Transitioning from Clinician to Product Manager: A Guide to Navigating Your Career Shift

As clinicians looking to make a career shift, transitioning to a product manager role offers a unique opportunity to leverage your skills in a new and impactful way.  In recent years the tech industry has seen a jump in non-technical PMs leveraging their expertise in other industries to guide tech teams toward more impactful features (there has been a slight shift back to more technical PMs, but don’t worry, more on that below).

So here’s what we’re diving into today:

• What Product Management is: So you can ask yourself - do I really want to do this?

• How your skills might transfer: And new skills you’ll need to expand on.

• Steps to Transition:  So you can actually get the role you want. 

1. Understanding the Role of a Product Manager

What is a product manager?   Product management can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different companies.  In general, if you’re talking about technology product management a product manager will be responsible for the following:

• Product development - You’ll be given a specific area of a business and told to make it better. Your product development will almost always roll up to a specific key business metric to move.  Your job is to improve the product in a way that improves that business metric (or metrics).  

• Market research - To move a business metric you need to understand what’s affecting it, which ultimately becomes your “problem to solve”.  To really get into that level of detail you’re going to need to do market research, both across competitors and talking to individual people who are ideal users for your product to get a sense of what the pain points are and how other companies look to solve those.  

• Stakeholder management - This is the element of leadership that will require you to lead at all levels.  

  • Lead up: Keep senior leadership (all the way up to the CEO) informed on the progress of the project and any roadblocks you’re experiencing. 

  • Lead across:  Identify key stakeholders across your organization from other departments and keep them informed and aligned on what you’re building, as well as how this impacts them.  Understand those stakeholders' needs and anything that might get in the way.  

  • Lead around: You’ll be working with other team members on this project, specifically designers and engineers.  You need to have an ability to discuss what you're building in a way that they understand.  You will also need to be able to work strategically with them as you run into roadblocks around the way.   

• Skills Required:  Strategic thinking, leadership, communication, and technical understanding. 

2. Your Transferable Skills from Clinical Practice

Believe it or not, you have a lot of skills that many product managers would love to have!!  Your superpowers will look different than other PM’s superpowers, so knowing where your strengths lie is incredibly important.  Here are some examples of skills that you’ve already honed.

• Analytical Thinking: As a clinician you are adept at diagnosing problems and developing treatment plans, which translates well into problem-solving and decision-making in product management.  That type of diagnostic thinking is really helpful as a general framework to start with.  

• Communication: Believe it or not, your daily interactions with patients and healthcare teams have honed your communication skills unlike many other professionals.  That’s a crucial element and skill for both interviewing users and collaborating with cross-functional teams.

• Empathy and User-Centric Approach: Empathy is a superpower in product development and clinicians have that in spades.  Your focus on patient care fosters a user-centric mindset, and that's essential for understanding and addressing customer needs.

3. Know the Gaps You Need to Fill

Ok, so while you have a lot of skills related to product management, you’ve got to come into this transition knowing where you need to build up your weaknesses.  As clinicians you get a lot of opportunities to work directly with people, but often don’t have a ton of chances to build up and round out other skills.  Here are a few skills you’re going to need to have.

• Business Acumen: Do you have at least a basic understanding of business principles, market dynamics, and financial literacy? 

• Technical Skills: Depending on the product, you're going to need to show that you can understand how the “sausage is made” so to speak.  That being, how does the specific implementation of the product work?  How does it get from say, your company to someone's phone?  How are things stored?  How will you get the data?  Also, engineers have a very specific way of communicating, and you’re going to need to be able to communicate as clearly and specifically with them as possible for the best outcome.  

• Project Management: What’s your experience with methodologies like Agile, Scrum, or Lean?  Can you speak to these types of project management styles? 

My take is that to get a Product Management job, at least one of these needs to come off to an interviewer as good (IE above average), while the other two will need to come off as passable as long as you’ve shown a strong willingness to learn!

In today's environment, companies have shown a strong emphasis on Technical skills.  This has been a pretty abrupt shift over the past 12 months vs. what was going on in 2022 and 2023.  With that I’d suggest learning or being able to speak to experiences where you can discuss your technical chops!  Here are some ways to do that:

1. Take a Product management course - this will show you all phases of product management, but also get into the technical portion called “delivery”

2. Take a computer science course - You don’t have to know how to code well, it’s not needed for the job.  But you have to be able to think like an engineer, and that takes an understanding of the fundamentals of computer science.  There are great free courses like Harvard's CS50 that allow you to get all the information you need.  

3. Get experience using the tools that PMs and Engineers use!  Tools like Jira, Mixpanel, or Mode are all great examples of tools that PMs use everyday to synthesize information and communicate with their teams.  Create or take on a side project that will help you use those tools if you have zero experience with them. 

Finally, plain old networking is a great way to get you into some of the introductory rounds of product management interviews.  The biggest challenge with getting a PM role is actually getting to the recruiter screen.  Product Manager recruiters get 1000’s of applications for a single role, so having channels that allow your resume to get looked at and pique the interest of the recruiter is incredibly valuable.  

4. How can you Leverage Your Clinical Expertise in Product Management

There are a few different ways you can utilize your clinical chops to be a world class product manager.  Here are a few ideas for ways you're clinical expertise will work for you:

• Health-Tech Products: I mean… this should be pretty self explanatory.  Most Health Tech companies need and crave people with real world healthcare experience.  Being a PM at these companies gives you a huge advantage over someone who comes from the Microsofts or Googles of the world.  

• Healthcare Customer Insights: Again, you have real world experience of what it’s really like to treat a patient.  That’s incredibly valuable, and one where it allows you to be able to wade through areas where a patient being interviewed will be telling you something you want to hear (most PMs get stuck on this) and where your clinical knowledge knows that what most people say and what their behavior actually is doesn’t line up.  That kind of insight is incredibly critical in creating the best products.  

• Regulatory Knowledge: Experience with healthcare regulations and compliance can be a significant asset.  Especially in the Healthcare/Health Tech space.  
  

Hope this all was informative, and gets you a good idea of what Product Management actually is, and how your skills might line up!