In practice, this creates CPM roles that are responsible for clinical safety, not merely contributors to it.
3. âProductâ is defined as care delivery, not features
UK job descriptions consistently frame product as an end-to-end care system, encompassing:
clinical pathways and decision logic
operating models, SOPs and training
escalation and safety mechanisms
internal tools for clinicians and operations
Clinical product managers are expected to design entire care journeys rather than building isolated features.
4. Evidence beats engagement
Across job descriptions, success isnât defined by metrics like daily active users, retention or NPS.
Instead, CPMs are being measured on:
pathway performance and quality indicators
outcomes and evaluation
real-world data and evidence generation
credibility with regulators, partners and the NHS
Traditional product engagement metrics are secondary to clinical impact and assurance.
5. Scope is wide and often stretched
Many UK roles combine responsibilities across:
product strategy and delivery
clinical operations
safety and risk management
regulatory coordination
evidence and evaluation
partnerships and due diligence
This breadth suggests a discipline still maturing, with organisations relying on Clinical Product to hold together multiple high-risk domains.
While powerful, this can create roles where accountability outpaces resourcing, authority⌠and support!
đşđ¸ The US Market
US roles show significantly greater variation in how âClinical Productâ is defined, alongside a clearer separation of responsibilities.
1. Clinical Product does not consistently require clinical training
Unlike the UK, many US roles do not require candidates to be clinicians. This suggests that in the US, âclinicalâ often refers to:
the problem space (healthcare, medicine, diagnostics), or
the outcomes being targeted
ânot necessarily the professional background of the product leader.
2. Regulation and safety are present, but rarely owned by clinical product
US job descriptions acknowledge regulatory and clinical constraints, but responsibility is more often described as:
collaboration with medical, quality or compliance teams
consultation on validation, human factors or regulatory pathways
Rather than direct ownership.
This indicates a structural difference: US Clinical Product roles interface with governance; UK roles internalise it.
3. Greater emphasis on scale and business impact
Across US roles, success is commonly defined in terms of:
measurable health outcomes at scale
provider or member efficiency
adoption and operational performance
ROI for employers, payers or customers
Clinical Product is framed as a lever for organisational scale and impact, with strong alignment to commercial or population-level goals.
The key contrast
Across this dataset, the most important distinction is where accountability sits.
In the UK, Clinical Product is a clinician-led function, often absorbing clinical risk, governance and safety.
In the US, Clinical Product roles are more commercial, focusing on scale, outcomes and product impact, with governance distributed across specialist functions.
Both approaches create senior roles with influence, but the work itself and the risks that come with it look very different.
Section 3: Predictions for 2026
It wouldnât be a âstate ofâ report without making some predictions for what comes next đŽ. Hereâs where I believe the clinical product market is moving in 2026:
1. Director and VP clinical product roles become standard, not exceptional
In 2026, Clinical Product is moving decisively into senior leadership at Director and VP level.
These roles wonât exist to âmanage PMsâ. They will exist to:
hold explicit accountability for clinical risk at product level
arbitrate trade-offs between safety, evidence, speed and scale
sit alongside engineering, commercial and medical leadership as peers
This trend is likely to produce something new: the first C-suite clinical product leaders, emerging in organisations where clinical decision-making is fundamentally embedded in the product itself.
2. AI becomes core infrastructure for clinical product work
In 2026, AI will reshape Clinical Product management itself, not with generic GPTs, but with purpose-build products that act as core capacity infrastructure, embedded into how work gets done.
Expect AI to be used for:
assisted clinical risk identification and hazard surfacing
supporting workflow and pathway modelling across complex care systems
natural language querying across safety cases, regulatory documentation and standards
As a result, the scope of what a single CPM can reasonably own, and is expected to own, will expand.
3. Clinical Product formalises as a function
In 2026, Clinical Product will no longer be defined primarily by individuals, but by structure.
Organisations will begin to formalise Clinical Product as a governed function with:
clearer decision rights
explicit ownership boundaries
defined interfaces with clinical safety, medical, regulatory and engineering teams
The persistent question, âWhat does a Clinical Product Manager actually do?â, will begin to fade, replaced by more consistent expectations of scope, authority and accountability.
4. The first widely recognised Clinical Product career framework emerges
By 2026, Clinical Product will begin to develop a shared career language.
Weâll see early convergence around:
clearer role definitions (CPM â Senior CPM â Head â VP â C-suite
emerging levelling, competency expectations and salary banding
clearer separation between Clinical Product, Clinical Safety Officer and QARA roles
more realistic job scopes aligned to authority and support
This will materially reduce career ambiguity and accelerate the disciplineâs maturation.
Conclusion: Clinical Product at a Turning Point
Clinical Product is crossing a threshold. It is becoming core infrastructure, shaping how clinical risk, evidence, regulation and care delivery are designed into products from the outset.
In practice, this shift shows up as a set of clear trajectories:
Compliance â Design
Reactive â Proactive
Clinical translator â Clinical strategist
Feature delivery â Outcome delivery
Supporting role â Core function
In many organisations, however, responsibility has moved faster than structure. The scope of the Clinical Product role often exceeds the authority, frameworks and organisational support available to sustain it.
How deliberately organisations respond to this will shape the next phase of the discipline. As healthcare products become more complex, the need for people who can think across clinical, product and regulatory domains will only increase.
Clinical Product is no longer an emerging niche. It is becoming part of the foundation on which great healthtech is built.
Your Turn
If you work in or around clinical product:
đ Which challenges feel most pressing in your work right now?
đ Where do you think the discipline needs to go next?
Iâd love to hear from you - just hit reply.
Hiring Spotlight x 5 đđđđđ
đŹđ§ Aisel Health, the clinical operating system for modern psychiatry are hiring a Head of Clinical Innovation to support mapping clinical workflows and clinical pathway design. đ Apply here.
đŹđ§ Manual, or Voy, the online care provider, are hiring a weight loss Clinical Lead and a Clinical Advisor for weight loss. đ Apply here & here.
đŹđ§ Numan, the online care provider are hiring a Clinical Governance Lead. This would be a great opportunity to work alongside one of the largest clinical product teams in the UK. đ Apply here.
đşđ¸ Headway, the matching platform for therapists are hiring a Director of Clinical Product. đ Apply here.
Join Us at HLTH Europe đŞđş
Danielle Brightman and I are running a panel event on clinical product with two incredible guest speakers. If you donât know about HLTH, itâs the health tech conference you absolutely cannot miss.
đ Register your interest for the panel here.
đď¸ Get your HLTH ticket here. (Use code: HE26PP_CPT250 for âŹ250 off your ticket!)
Clinical Product Drinks â¨
đ 25th March, 6:30pm, The Folly.
Join for a drink with other folks at the front line of clinical product. This is an informal evening to mingle and share experiences. No agenda, no panel or slides. đ Get your ticket here.
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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