Why Clinical Customer Discovery Is the Most Important Thing You’ll Do Today
Your weekly newsletter on all things clinical product and building better healthcare 🏥
This is Clinical Product Thinking 🧠, your weekly newsletter featuring practical tips, frameworks and strategies from the frontlines of clinical product.
Good afternoon friends, this is issue No. 014. This week we’re diving deep into why clinical customer discovery is vital to building safe and effective healthcare.
Many products don’t fail in build. They fail in discovery.
Not because the team lacked skill, effort or funding but because they never understood the clinical reality they were building for.
And in healthtech, misunderstanding reality is expensive:
Wrong workflow → wrong evidence → wrong safety story → wrong product.
Clinical Customer Discovery (CCD) is how you avoid that outcome. It’s the discipline of listening deeply to clinicians, patients and administrators to uncover what’s actually broken before you design a fix.
It is not generic UX research.
It is not regular user interviews.
It’s the clinical groundwork that determines whether your product succeeds or fails.
When I was investing in early-stage AI startups at Forward Partners, the pattern was painfully consistent:
Teams that skipped discovery built beautiful solutions to imaginary problems.
Teams that nailed it built trust, traction and revenue faster than anyone else.
We made it non-negotiable. Every pre-seed company had to redo discovery post-investment, because it was the single strongest predictor of success.
Here’s why discovery is the most important work you’ll do as a Clinical Product Manager:
Discovery Makes Product Decisions Smarter (and Cheaper)
Without discovery, you aren’t building, you’re guessing.
Most teams overbuild. They chase shiny ‘nice-to-haves’ that test well in a workshop but collapse the second they hit real workflows.
Great discovery lets you kill ideas early and prioritise with clinical precision.
👉 In practice:
Start sprint planning with problems not features.
Test hypotheses about jobs to be done (“How do you currently manage X?”) rather than pitching features.
Track validated and invalidated assumptions. This knowledge bank will become a valuable asset.
💡 Good discovery tells you what to build. Great discovery tells you what to ignore.
Discovery Makes Your Product Clinically Relevant
Healthcare is a system of constraints: guidelines, EHRs, risk, time pressure, workarounds, emotional labour.
If your product doesn’t fit into real workflows (not the SOP version, the human version), it will not last.
👉 In practice:
Map the actual workflow. There is always a shadow workflow.
Ask: “What slows you down? What gets duplicated? What do you workaround?”
Include policy, IT, human steps and failure points.
🧠 If you can’t sketch the current workflow from memory, you are not ready to redesign it.
Discovery Drives Adoption (Because Time Is the Real Currency)
Clinicians don’t resist change; they resist friction.
Anything that adds time, clicks, admin, or cognitive load instantly signals:
’This won’t work in the real world.’
That’s why discovery is not just about understanding problems, but about understanding the time cost of adopting your product.
When I worked with a US telemedicine startup, we assumed better outcomes + more revenue would drive adoption. Wrong. The blocker was onboarding and documentation time.
Once we understood that, the rule was simple:
If it doesn’t save time, it won’t be used.
👉 In practice:
Quantify the time cost of using your product.
Ask: “What would make this worth switching for?”
Measure workflow fit: Does it slot in, or does it interrupt?
⌛ In healthcare, time isn’t just money. It’s trust.
📌 Finding this post useful? Please consider restacking it to help build the Clinical Product community. 🙏
Discovery Shapes Your Evidence Strategy
Here’s the part most teams miss:
Discovery isn’t only about understanding problems.
It’s about understanding what you need to prove.
Regulators, buyers and clinicians often care about different outcomes. Discovery reveals which metrics actually matter.
When I spoke with Benedikt von Thüngen, CEO of Sanome, he put it perfectly:
’We need to stop thinking product-market fit in healthtech and start thinking product-stakeholder fit.’
👉 In practice:
Ask clinicians what outcomes convince them a product is safe/effective.
Ask buyers what metrics drive procurement.
Map each stakeholder’s definition of success; this becomes your early evidence plan.
📊 You can’t retrofit evidence. Build it from day one.
Discovery Builds Stakeholder Trust (Your Real Moat)
You cannot buy trust in healthcare. You earn it through involvement.
Early involvement gives you:
better feedback
early champions
clinical allies in procurement
safer product decisions
👉 In practice:
Share early concepts, not polished designs.
Close the loop: ‘Here’s what we changed based on your feedback.’
Document these stories, they become internal alignment tools.
🤝 Discovery isn’t insight-gathering. It’s relationship-building. And relationships are your moat.
The Bottom Line
Clinical Customer Discovery isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation of everything that follows.
Skip discovery → build the wrong product.
Nail discovery → everything downstream becomes easier.
Happy discovering, folks!
Content & Community Associate 😍
Clinical Product Thinking 🧠 is looking for a part-time Content & Community Associate to support content ops, events and early testing of new Clinical Product AI tools. Ideal for someone early in their healthtech or clinical product career who wants mentorship, exposure and hands-on experience in a fast-growing discipline. 👉 Details and how to apply here.
Clinical Product Calendar 2026 💁♀️
Incredibly excited to be planning out the Clinical Product Thinking 🧠 calendar for 2026.
We kick off with a panel event on 29th Jan, followed by intimate Clinical Product Dinners on 4th Feb and 4th March. The next round of Clinical Product Drinks lands on 25th March. Save the dates and subscribe to the CPT Substack for early access codes. More details here.
From the Community 💡
A few highlights from the Clinical Product community this week 👇
Post | New online NHS hospital service by 2027, PM to promise: BBC News, Sir Keir Starmer has announced virtual hospitals will be phased in by 2027.
Resource | Trusted Resources for Software/AI as Medical Device Innovators: By Radiant Cersi. A vetted bank of resources for those working on medical devices.
Post | How to Write a Better Intended Purpose for SaMD: By Scarlet on how to write intended-purpose statements that make compliance, evidence generation and clinical adoption much simpler.
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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