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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Embrace the Tension Between Agility and Regulation:
As a medical device company, Feedback must balance the desire to move quickly and iterate based on customer feedback with the need to prioritize patient safety and risk management. Dr. Oakley highlights the importance of developing a unique skill set that allows for agile development within a regulated environment.
Focus on Customer Obsession, Not Share Price:
While being a public company brings added scrutiny and pressure from shareholders, Dr. Oakley emphasizes the importance of staying focused on delivering value to customers and sitting close to their needs. By prioritizing product quality and user experience, the team can drive long-term growth and trust that the share price will follow.
Turn Constraints into Competitive Advantages:
The rigorous certification process for medical devices can be a barrier to entry, but it also creates opportunities to differentiate from both larger competitors and smaller startups. By leveraging its status as a certified platform for image display and collaboration, Feedback can tackle challenges and integrate systems in ways that others cannot.
Persist Through Complex Sales Cycles:
Selling technology into healthcare, particularly in the NHS, requires a high degree of persistence and discipline. With decision-making often involving multiple stakeholders and lengthy procurement processes, founders must be prepared to engage repeatedly and chase opportunities relentlessly to close deals.
Think Beyond Geographical Boundaries:
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of remote collaboration tools in healthcare, and Feedback seized this opportunity to enable clinicians to treat patients across vast distances. As the company expands internationally, it envisions a future where its platform can serve as a "digital glue" connecting care settings and deploying innovative technologies on a global scale.
Conversation
Highlights
How Feedback PLC Turned Medical Device Constraints Into a Blue Ocean Opportunity
The most interesting pivots often come from seeing opportunity where others see constraints. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Thomas Oakley shared how he transformed a declining 20-year-old medical imaging company into a high-growth clinical collaboration platform by embracing the very regulations that others saw as limitations.
When Thomas took the helm of Feedback PLC in 2019, he inherited a company that had been “over promised and often under delivered” to shareholders. Their legacy medical imaging products were being overtaken by industry giants like GE, Phillips, and Siemens, creating what seemed like an impossible competitive situation.
But rather than try to compete head-on, Thomas saw an opportunity to leverage their medical device certification in an entirely new direction. “The medical device has both a real term advantage for us, but also creates that slight friction because we can’t be as agile as we’d like to because we have to conform to quality standards as we develop the product,” he explains.
This apparent constraint became their competitive moat. While other companies could build chat interfaces or integration tools, none could combine these with certified medical image viewing capabilities. As Thomas notes, “We are certainly in the UK, the only clinical collaboration platform that is certified as medical device for image display.”
This positioning unlocked entirely new markets. They were selected to run “the UK’s first end-to-end care pathway between GPs in primary care hospitals, in secondary care, and these new community diagnostic centers.” Why? Because they were “the only provider that had the capability to stitch the IT infrastructure together in the background and then present it in a collaboration environment.”
Building in a Regulated Environment
The team had to solve a fundamental tension between agile development and medical device requirements. As Thomas explains, “If you are developing software in an agile way, you rapidly create a new version of a product, see what works, see what doesn’t, and then iterate those changes back into your product. You can’t do that in a clinical environment where if you get something wrong or there’s a bug in your software that could have an impact on patients.”
Their solution was developing a unique approach to regulated agile development. Instead of rapid iteration, they “risk assess everything that you’re doing, anticipate risk and try and remove it from the product before you ever put it into the hands of clinicians.” This created a high barrier to entry while still enabling customer-driven development.
The Sales Marathon
The sales cycle reflects the complexity of selling into healthcare environments. Thomas is candid about the persistence required: “It takes anywhere between ten to thirty engagements before you get to the point of contracting. Then you typically go through procurement, and that procurement process can take six to nine months.”
Rather than trying to shortcut this process, they embraced it. The team maintains an “absolute obsession with sitting close to the customer,” using their input to drive product iterations. During COVID, this led them to develop capabilities allowing consultants to treat patients in Manchester while being at home with family in Delhi.
This customer-centric approach extended internationally through strategic partnerships. Working with AWS and an AI company called Cure AI, they adapted their technology to enable TB screening in rural India. By developing capabilities to push imaging over mobile networks – originally created for veterinary use in the UK – they enabled “AI-powered TB screening diagnosis within about 30 seconds of an x-ray being taken anywhere in India where you had 3G connectivity.”
The Results
The transformation has delivered consistent 74% year-over-year growth for three years running, with an 89% increase in sales in their latest period. More importantly, they’ve demonstrated the ability to reduce patient wait times in the NHS by 70% without adding clinical staff.
Looking ahead, Thomas sees their technology becoming “essentially a digital glue that pulls healthcare environments together and through party technologies can be deployed to a national or international healthcare audience.” By embracing rather than fighting regulatory constraints, they’ve created a unique position in healthcare technology – one that larger competitors can’t easily replicate and smaller ones can’t easily enter.
The lesson for founders? Sometimes the most promising go-to-market opportunities come not from avoiding constraints, but from turning them into competitive advantages that others can’t easily replicate.
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