Michelle Wridgway

My professional life and my personal life are not in two separate compartments. They feed each other. They make sense of each other.

I lead sales enablement for EMEA Diabetes at MiniMed — the standalone diabetes technology company recently separated from Medtronic. My team supports our field force across the region with training, strategy, and the daily craft of selling well in a complex healthcare market. I have been in this industry, in one form or another, for more than twenty years.

I am also the proud mother of two children living with Type 1 Diabetes. That fact is not incidental to my work. It is, in many ways, the engine of it.

My eldest son was diagnosed at two years and nine months old. I had qualified as a dietitian a decade earlier, and I thought I understood what we were facing. I did not. Nothing prepares you for the 2 a.m. blood sugar checks, the needle phobia, the slow grind of managing a condition that does not pause. Living with Type 1 is like doing everything else you do in normal life — while also keeping a balloon in the air. It is invisible to almost everyone around you.

That perspective is what I bring into every meeting at work. Every conversation our teams have with a clinician or a family is a chance to ease that balancing act, even just a little. To make the invisible visible. To give a parent the gift of sleeping through the night. That, to me, is what commercial excellence in this category actually means.