Commercial Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography Imaging Systems – Who’s Next, What's at Stake, and What’s Taking So Long?

I really admire Eric Swanson, one of the founders of LightLab Imaging and the author and webmaster at www.octnews.org.  I have one bone to pick regarding this article because it is a personal thing about my profession.   

I quote from his article:  

"To take over 6 years to develop a medical device product and spend ~$100M and still not be shipping when a competitor is would make most investors cringe and for engineering and product management to miss a product release date by over 4 years and counting is hard to imagine in most industries."

Now just one minute there.  I was Director of Marketing at LightLab Imaging from 2007 until they were acquired by SJM in mid 2010 , and I was the de facto product manager for the C7-XR FD-OCT platform.  The definition of "product manager" varies by industry.  In US automotive companies, and many large medical device hardware companies, the product manager is in charge of everything to do with the product and the whole team reports to him/her.

Not so, in most of the positions I have held in medical devices.  The product manager can be extremely influential in the right team environment, and quite limited in others.

So, Eric, please reconsider the ability of product management to play a role in a four year project delay.

Just sayin'