Medical Design and Outsourcing
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Sovato CEO Brian Miller [Photo by Cole Kistler for Medical Design & Outsourcing]
After studying electrical and computer engineering in his undergrad years at Iowa State University and then earning advanced degrees in robotics from Northwestern University, he joined Computer Motion in 2000 as a software engineer. A few years later the startup was purchased by Intuitive, kicking off his 23-year career with the device developer as it became the world’s leading surgical robotics company and he rose to the positions of chief digital officer and head of AI and strategy.
That chapter ended in April 2026 when he left Intuitive to lead telesurgery software startup Sovato as it plans to scale robotic telesurgery and take it worldwide.
Read more from Miller and other robotics experts in the July 2026 issue of MDO magazine: Robotic stroke telesurgery’s time is now
In the latest part of our interview with Miller, we discussed his entry into the medical device industry, how he built his career, what it was like at Intuitive as the device developer grew, and advice for software engineers and medtech pros to build their careers.
The following has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
Miller: “I was fortunate as an undergrad to get into research in the area of human-machine interface, so humans interacting with robots for a range of things like virtual prototyping, virtual models. I was always intrigued about developing systems that could collaborate with humans. I was lucky to meet the co-founder of Sovato and the founder of Computer Motion in the early days at a conference, and that was the first time I realized there were actually surgical applications that were being done. When I was in school, I really didn’t have a direction toward med device, but once I got in it, I very quickly determined I would never leave it.”
Miller: “I was lucky to grow in the industry, and I say that because in the early days, like most startups and most new categories of technology, you do everything. You don’t just have a narrow focus. I got experience where my background was — in product design and developing robotics — but I also got a lot of learning and the regulatory elements of it, the quality and the safety of how we develop these types of things. I was fortunate to get a well-rounded view of the business. And then throughout my career, at Intuitive I led the robotic systems and vision, which included not just design, but new product introduction, and then even ran manufacturing for a couple of years. It was really through that broad set of experiences that I go to positions where I could lead teams and lead efforts and and then ultimately, it landed me here at Sovato.”
Miller: “Be ready for it to feel like multiple companies within the same company. Through the various phases early on, you need people that will just roll up their sleeves. Doesn’t matter what their title is, they will do whatever is needed. Then as we went into the fast acceleration, there was a different dynamic. You got a lot more disciplined, things were a lot more rigorous. You were starting now to have people that needed to focus in specialty areas because of the scale. Then we got to the phase where it’s at now, where it is a critical part of doing surgery. It’s in the fabric of surgery, and therefore if we didn’t do our job, hospitals wouldn’t do procedures. You have these multiple phases, and when you look at the talent that you need and how you operate the company, they’re going to be different things that you’re going to need to focus on in those different phases.”
The 2026 MDO Medtech Startups Special Report: Technical tips and actionable advice for device startups
Miller: “You need to deeply understand the application. That means spending time in the environment, talking with people. People talk a lot about, ‘Did we get the specs right?’ When you’re developing technology for medical device applications — procedures, interventions, whatever it is — the spec is understanding what they’re trying to accomplish and then building the device so it can enable it. It sounds obvious, but I see people building tech for the sake of tech, and just thinking, ‘I understand the spec.’ And then you get in the operating room or you get into the hospital, and it’s nowhere near. I’ve had that happen in my career. I’m not perfect, but I learned quickly that how you define the spec is by deeply understanding it. Companies have people that are more clinically focused and engineers that are more technically focused, and everybody can’t be everything. But I have all my engineers spend time in the environment in which we’re developing our products and deploying our products, because they need an appreciation, they need that moment of, ‘Well, if I go and design it and they have to push four buttons, that doesn’t sound like a big deal,’ and then get in the operating room and realize how many things are going on and they need to push one button so they can do what they need to do, because they’ve got to focus on the patient. People make better decisions in design when they understand the application and the environment where it’s being deployed.”
Read more about Intuitive and other innovative medical robotics developers in the 2026 Mass Device Surgical Robotics Special Report.
Miller: “Back to understanding the application, I always send engineers into the environment, and the reason I do is when they’re sitting back at their desk coding for hours and hours, there are a bunch of decisions that they’re making — and sometimes they don’t even know they’re making — with regards to how they’re coding things and the design. But I found that if you set that context, where they’re sitting there and in the back of their mind they remember watching that procedure and all these things that were happening, maybe they’ll think twice about how they implement a UI or how they do a particular workflow implementation.
“When you’re in medical device, there’s a different category of how you view bugs and how you view things that don’t work quite right. Clearly in software development, there’s a push to try to minimize the amount of things that don’t work the way they should, but in med device you are tied very closely to a risk analysis of the things we don’t want to happen. Because not only will it not work right, there’s a chance that it will cause patient harm and things like that. There is a different mindset, which I actually find fascinating, for software engineers in being very diligent about understanding what their design is doing. A lot of software are mitigations for things that you’re trying to avoid, but you have to have that particular mindset as you’re going through it.”
We’ve got more from this interview about product development, AI and what Miller learned at Intuitive, and we’ll have more soon, so subscribe to our free newsletter to watch for the next part.
Jim Hammerand is the managing editor of Medical Design & Outsourcing, where he leads coverage of medtech innovation, design, engineering and manufacturing. He has more than two decades of journalism experience spanning newspapers, magazines, websites, live events, radio and TV news. For nearly a decade, Hammerand reported and edited business news for American City Business Journals as a reporter and digital editor at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal and then managing editor of the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle. He holds degrees in journalism and management from the University of Minnesota and has won journalism awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, American Society of Business Publication Editors, and Trade, Association, Business Publications International. Connect with him on LinkedIn or by email at [email protected].
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