Talent Acquisition November 08, 2022

Nimish Parikh: My Road To Scaling Impact Through Product Development

In the “My Road to Redesign Health” series, our team members reflect on their career journeys and how their unique experiences contribute to innovation at Redesign Health.

This edition features Nimish Parikh, Director of Product Strategy, on the New Ventures team.

I’ve always had deep ties to the healthcare industry: everyone in my family is a doctor! While I was originally destined to follow in their path, I left medical school during my second year (much to my parents’ dismay). However, I’ve never swayed in my passion for making an impact and helping improve lives through the healthcare industry.

I devoted the first half of my career in healthcare to becoming a life sciences product leader, before pivoting mid-career to work in AI and health cloud data. My career experiences – from working as an investment analyst and founding my own companies, to spending over a decade with a large, traditional healthcare company – have prepared me to take on my current role as Redesign Health’s Director of Product Strategy on the New Ventures team.

Helping our Operating Companies develop their product strategies at Redesign Health combines my love of technological innovation and new service models with the deep satisfaction of interacting with the entrepreneurial world.

Growing My Entrepreneurial Mindset Informed My Approach to Scaling Healthcare Start-Ups

My time at med school helped me realize that my real passion was not so much within practicing medicine, but rather introducing innovation into the healthcare industry. After leaving medical school and spending a year as an investment analyst, where I learned about the dynamics of health ventures, I founded a company – a web-based tool for caregivers – that was part of the first wave of internet startups.

This experience gave me a crash course in what it takes to start a business within a field of emerging technology (in an industry as complex and regulated as healthcare, no less). After the business was acquired, I spent a year at a biotech start-up before returning to school for an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

My decision to attend business school pushed me to continue fostering the entrepreneurial mindset that still informs much of the work today producing functional solutions for Operating Companies grown on the Redesign Health platform.

Immersing Myself in the Field Sparked My Love For Product Development

After graduating from MIT, I joined Johnson & Johnson — where, little to my knowledge at the time, I would stay for over 12 years working across product management and product marketing teams.

As a Product Director, my work took on new meaning when I understood my potential for impact. One of the first products I helped launch was an expandable cage that is implanted into the spine. Today, this product is in over 2,000 individuals around the world and has prevented death or disability in many cases. Most software PM’s worry about user acceptance testing, but medical device PM’s can actually have an impact on whether the patient lives or dies.

Many great healthcare product development groups perform what we call ethnography, which entails immersing oneself in the field and observing how doctors work. My time at Johnson & Johnson gave me an opportunity to conduct some ethnography of my own, as I traveled to many countries and engaged with various global healthcare institutions throughout the years.

I moved on to product management at Medtronic and Philips where I worked on remote patient monitoring and applying AI to cancer diagnosis. At Medtronic we had an Israeli R&D team and I grew a deep appreciation for the Israeli innovative mindset, which relies on constant experimentation and thinking fast on your feet. The healthcare industry can be resistant to change, but change is possible—you just have to understand which levers to pull to cause impact.

Turning Concepts Into Meaningful Products at Redesign Health

While at Medtronic, Philips and the startup I founded, I learned about how data and AI intersect in the cloud to transform healthcare. From these experiences, I learned valuable lessons: namely, the importance of having a network of experts who can support you and help solve more than one variable at a time.

And after working in the traditional healthcare space for over a decade, I wanted to transition to the data software side. The Marc Andreessen quote is true: “software is eating the world.” I wanted to learn more about that change.

This created a natural segue to my work at Redesign Health, working within the incredibly innovative business model to leverage the growing amount of data liquidity in healthcare and coordinate care delivery in the cloud with the support of a cross-functional team.

I was drawn to the sheer variety presented by the innovation model, and how Redesign Health is structured to facilitate the success of our Operating Companies. Access to a cross-functional team with deep domain expertise in healthcare, coupled with a company-wide entrepreneurial mindset, accelerates the rate of innovation. It’s been especially fun to work with Redesigners that come from Silicon Valley, who bring a fantastic innovative mindset that pairs really well with the insider knowledge brought by people who come from a healthcare background.

Day-to-day, my team works to turn challenges and concepts from the New Ventures team into actual products. We help Founders and Heads of Product understand which audiences to focus on and which problems to solve when building an Operating Company, and are responsible for the nuts and bolts of bringing a product to fruition. Right now, digital health is inundated with cool new ideas - one dream aspect of my job is that our product strategy team works on over 20 new concepts every year. The sheer variety of the problems we solve is fascinating - the perfect training ground for people that want to become founders or product leaders down the road.

If I had to choose the single best part about my experience at Redesign Health, it’s the team. The extraordinary people stick with you, and sharing ideas in an upbeat environment makes our impact all the more gratifying.

Nimish Parikh Director of Product Strategy

Nimish Parikh is a Director of Product Strategy at Redesign Health where he leads a Product Strategy team that works on all new concepts launched by Redesign Health. He started his career working as an Investment Analyst at Health Business Partners, an early stage venture fund, and later founded and sold a digital health company in the eldercare space. He has held a variety of product and marketing roles at leading health technology companies including JNJ, Medtronic, and Philips (where he served as Head of Product for the Philips digital pathology division). He received his MBA from the MIT/Sloan School of Management.