Someone Has to Speak for the Patient

One of the biggest shifts in my thinking as a product manager didn't come from a conference, a book, or a new framework.

Then everything became personal.

Before my breast cancer diagnosis, I spent years building products across a variety of different organizations and with different types of users. Like many product managers, I focused on understanding business goals, gathering requirements, balancing stakeholder priorities, and delivering solutions that solved meaningful problems. I cared deeply about users, but my understanding of the user experience was still largely secondhand.

Once I became a patient, I found myself becoming the user.

Suddenly I wasn't evaluating healthcare products as a product manager. I was relying on them to support my health journey and help me take action.

And I realized something that has fundamentally changed how I think about product leadership.

Every product team needs someone intentionally representing the end user - and in the case of healthcare tech, the patient needs to have a voice at the table.

The Patient Isn't Always in the Room

Product decisions happen every day, and they often center around making decisions that make sense for the business or operational challenges to be solved.

These types of questions are common: 

• Should we simplify this workflow?

• Can we remove this step?

• Should we prioritize this feature over another?

• Do we really need to explain this information?

These conversations are filled with smart people who bring deep expertise in their area.

Engineers think about technical feasibility.

Designers think about usability.

Clinical experts think about safety and accuracy.

Operational leaders think about sustainability and scale.

Business leaders think about strategy, compliance, and growth.

Every perspective matters because it impacts all of these areas.

But I've noticed that often one perspective can quietly disappear amongst discussion about cost and tradeoffs -the patient's.

Not because anyone doesn't care. Quite the opposite.

People building healthcare products genuinely want to improve patient outcomes.

The challenge is that organizational priorities naturally dominate the conversation. Regulatory requirements, implementation timelines, operational constraints, business metrics, and technical debt all demand attention. It becomes very easy for the lived experience of the patient to become abstract or nebulous.

When that happens, products can become optimized for the system instead of the person using it. Sometimes leading to the unintended consequence of actually making the patient's life harder.

Healthcare Is Already Hard

Patients don't interact with one product. They interact with an entire ecosystem.

Appointment reminders. Insurance portals. Lab results. Medication instructions. Provider messaging. Educational materials. Scheduling systems. Bills, Bills, and more Bills.

Each experience may seem small in isolation. Together, they create the healthcare journey that a patient has to navigate at one of the most difficult periods of time.

As product managers, we often evaluate these interactions on a per-screen or per-workflow basis. Looking at each interaction in isolation makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees.

Patients experience them as one continuous story.

Every confusing screen adds uncertainty. Every unnecessary form adds friction. Every unclear message increases anxiety.

For patients, these costs are very real and significantly affect their daily lives. Unfortunately for product managers, these costs are hard to quantify and not easily measured in a dashboard.

Representation Is More Than Empathy

Empathy is an essential skill for product managers. But I think representation goes a step further.

True representation means someone consistently asks questions like:

• How will a patient interpret this information?

• What assumptions are we making about their knowledge?

• What happens when they're tired, overwhelmed, or scared?

• Does this workflow reduce cognitive burden or increase it?

• Are we helping people make confident decisions, or simply giving them more information?

Those questions don't replace business goals. They improve them by clarifying and sharpening the focus. There is a direct correlation between business outcomes and product success. 

Products that reduce confusion often reduce support costs.

Products that build trust improve engagement.

Products that help people understand what comes next create better experiences for everyone involved.

Patient advocacy and business value are not opposing forces. In many cases, they're deeply aligned.

My Perspective Changed

Cancer taught me something I hadn't fully appreciated before.

Managing a serious illness is a job - unfortunately, one you don't get paid for. 

There are appointments to coordinate.

Questions to remember for at least one or two of your doctors.

Medications to track.

Insurance documents to review and understand.

Results to interpret or ask more questions about.

Family members to update.

Forms to complete.

Decisions to make.

Every one of those tasks requires mental energy. Every interaction asks patients to spend some of their limited physical, emotional, or mental energy. I think of that energy as "health points", similar to the health meter in a video game. Every interaction either consumes that limited resource or helps preserve it.

Some products spend those health points unnecessarily due to being overly complex, unclear communication, and other friction points.

Others give some of them back. I want to build the second kind.

What This Means for Product Teams

I don't think every healthcare product manager needs to be a patient. Lived experience is valuable, but it isn't the only way to understand the people we're building for.

Great product teams can represent patients by intentionally bringing their voices into the product development process, and that means investing extra time and energy into discovery.

This also means:

• Listening before designing.

• Observing people walking through workflows instead of making assumptions about how they move through the application.

• Testing ideas early with real users & gathering feedback often.

• Measuring patient understanding—not just adoption-through both qualitative and quantitative measures.

Perhaps most importantly, product leadership must insist on creating space in every product conversation for someone to ask:

"What does this feel like from the patient's perspective?"

Sometimes that person will be a researcher. Sometimes a designer. Sometimes a clinician. Sometimes a caregiver. Sometimes the product manager. I've even had someone from our legal team raise this question during an initiative. Good ideas about the patient can come from anywhere.

Regardless of who speaks up, what matters is that someone consistently represents that perspective when decisions are being made - because ultimately, that's who we're building for.

The Products I Want to Build

As my career has evolved—from enterprise communication platforms to consumer-facing patient experiences—I've started to realize that a centralized idea keeps cropping up.

I'm interested in products that reduce complexity, increase understanding, and drive action with confidence.

I am particularly interested in the healthcare space because it's an ecosystem that impacts so many people from a variety of backgrounds. But for all their differences, there are common threads and experiences with complex problems that need to be solved.

The goal of healthcare technology is not simply to digitize existing processes - although that's definitely an important and worthwhile goal. 

I believe it's to make those processes more human, and with the explosion of AI, I believe that we're getting closer to that goal.

If we want to build better healthcare products, someone has to keep asking how every decision affects the person on the other side of the screen.

I hope that person is always in the room.

And if I'm in the room, I hope it's me.