From the Dental Chair to the Roadmap

Diagnosis is the transferable skill

A child in a dental chair cannot give you a clean problem statement. They point vaguely, they're frightened, and what they say hurts often isn't what actually hurts. You learn to treat the reported symptom as a clue rather than a brief, and to examine before you conclude.

Product work is identical. A customer says the app is slow; the real issue is a confusing state that makes them tap twice. A stakeholder asks for a dashboard; what they want is one number, weekly. The instinct to keep asking until the complaint and the cause line up is the single most useful thing my clinical training gave me.

Domain knowledge earns you the right to say no

My first product roles were in healthcare, at Cloudnine, and having practised clinically changed how those conversations went. When a doctor told me a workflow wouldn't survive a real clinic, I could tell whether that was true or whether it was resistance to change, and I could argue back with specifics.

That's the underrated part of coming into product from a domain. Anyone can gather requirements. Knowing which requirements are non-negotiable and which are habit is what stops a roadmap from becoming a wish list.

Moving across industries taught me what actually transfers

Since then I've built in EV at Ola Electric and in telecom at ACT Fibernet. On paper, connected-vehicle UX, a hospital EMR, and a home broadband platform have nothing in common. In practice, they're the same shape: multiple roles, multiple interfaces, data workflows underneath, and a physical thing at the end that either works or doesn't.

What transfers is systems thinking and structured listening. At Ola I turned 900+ customer inputs into a prioritised backlog through a structured VOC pipeline, and led a slow-charging protocol improvement across 70 test scenarios that cut battery discharge by 33%. That's clinical method with a different subject: hypothesis, controlled testing, measurable outcome.

What doesn't transfer is intuition about the user. That has to be rebuilt from scratch every single time, and pretending otherwise is how experienced PMs ship confident, wrong products in a new industry.

Advice for anyone switching in

Don't apologise for the years before. The seven years I've spent in product are stronger because of the years in clinical practice, not in spite of them, and the credential I bring to a healthcare product conversation is not one a PM can pick up from a course.

Lead with the method, not the job title. Everything I do now is still examine, diagnose, treat, follow up. The chair just got replaced by a roadmap.