Where Clinical Meets Product
Honest writing on building and leading Clinical Product in digital health.
The role no one trained me for
I’m a Clinical Director in digital health. My journey into clinical product wasn’t planned - it started with curiosity during an early clinical role in a private health tech organisation, where I kept being drawn to the decisions that sat between patient safety and product delivery.
Over time, that curiosity became a career. I’ve spent years building clinical product leadership from the ground up - shaping teams that can develop clinical products where healthcare, technology, and delivery all collide. I’ve embedded clinical product as a function within a broader product organisation, making sure clinical expertise isn’t an afterthought but sits at the centre of decision-making. The kind of decision-making that’s continuous, time-critical, and rarely straightforward.
Along the way, I kept running into the same problems. Clinical product is poorly defined and even more poorly understood. There’s no guide for when or how to implement it within an organisation. And when teams do hire for it, they expect senior-level judgement without providing senior-level support - while almost nothing exists externally to bridge that gap.
That’s why I started writing. To clarify what clinical product work actually involves, how it looks different across contexts, and what good practice means when you’re living it day to day.
A discipline outpacing its own support
Clinical product roles are growing fast across digital health, which is a good thing. But the supply of people who can do this work well hasn’t kept pace. So organisations hire smart clinicians into product roles and expect them to figure it out - own the clinical risk, make the hard calls, advise on regulatory grey areas - often as the sole clinical voice in the room.
In clinical practice, you’d never carry that level of responsibility without years of structured support first. In clinical product, those layers mostly don’t exist yet. No curriculum. No competency framework. No training that prepares you for making clinical judgements where speed, scope, and commercial viability are always part of the conversation.
The debates no one hears
The part that surprised me most wasn’t the clinical complexity. It was the constant internal calibration - the clinician in me, the product thinker, and the person who understood the business needed to survive for any of this to matter.
Should I block this release? Is this risk tolerable or am I being cautious? How do I explain what I’m worried about in terms an engineer can act on? When do I say “I don’t know” without losing trust?
These aren’t questions with clean answers. They’re judgement calls, made under pressure, with incomplete information, dozens of times a week - often with no one to debrief with afterwards.
Why this exists
I kept seeing the same challenges amongst the emerging Clinical Product Manager role in health tech. Organisations trying to figure out where clinical ownership sits and leaders who wanted to build the product but didn’t know what “good” looked like in a clinical setting.
That gap is what this site is about. I write from my experience as a Clinical Director in digital health, where I’ve built Clinical Product as a function within a broader product organisation.
This is an honest account of what clinical product work actually involves - the decisions, the tensions, and the things nobody warns you about. If you’re working in this space, building a team, or trying to understand where clinical thinking fits in your organisation, this is for you.
I write in two places.
Longer, in-depth articles live on my site —> https://www.clinicalproduct.uk
Shorter posts, weekly takes, and updates on new articles live here on Substack.
Subscribe to whichever suits how you like to read - or both.
Ways to connect:
✉️ Email: hello@clinicalproduct.uk
💼 LinkedIn: Connect here