Why Healthtech Needs a New Kind of Product Leader
Highlights from our panel event on the emerging discipline essential to building safe, effective digital health
This is Clinical Product Thinking 🧠, a weekly newsletter featuring practical tips, frameworks and strategies from the front line of clinical product.
Welcome, friends, this is issue No. 047 of Clinical Product Thinking. This week: a recap on the third webinar in the series on clinical product management, co-hosted with Dani Brightman.
When we ran the first in-person event in January, clinical product was still hugely under-recognised in health tech. Six months on it feels like things are slowly starting to shift. Roles are being named properly. Job descriptions are looking less like a dog’s dinner. And the question is beginning to shift from “WTF even is clinical product?” to “how do we do clinical product well?” 🎉
This time we deliberately widened the panel. You told us you wanted more product and technology voices, so we brought them in:
Dani Brightman — Clinical Director, Numan (pharmacist by training, now leading biggest clinical product team in UK)
Lorenzo Espinoza — Director of Product, C the Signs (early-stage cancer detection; 13+ years in product, 7 in health tech)
Jamie Webb Smith — Chief Product & Technology Officer, Numan (engineer by background, ~20 years in regulated fintech before health)
Dr Alice McGee — Senior Medical Advisor, Flo Health (doctor by background, ex-founder of a health tech consultancy)
What came out was an interesting reflection: building products that touch health needs a new kind of product leader and the companies who don’t recognise this early will end up paying the price.
Let’s dive in.
First, what is clinical product?
The reason clinical product has lived in a grey area for so long is that nobody agreed where its edges were. Dr Alice gave her definition and it’s purposefully broad:
“To me, clinical product is any kind of product that relates to health in any way, from a full-blown medical device to anything that lets a user track their health data, symptoms or outcomes.”
— Dr Alice McGee, Senior Medical Advisor, Flo Health
That’s a deliberately wide net, and it should be. The tracker that looks harmless today is one intended-use statement away from being a regulated medical device tomorrow. If your definition of “clinical” only kicks in once something is obviously a device, you run a serious risk of getting caught out.
Why it’s having its moment
Jamie made an interesting parallel and it’s not one I’ve heard before:
“I came from fintech about 10 years ago. We saw a very similar thing, regulation started to move, it started to enable innovation, and there was a real push for the larger fintechs to break through. I think it’s a similar moment in health tech, and central to that innovation is clinical thinking.”
— Jamie, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Numan
That’s the same pattern: consumer health exploding, people taking their health into their own hands, and regulation maturing from a blocker into an enabler. Fintech went through exactly this a decade ago. The companies that broke through were the ones that took the regulated core seriously and built product muscle around it. In health tech, that regulated core is clinical thinking.
The cost of not having clinical product embedded
Lorenzo has led product teams both with and without embedded clinical product people, and he was blunt about the difference. When clinical is treated as an external advisor or part-time help, it breaks down in both halves of the product process: discovery and delivery:
“We spent weeks and months solving a problem that was not the right problem to solve.”
— Lorenzo, Director of Product, C the Signs
Without clinical thinking from the start, the team can spend months building a good solution to a problem that did not need solving.
Jamie gave a concrete example of this. A company was prescribing GLP-1 medication and, after a period, renewed those prescriptions. The team Jamie was working with built the renewal flow without enough clinical product input embedded:
“A few small but critical elements weren’t right, which meant we didn’t get the information we needed at the right time for clinicians to make a good prescribing decision. So they had to go back to the patient, which creates unnecessary cycles.”
— Jamie, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Numan
That small gap meant clinicians had to contact patients again before renewing the prescription. It added work for the clinical team, delayed treatment and gave patients another opportunity to drop out. A “small” clinical oversight showed up as a revenue problem. That’s the pattern many health tech founders underestimate.
Lorenzo also described what happens when the patient experience works but the clinician workflow does not.
“Time and again we see health tech innovation that basically dies at pilot stage, because the dynamics of patients, business and clinicians are not in sync.”
— Lorenzo, Director of Product, C the Signs
You can design a beautiful patient experience that becomes ugly the moment it hits the clinician’s workflow if the end-to-end experience hasn’t been mapped from each users view point.
👉 What to do about it:
Embed clinical product discovery, not just delivery. Most wrong-problem failures happen before a line of code is written.
Map the clinician journey alongside the patient journey. If a feature adds work for the person on the other side of the screen, you’ll find out at pilot, the worst possible time.
Run an early “are we accidentally a medical device?” check on intended use and marketing language. It’s cheap now and painful later.
You do not have to be a clinician to develop clinical product judgement
One thing I loved was how quickly the “clinician or product person” framing fell apart. Dr Alice pointed out that some of her strongest colleagues at Flo have no clinical background at all:
“They’ve been in the space five, six, seven years. They’re not clinical by background, but they think in a clinical product mindset now, from absorbing years of feedback and user insight.”
— Dr Alice McGee, Senior Medical Advisor, Flo Health
And it runs both ways. Jamie described what happens when product, design, engineering and clinical genuinely mix:
“You start to get real magic. It’s almost like you create a common problem-solving brain between clinical, technology and design.”
— Jamie, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Numan
That’s what companies should aim for. Not a clinician who signs things off at the end, but a shared way of thinking that lets clinicians adopt product frameworks and lets product people develop clinical instincts. The best teams build a common brain.
Where clinical product should sit (Culture beats the org chart)
We spent a good chunk on reporting lines, and the honest answer is: several structures work.
Lorenzo (C the Signs): clinical product reports into product; the Clinical Safety Officer sits outside product to keep an independent view.
Dr Alice (Flo Health): a medical function reporting to the CEO (a Chief Medical Officer providing C-suite representation), with a named medical advisor assigned to each product initiative.
Both set ups can work, and as Jamie put it:
“What matters more than line management is alignment on how the company operates. Small cross-functional teams with a very clear problem to solve. If your operating model is broken, line management won’t fix it.”
— Jamie, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Numan
The real answer to “where should clinical product sit?” is inside the cross-functional team, from day zero. Reporting lines vary, but clinical product needs to be involved in the team’s day-to-day decisions rather than consulted shortly before release.
👉 What to do about it:
Do not spend too long perfecting reporting lines while clinical product remains outside the day-to-day work. Put clinical expertise into the team that is investigating and solving the problem.
Give clinical product a proper role in shaping the solution, rather than asking for approval after the main decisions have already been made.
Whatever your structure, consider having an independent clinical safety view (a CSO outside the delivery team) so speed never quietly overrides safety.
The takeaway
Clinical product isn’t the bit where a clinician signs things off at the end. It’s a discipline. And it sits in one very particular place: between the patient, the business and the clinician.
Health tech is having its fintech moment. The teams that win it won’t be the fastest. They’ll be the ones who got clinical thinking into the room early, and built the common brain as a strategic advantage.
Introducing Subscriber Perks 🤩
I’m very excited to introduce subscriber perks: a growing library of resources for clinical product managers and people building clinical products or health tech companies.
What you’ll find:
Deep dives on breaking into clinical product, embedding clinical safety into product decisions, building commercial knowledge and more
Masterclasses on building safe clinical AI systems
A guide to writing clinical product manager job descriptions that people can actually fill
A database of European health tech VCs, grants and other funding opportunities
A 30-minute clinical product advisory session with me for founding subscribers
👉 Check them out here.
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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This sounds like design by committee approach, what we used to call a waterfall approach. It's a traditional way of thinking that doesn't really allow for innovation or flexibility.. It sounds like many people are involved in the decision making process.