Healthcare's Next Digital Challenge Isn't Building Faster. It's Making Better Technology Decisions.

Healthcare has never had more technology available to it than it does today.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating software development, digital health platforms continue to evolve, and healthcare organisations are investing heavily in technology designed to improve patient experience, streamline operations and support clinical teams. But as the pace of innovation increases, a different question is emerging.

Are organisations building the right solutions in the first place?

That is one of the central themes emerging from the 2026 State of Product Development Report, released by Cape Town-based digital product consultancy Specno. While the report examines digital product development across multiple industries, its findings carry important lessons for healthcare organisations navigating increasingly complex digital transformation programmes.

Rather than identifying a software problem, the report points to a decision-making problem. Drawing on insights from a council of group CEOs and senior product operators, observed performance patterns across hundreds of embedded engagements, and field-tested applications inside live product teams across the emerging-market landscape, the report identifies the capabilities separating organisations that successfully convert digital investment into measurable
growth from those that simply continue producing more software.

Collectively, those engagements span organisations responsible for billions of rand in annual economic activity, including regulated financial institutions and pension funds, FMCG and food businesses, logistics operators, venture-backed fintechs scaling across South Africa and the broader African continent, marketplaces and enterprise digital platforms.

Rather than being based on survey responses, the report is built from direct operational exposure. For healthcare leaders, the findings arrive at a time when digital transformation has become less about adopting technology and more about ensuring those investments deliver meaningful operational value. As artificial intelligence rapidly reduces the cost and speed of software development, simply releasing more features or implementing more digital tools is becoming less of
a competitive advantage.

Instead, organisations are increasingly being challenged on the quality of the decisions that sit behind those investments.
One of the report's strongest findings is that leading product teams have quietly shifted from a build culture to a review culture. As AI continues driving the cost of production towards zero, success increasingly depends on deciding what deserves to be built, what should be rejected, how work should be prioritised and where technology will create the greatest value.

AI may accelerate production, but human judgement remains responsible for the decisions that determine whether
those products ultimately succeed. 

"The market has become very good at measuring output," says Joshua Harvey, CEO at Specno.

"What many businesses still struggle to measure is whether the systems underneath that output are mature enough to sustain growth effectively over time. The bar for turning product into revenue has risen sharply in the last 24 months. Capital is harder to raise. Compounding it is harder still. The gap between teams that compound their gains and those that stall continues to widen with each passing quarter."

For healthcare organisations, where technology increasingly supports everything from operational workflows to patient-facing digital services, that distinction has become increasingly important. The challenge is no longer simply delivering more technology. It is ensuring every investment solves the right problem and contributes measurable value.

According to the report, one of the biggest misconceptions in modern product development is that shipping more software creates more growth. The findings suggest the opposite. The highest-performing product teams observed by Specno shipped 30% to 50% less at the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage than their peers, yet consistently outperformed them commercially. They converted engineering effort into revenue at two to three times the industry average, responded to market signals an order of magnitude faster, and treated every product decision as a measurable
commercial bet rather than another feature release.

Their roadmaps were not longer. They were simply more deliberate. 

The report also identifies Product Decisioning as the weakest capability across the market, highlighting how organisations often struggle to make evidence-based decisions despite significant investment in technology. One example involved a premium direct-to-door seafood business generating several million rand in monthly turnover while making daily pricing decisions largely on instinct rather than customer evidence. Another involved a funded startup that scored lowest on
evidence and validation during its own assessment. In both cases, the underlying challenge was not product development itself, but the quality of the decisions shaping it.

To help organisations better understand those capability gaps, the report introduces what Specno calls the Product-to-Revenue Capability Stack, a three-layer framework covering Product Decisioning, Delivery Velocity and Revenue Conversion. It identifies 10 core capabilities that consistently distinguish high-performing product teams from those that struggle to sustain long-term growth, regardless of industry, business model or stage of maturity.

"We developed this report because we realised there was no structured way for businesses to properly evaluate the maturity of their product environments,"; says Harvey. "After working alongside organisations ranging from regulated financial institutions and pension funds to fast-growing fintechs, FMCG businesses and enterprise platforms operating across Africa, the same capability patterns kept emerging. Many tools measure isolated technical outputs, but very few assess whether the wider operational environment supporting a product is actually capable of sustaining long-term growth. Most product teams are operating below the standard the market now demands, and they can feel it without being able to name it."

For healthcare providers, healthtech companies, medical schemes and organisations continuing to digitise services, the report argues that artificial intelligence should not be viewed as the capability itself. Instead, AI acts as an amplifier, making strong operating models stronger while exposing weaknesses in less mature organisations even more quickly.

"The teams that win in 2026 are not the ones doing more. They are the ones building the capabilities that matter, and knowing exactly how strong they are," concludes Harvey.

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