Shaping Future Product Direction in Robotic Bronchoscopy
Building on foundational work that identified unmet needs and competitive gaps in robotic bronchoscopy, I was responsible for helping the organization define a point of view about where the next generation of the category should go.
I led the engagement from strategy through concept development, guiding a multidisciplinary design team while aligning technical experts and senior stakeholders around a set of future product directions.
The resulting concepts made the opportunities tangible, giving leadership a clearer basis for evaluating where to invest next and engineers a vision of what they could build.
Project Info
Client: A Major Medical Device Manufacturer
Time: 2021, 3 Months
Role: Project Lead, Strategist, Design Team Lead
Project Overview
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We began with the unmet needs, workflow challenges, and strategic opportunities identified through the earlier discovery engagement.
I translated those findings into design challenges and guided designers and marketing stakeholders in considering where new products could create meaningful differentiation.
The objective was not simply to generate ideas, but to ensure future directions remained connected to user needs, clinical workflows, and the competitive gaps we had already identified.
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The client initially asked us to explore near-term improvements to commercially available robotic platforms.
As the work progressed, I pushed the team beyond incremental improvement and helped establish a broader point of view about how robotic bronchoscopy could evolve and where the company could differentiate.
The portfolio ultimately spanned multiple horizons, from nearer-term product opportunities to future-facing directions intended to provoke conversations across the organization’s robotics, lung health, and imaging businesses.
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We engaged technical experts and key opinion leaders to challenge the emerging directions from clinical, technical, and operational perspectives.
I led these discussions to determine where concepts were compelling, where assumptions needed to change, and which directions warranted continued development.
This strengthened the portfolio without losing continuity with the strategic opportunities that had initiated the work.
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We translated the strongest directions into a portfolio of concepts and strategic narratives that made different futures for robotic bronchoscopy tangible.
I framed the portfolio not as a collection of design ideas, but as a set of potential product directions with different implications for users, technology, workflow, and competitive differentiation.
Making those futures tangible gave senior stakeholders a clearer basis for discussing where the category should go next and contributed to leadership approving continued internal investment in development.
Key Takeaways
Building a Point of View on the Future of Robotics
The engagement began with a near-term product-development question but evolved into an opportunity to establish a broader organizational point of view about the future of robotic bronchoscopy.
Exploring multiple time horizons allowed us to address immediate opportunities while also giving leadership a way to consider where the company could create longer-term differentiation.
The resulting portfolio shifted the conversation from individual features toward what the next generation of the category could become.
Designing for the Whole Procedure
The strongest opportunities extended beyond individual features or the physical appearance of the platform.
We considered how technology could better support operator focus, communication, teamwork, workflow efficiency, and coordination across the entire procedure.
This systems-level perspective oriented future product direction around how clinicians and care teams wanted to work rather than requiring them to adapt around the technology.
Challenges
Making Complexity Actionable
The design team needed enough understanding of a highly complex clinical procedure to make informed decisions without becoming clinical experts themselves.
I translated the underlying evidence into workflows, design principles, and a physical model of the pulmonology suite that allowed the team to reason about emerging ideas in context.
This preserved the strategic intent of the work while giving designers enough clarity to explore new possibilities.
Leading a Distributed Design Team
Much of the development occurred with me working remotely from the design team.
I used regular critiques, collaborative tools, and clear strategic narratives to keep the team aligned around the opportunity areas and maintain continuity from discovery through emerging product direction.
This allowed me to guide the team at a distance while keeping the work connected to the larger strategic question.