Why Clinicians Sometimes Struggle to Land HealthTech Roles and What Works Instead

Hint: it's absolutely not applying for jobs online.

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. 020. This week, we’re talking about how to land your dream role in clinical product/healthtech.

In a few weeks, I’m co-hosting an event with Danielle Brightman, Clinical Director of Numan, on how to break into clinical product (link). In the lead-up, I’ve been reflecting on a question I’m asked quite a lot: how did you get the roles you’ve held over the last decade?

And here’s the tea:

I have never applied for a role online and then been invited to interview. Ever.

I’m sharing this because many clinicians leave clinical practice already questioning what they bring to a new industry. When they then spend months applying for jobs online and hearing nothing back, that doubt hardens into a totally inaccurate story:

Maybe I’m not qualified, good enough, [insert self-criticism here]

But that is the wrong conclusion, based on a flawed strategy.

Since leaving medicine in 2018, I’ve worked across venture capital, product leadership and healthtech in roles that are traditionally seen as difficult to access. Each came through people, proximity and visible thinking, not my CV standing out in a pile of 800 from an online application.

Below is how I secured each role, along with the lessons you can apply today to land your next role in healthtech.

How I actually got each role

🔗 Entrepreneur First

A business accelerator that’s harder to get into than Google or Harvard. I didn’t apply cold. Someone in my network knew Alice, co-founder and now CEO, and got me an interview just before the cohort started.

What mattered:
Not only did I have a warm introduction, but I’d already been building a product for six months.

🤝 Forward Partners (Venture Capital)

I did apply online. Then heard nothing. (Told you.)

Instead of leaving it at that, I chased down Matt, one of the partners, at a networking event. I introduced myself, talked through my career, referenced their portfolio, and shared how I’d been thinking about product strategy in one of their companies. He suggested an interview on the spot.

What mattered:
I’d already taken a product management course where I studied their portfolio deeply, was already networked with some of their portfolio CEOs and understood how startups are built. Then I did the uncomfortable thing of tracking him down at an event.

🎯 Bea Fertility

I met David, Bea’s co-founder, at a random hardware-in-femtech workshop years before joining. I had absolutely no reason to be there. I think the organiser was mildly annoyed I’d taken a spot.

What mattered:
I was already researching and writing about women’s health and attending random events years before the opportunity presented itself.

✍️ Metronomic

I wrote a piece on intuitive decision-making that I nearly didn’t publish. Sujith, the CEO, read it, reached out, and hired me.

We had:

• Never met

• No mutual contacts

• Lived on different continents

What mattered:
My thinking was visible, and I did the cringey thing of putting it out into the world.

🌱 Simplyhealth

I encouraged someone who was struggling to find a job. Later, they sent me this role.

Separately, I’d also been connected to the team through Annie Coleridge.

What mattered:
Instead of applying cold, I emailed the hiring manager I’d already spoken with. I paid it forward to support someone else in their search for their next role and it came back multiple-fold.

“This all sounds like luck…”

If you got through that list and thought:

“This is all luck and happenstance and completely unreplicable.”

Bear with me. Yes, there was timing. And chance. And generosity from others.

But there were also patterns. And those are replicable.

Here’s what was really happening underneath.

The underlying strategy (whether I realised it or not)

• I was building before being hired

• I was learning and sharing publicly

• I was thinking in years, not applications

• I was showing up in rooms, not inboxes

• I was giving without expectation

When I met each of those people:

• I already had work in motion

• I could speak concretely about problems and trade-offs

• I wasn’t asking for permission; I was showing capability

This brings me to another point we will expand on in another post: You don’t need a job title to do clinical product work.

If I were starting again, here’s how I’d approach it

I’d stop obsessing over the number of job applications and start optimising for surface area.

I would:

• Learn ferociously: Product fundamentals, strategy, delivery, AI, regulation, clinical safety. This means you’re ready for opportunities when they come.

• Build something: A clinical product, a prototype, a concept, a service, even if it never sees a patient. What you’ll learn will likely be more valuable than anything you read in a book.

• Invest in LinkedIn: I’ve never met a clinician who didn’t think this extremely unappealing at first but building a personal brand on Linkedin is one of the highest leverage things you can do.

• Put my thinking out there: Write. Post. Speak. Share unfinished ideas. When you share what is on your mind people know who to connect you with and what opportunities are relevant.

• Network in real life, with a long time horizon: At first, I would network indiscriminately. That’s how I started. Then, over time, more intentionally and strategically.

• Pay it forward relentlessly: Help without an agenda. It compounds in ways you can’t predict.

• Get formal signals where they matter: Clinical Safety Officer training. Core AI principles. Governance literacy. Not to collect certificates, but to prove commitment and capability in skills that actually matter.

• Seek early-stage advisory roles: Even if unpaid initially. It’s the fastest way to practise translating clinical expertise into product thinking.

What I wouldn’t do is rely on job boards as a primary strategy. Many of the most interesting roles in healthtech are filled long before a formal role is ever posted.

If you’re a clinician trying to move into healthtech and nothing is landing, the thing I’d love you to take away is this: it’s not a signal about your value. It is feedback on your approach.

If you’re in the middle of this transition, I’m rooting for you. 💪

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Work With Me 💁‍♀️

I have a small amount of capacity to work with clinicians, founders and teams navigating career transitions or building clinical products, particularly where clinical risk, governance and product trade-offs are complex. If you’re facing a decision that feels high-stakes or hard to untangle, send a short note and I’ll let you know if it’s a fit. 👉 More info here

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Clinical Product Dinner ✨

📆 4th February - How Clinicians Can Turn Expertise Into Category-Defining Healthtech Products

With Dr Arun Notaney, Founder of GP Automate, exploring how lived clinical experience can be transformed into category-defining healthtech products, and how frontline frustration becomes scalable, NHS-ready solutions. 👉 Get your ticket here.

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That’s all for this week. See you next time! 👋

🤝 Work with me | 📅 Attend an event | | ✍️ Send a message

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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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