What Speaking Their Language Actually Looks Like

One clinical concern, three different conversations

👋🏻 Hey there! This is the first post in the Translation Series, exploring clinical product at its most effective.

I talk a lot about clinical product people needing to speak the language of the functions around them. But I realised I’ve never actually shown what that looks like.

So here’s the same clinical concern, framed three different ways for three different audiences.

The scenario

You’re working on a treatment pathway for a digital health product. During review, you spot that the current flow lets a patient select a medication without completing a contraindication check. It’s an edge case, but you feel it’s a real clinical safety gap and you want to get it fixed.

Here’s how the conversation changes depending on who you’re talking to.

Talking to engineering

What you might be tempted to say:

“This is a clinical risk. We need to add a contraindication check before the medication selection step.”

What lands better:

"There's a missing validation step. If a user reaches medication selection via the deep link, they bypass the contraindication screen. It affects about 3% of sessions. A fix could be a check on the screening step, if it's not complete, redirect back. Happy to work together on finding a solution."

Why this works: you’ve described the system behaviour, not the clinical concept. You’ve given them a route to reproduce it, a scope estimate, and a rough shape of the solution. Engineers don’t need you to explain why contraindications matter, they need to understand what’s broken, how users get there, and what “fixed” looks like.

Talking to commercial

What you might be tempted to say:

“We’ve found a clinical safety issue that needs fixing before we scale this pathway.”

What lands better:

“There’s an edge case where about 3% of users can reach checkout without completing a required safety screen. If we launch the paid campaign next month without fixing it, we’re looking at a percentage of orders that might need manual clinical review or cancellation. That’ll mean increased ops cost and higher refund rate. The eng fix is small and it’s in hand.”

Why this works: you’ve connected the clinical gap to money, scale risk, and operational cost. Commercial teams aren’t indifferent to patient safety, but their mental model runs on acquisition, conversion, and retention.

Talking to product

What you might be tempted to say:

“I’ve flagged a clinical risk in the treatment pathway. Can we prioritise a fix?”

What lands better:

“There’s a gap in the pathway that affects about 3% of users - they can reach medication selection without completing screening. I’d suggest we prioritise it this sprint because fixing it actually improves the completion rate for the screening step, which should reduce downstream drop-off. The eng work is scoped and small.”

Why this works: you’ve given the product manager a reason to prioritise it - better conversion. You’ve also signalled that it’s scoped, which means it won’t blow up the sprint. Product managers are constantly prioritising, so make it easy for them to say yes.

The pattern

What’s consistent across all three is that the clinical judgement doesn’t change.

What changes is the frame. You’re choosing the words, metrics, and implications that match how each person thinks about their work.

The mistake I see most often in clinical product is treating “I’ve raised the risk” as the end of the job. It’s not. Your job is to get the right thing built, and that means making it easy for the people around you to act.

This post is a companion to the Translation Series on working across functions in clinical product.

👉 Read the full post here

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