By Kariena Greiten, fractional Chief Product Officer, Janus Healthcare Partners
Many healthcare organizations still treat Product as a function that executes strategy rather than shapes it. This is a costly mistake. I have spent more than two decades growing businesses through their product strategy and I have seen firsthand how often other businesses have failed to align their product strategy with their business strategy. This misalignment leads to expensive mistakes that sometimes steer the business in an unintended, less desirable direction. Product decisions will define your economics, impact your ability to scale, create or mitigate regulatory exposure and determine whether your strategy is even achievable. When Product sits outside of core business decision-making, organizations believe they are executing strategy while, in fact, Product may be quietly redefining it.
Product Decisions are Business Decisions
Consider what product choices control:
- Your cost structure. Decisions about automation versus manual workflows, the extent of clinical depth contained in the product, and the ease of configuration changes aren’t just technical choices. They are multi-year margin decisions. These decisions become embedded in the P&L and can be difficult and expensive to unwind. It is important to ensure you are aware of these decisions (which are often made as part of an iterative process over time) and how they impact the cost of delivery.
- Your revenue ceiling. Product architecture determines your pricing models, packaging options, and even customer buying decisions. If your strategy depends on selling a premium product but your product design steers customers toward less expensive offerings, you have capped (or at least inhibited) your growth. Here, the design can dictate your economics. Therefore, always ensure you have discipline in the available product features and how they are bundled so that product features support your business strategy.
- Your adoption rates. Business plans often assume certain uptake and retention levels. However, a product may fail to deliver the planned levels of adoption because it ignores existing clinical workflows, lacks sufficient transparency, or forces users to compensate for design gaps. Your business strategy may anticipate a certain level of adoption, but the product will determine actual adoption. Consider all stakeholders and create a frictionless experience that supports your adoption and retention expectations.
- Your regulatory risk. Choices impacting data capture, access controls and ease of auditing create compliance exposure that may surface years later, requiring costly remediation. Decisions that were individually defensible (perhaps to accelerate speed to market) can accumulate into enterprise liability when made without business accountability. Bring compliance experts in early and often to avoid these challenges later.
- Your strategic flexibility. Product decisions determine how swiftly you can launch new offerings, enter adjacent markets, or adapt to evolving payment models. If you don’t build in a level of flexibility, you risk your strategy being constrained by products that can’t keep pace with market dynamics. While you can’t build for every scenario, you can consider probable market expansion in your approach to product design.
Ensuring Product Strategy Enables the Business Strategy
Misalignments typically arise when Product teams are responsible for design and creation, business leaders are accountable for results, and there is no mechanism to ensure they are aligned over time. Often, by the time the fragmentation is discovered, a product portfolio hasn’t just failed to achieve the strategy; it has redefined the strategy.
Healthcare organizations must govern product decisions with the same rigor as clinical, operational, and financial decisions. That means treating Product like a core strategic element of the business, with tradeoffs around margin, growth, risk, and flexibility explicitly debated and decided at the enterprise level. When product decisions are tightly aligned with enterprise strategy, you control the tradeoffs. When these decisions are not tightly aligned with the business strategy, you cede control and are making important business decisions without even realizing it.
Complexity isn’t a reason to keep Product downstream from strategic decisions. Rather, it is the reason why product strategy must be central to the business strategy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kariena Greiten is a healthcare executive with over 20 years of experience building and scaling businesses through product strategy. Kariena has served as CEO, CPO and other executive roles at Janus Healthcare Partners, HealthHelp, Magellan Health, and other organizations navigating growth, innovation and transformation. Her background spans payer and provider markets, behavioral and physical health, and both digital and traditional care delivery models, with a focus on responsible scaling in complex, regulated environments.
