So What Is Clinical Product, Really?

Clinical product is embedded. It's blocking by default. It's accountable for clinical integrity.

But those are characteristics. They don't quite capture what the role is.

A working definition

Clinical product does five things:

1. Setting clinical direction

Clinical product doesn't wait for requirements to arrive. It actively scans emerging evidence, market shifts, and changes in clinical practice to shape what should exist next.

This includes identifying when new treatments or care models are clinically viable and when they're premature, unsafe, or operationally unrealistic.

2. Embedding clinical judgment throughout the software development lifecycle

Clinical product is involved across:

• Discovery and planning – grounding ideas in real clinical practice, evidence, and patient care realities
• System and experience design – shaping requirements so what's being built is clinically coherent, not just technically correct
• Implementation – preventing "small" implementation details from creating unacceptable clinical behaviour
• Testing and acceptance – validating that things behave safely in real-world clinical use
• Deployment and monitoring – owning what happens after launch, including incident response and emerging risks

This is where the role differs most clearly from advisory, QA, or compliance functions: clinical product carries accountability across the whole arc.

3. Designing for the full clinical ecosystem

Clinical product optimises for outcomes, not isolated users.

Patient safety and effectiveness depend on the combined behaviour of patients, clinicians, health coaches, operations, customer support, and systems.

A feature that "works" for patients but creates unsafe escalation paths, unmanageable clinician load, or regulatory exposure is not ready to ship.

4. Exercising clinical risk ownership

Clinical product leads clinical risk thinking in day-to-day product work:

• Identifying and articulating risks early
• Maintaining and evolving hazard logs and risk registers
• Providing clear, defensible clinical rationale for decisions
• Supporting incident investigation and learning
• Working with governance roles without outsourcing accountability

5. Acting as the point of clinical accountability in partnerships and scale

As products integrate with external partners or scale across teams, clinical risk diffuses.

Clinical product owns due diligence and integration decisions from a clinical perspective, ensuring that external dependencies don't dilute safety or accountability.

One role, different shapes

Clinical product isn't monolithic. The core accountability stays the same, but the emphasis shifts:

• Safety-heavy contexts – where regulatory risk and patient safety dominate
• Operations-heavy contexts – where clinical workflows and service design are central
• Early-stage – where the clinical model itself is still being defined
• Scaling – where consistency across teams becomes the challenge
• Highly regulated vs. lightly regulated – where the burden of evidence varies significantly

Strong clinical product adapts to these contexts without outsourcing the core accountability.

What clinical product is not

A few clarifications, because the role is often confused with adjacent functions:

Clinical product is not clinical subject-matter expert (SME) work.

SMEs provide knowledge; clinical product provides judgment, including the judgment to say no. Confusion comes when SMEs provide product teams with their direct viewpoint. Teams don't know which clinician to listen to. Specialist input should inform the Clinical Product Manager, who remains accountable for how that input is applied.

Clinical product is not regulatory or compliance.

Compliance ensures processes are followed. Clinical product makes clinical decisions. There's overlap, but the accountability is different.

Clinical product is not QA.

QA tests whether the product works as intended. Clinical product determines whether what's intended is clinically sound. The Clinical Product Manager does often have a role in acceptance testing, but that's to ensure the product behaves safely in clinical use, not to validate that it meets functional specifications.

Clinical product is not medical affairs.

Medical affairs manages external clinical relationships. Clinical product operates inside the product team. In some organisations, particularly early stage ones, the same person may cover both areas.

Why this definition matters

Clinical product is still emerging as a discipline. There's no standard job description, no universal competency framework, no agreed curriculum.

That ambiguity creates problems. Organisations hire clinical product people without knowing what they're hiring for. People take clinical product roles without knowing what they're signing up for. Expectations misalign and accountability falls through the cracks.

A clear definition helps. Not because definitions are sacred, but because they make it possible to have honest conversations about what the role requires – and whether it's being set up to succeed.

This post is part of a series on what clinical product actually is. Subscribe to be notified of new posts.