Development teams who don’t have active conversations with field sales can risk missing critical input that can make or break a product launch.
Product managers in charge of developing new medical devices get feedback from the sales team, from the service technicians, and from customer service on a regular basis. Many times, this input gets written off as noise in the system. Overly specific input applicable to one account. Or “sales just trying to drive down price.”
What gets lost is the wisdom that comes from DAILY contact with end users.
The sales team is in the clinics and ASC’s meeting with nurses, doctors and administrators constantly. They hear about their struggles, complaints, wishes, hopes and dreams. They are also on the receiving end of some very real and pointed input about the quality of the solutions manufacturers are delivering.
Field teams have deep relationships built on trust and shared trauma of having to live within a very complex medical care delivery environment. I would be very surprised if top sales reps don’t have the personal cell numbers of the clinicians responsible for implementation on the floor. This relationship is gold.
At Engenious Design, we are often on the receiving end of briefs that require us to actively seek out input from all stakeholders in the process, including sales and service. Our team in Product Strategy synthesizes those insights into meaningful design inputs that drive winning products.
“Being a big Walt Whitman fan, I've always loved the quote "Be curious, not judgmental". Most good medical salespeople who have been doing this a long time and have great established relationships are curious, and we use that curiosity to be problem solvers for our customers, not salespeople. Many times, I have set up a call to discuss a certain product, but after seeing staff struggle with a task, I end up presenting a completely different solution.”
- John Deuser, Owner, Volker Medical Sales
When I was about 8 and a budding designer and entrepreneur, I decided to generate some cash by selling sketches of wildlife on the sidewalk to our local townsfolk. I generated an impressive amount of work and then set up shop on a hot Saturday in June. I had immediate traffic.
The first guy pulled up and said; “Are you selling lemonade?” To which I proudly responded, “No, bird pictures!”
He looked at me quizzically and drove off. After three more such encounters, I made a crucial pivot to the business plan. I whipped up a pitcher of lemonade (Wyler’s powder from a can) and got back to the sidewalk. I sold out in an hour and had $2.50 in my pocket.
Selling art to a beverage audience is not a winning formula. Had I listened to what the street was telling me by looking at the other lemonade vendors killing it, I may have gotten to the answer sooner. Maybe this won’t make it to the Harvard Business Review, but it is a great case study in knowing the audience and paying attention to the market.
It is easy for product managers and strategy leads like myself to lose sight of what is happening at the ground level. We are surrounded with device requirements, user needs, workflow studies, FDA documentation and endless rounds of business case reviews.
What we tend to overlook is the simple fact that there is a human on the other end of our meticulously researched, engineered and marketed device that is responsible for implementation. That may be a floor nurse implementing a new workflow, an administrator figuring out how to train staff, or a procurement director trying to figure out where a new consumable product gets stored.
The simple truth is that teams who have not thought these details through will have a tough time pushing for adoption. Just because the purchaser is on board does not mean that the staff will buy off on the solution. And if they dig in, good luck.
At that point, as my dad has been known to say; “You are trying to push a rope.”
“In my 27 years in medical sales, I’ve seen many launches solve problems that didn’t exist. Two years in, the company I worked for released a flushing device for Swan-Ganz and A-line catheters. Engineering found that the catheter maker’s instructions for use warned against exceeding a pressure that was easy to hit with a syringe. The new device couldn’t exceed it, so engineering called it safer and an easy sell. But ask any critical care nurse how often they’ve ruptured a catheter while flushing, and the answer is always “Never.” Management could have avoided the whole thing by asking the sales force to poll customers.”
- John Deuser, Owner, Volker Medical Sales
When it is crunch time during NPI, it’s tempting to punt implementation challenges over the wall to marketing and sales. These are not “Product Roadmap” inputs that can be designed around. A device acquisition at a major health system can involve 10-15 stakeholders involved in implementing a new product in a large hospital organization.[1] One University of Toledo value analysis committee list more than 20 departments and 11 of them with voting rights.[2]
Just for starters, there is administration, safety, compliance, IT, finance and supply chain. Each one of these is a potential roadblock. This does not necessarily mean that you need to design for each one. But successful teams know which ones are potential deal killers.
For these teams, reducing the friction in implementation is a superpower when it comes to displacing the competition. Sometimes it is the behind the scenes work that makes a huge difference in adoption.
I once worked on a product that tracked patient location within certain areas of an acute cardiac facility. The product delivered true value to the clinician, the patient and administration. We were making a real difference. Armed with executive support, I went to “check the box” with the IT/systems team, I was met with a blank look and; “There is no way that hardware is going on my network.” That resulted in many more rounds of iteration to satisfy the cybersecurity requirements before we could even think about a test.
Voice of the Customer (VOC) research is a vital part of the development process. It gives us a chance to dive deep into contextual study and understand user needs and workflows in detail. The downside is the process.
VOC studies can be cumbersome, costly and time consuming. So, they tend only to happen when there is a milestone to meet in the project. By definition, they are structured and staged. The feedback also tends to be clinical in nature and less candid.
On the other hand, field teams get the raw, unfiltered feelings and opinions from their customers. Good, bad, and sometimes, ugly. They hear about:
This feedback ladders up directly to the user’s needs and requirements product teams are working on today. A VOC team will not be hanging out in the break room to hear the lowdown on a competitor’s product launch, but the field team will.
There are a lot of reasons that field sales’ input gets overlooked. High on the list is that “sales input is biased” or “sales is just speaking for their account only.”
With 71,000 medical device service techs alone in the field[3], the data is there; successful teams know how to tap into it.
The lack of field input may not be immediately obvious. Unfortunately, it does not show up until much further in the process. When the sales team is presenting to clients or worse yet, during the launch phase of a new program.
There are lots of ways to get out in the field and gather feedback without the risk of the process being driven by sales. These practical steps are less a study and more a continual practice that compounds value over time.
Successful teams get out there and get their hands dirty. For them, field reps are an ally and the key to unlocking product value that no one else can match.
I’m part of Engenious Design, a medical device design and development firm that works on some of the industry’s most advanced technologies while carefully curating user experience along the way. We help R&D leaders create new medical devices, quickly. Our team of 100 designers, engineers, and builders can plan, architect, design, engineer, prototype, verify, validate, and transfer products to production, all under one roof.
1. Provyx. “How Medical Device Reps Find the Right Decision Makers.” March 2026. getprovyx.com/blog/medical-device-find-decision-makers
2. University of Toledo Supply Chain Management. “Surgical & Procedural Services CVA” (committee charter; last updated 2/19/26). utoledo.edu/depts/supplychain/vac/surgicalcva.html
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections, 2025–35 National Employment Matrix, Medical equipment repairers (SOC 49-9062).”
4. FDA, 21 CFR 803.50 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-H/part-803/subpart-E/section-803.50
5. Christensen, C. M., Cook, S., & Hall, T. (2005, December). Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure. Harvard Business Review. hbr.org/2005/12/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure
6. (GreenLight Medical), “Quick Guide to Understanding the Hospital Value Analysis Committee” https://www.symplr.com/blog/understanding-hospital-value-analysis-committee
