Clinical Product Is an Embedded Role, Not a Consulting Function
Why clinical expertise needs to sit inside the product team, not arrive as a review layer at the end.
👋🏻 Hey there! This is the fourth post in the Foundation Series, exploring what clinical product actually is.
The fourth post in the Foundation Series is live.
This one tackles something I see go wrong a lot: treating clinical product as a consulting function. Someone parachutes in, reviews something, gives an opinion, and leaves. It feels like clinical input is covered. In practice, it creates late-stage blockers, diffuse accountability, and clinical review that becomes a tick-box exercise.
I make the case for embedded clinical product - being part of the team from discovery, not just reviewing at the end - and get into why clinical judgment can’t work the same way as regulatory or legal review. There’s no checklist that tells you whether a user flow makes clinical sense. That kind of thinking needs to be in the room when decisions are being made.
I also cover the practical challenge honestly: embedding takes time, it requires organisations to actually structure the role that way, and one clinical product manager spread across six teams isn’t embedded in any of them.
If you’re building clinical product capability or trying to figure out why it isn’t working the way you expected, this one’s worth a read.