It covers the 5-7 year development journey of a NextGen SPECT/CT scanner at Siemens Healthineers, from concept to clinical trial, sharing insights gained while leading an engineering team through challenges in architecture, culture, and compliance.
In this talk, you’ll get hard-earned leadership lessons from a 7-year NPD journey of a new line of Nuclear Medicine/CT scanners—systems where failure isn’t an option and reliability is non-negotiable. From handling deep tech complexity to empowering engineers to own quality, speed, and motivation in one of the most regulated domains in tech. Drawing on a multi-year product journey in healthcare tech, this talk reveals simple but powerful techniques to lead with intent, foster autonomy, and get world-class results—without hero culture.
Key takeaways
- Fostering a culture of collaboration, open communication, and equal partnership across distributed teams is essential for leveraging global strengths, maintaining engagement, and ensuring product quality through real-time testing.
- Technical leadership in the medical device industry demands a strategic focus on long-term planning, maintainability, regulatory compliance, and resource management, balancing innovation with the significant upfront investment and extended product lifecycles.
- A multi-level testing approach—combining simulators, automated testing, and real-world system validation—along with fostering a culture of collaboration between development and system test, ensures comprehensive defect detection and guarantees software reliability and quality.
- Understanding regulatory guidelines early in the development process and testing critical requirements separately are essential for managing compliance efficiently, preventing delays, and overcoming the unique challenges of new product development in a highly regulated industry.
- While the challenges of long development cycles and unexpected obstacles, like the COVID-19 pandemic during clinical trials, can create uncertainty, the ultimate satisfaction of seeing your work positively impact users’ lives offers invaluable lessons that shape future leadership and decision-making.
