Rethinking Launch Planning: Investing Early for Launch Success

With contributions from: Peggy Chasler and Enam Rahman

Life science organizations often encounter challenges with aligning strategy and execution during a product launch, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Building a cross-functional team and preparing for commercialization years before launch ensures that foundational activities such as market research, portfolio coordination, and regulatory strategy are aligned to tactical execution. By investing in early market-shaping efforts, scenario planning, and comprehensive market research, organizations can set the stage for long-term success in a competitive and dynamic landscape.

In this insight, we explore key strategies for early launch planning, such as building a strong foundation for execution, proactive scenario planning, defining success, facilitating early market-shaping initiatives, and aligning within a broader portfolio strategy. Central to these strategies is widespread organizational buy-in to investing early for launch success.

Stand up the right team, right away

Given that nearly two-thirds of launches fail to meet expectations, early planning can be the critical difference between success and failure.¹ While it may seem premature, commercialization planning 3 to 4 years before launch helps bring more rigor to foundational activities such as portfolio planning, evidence generation, diagnostic testing, patient and caregiver advocacy, and payer planning.

It is especially crucial to resource key Commercial, Medical, and Market Access roles early. These roles can be staffed with partial allocation initially, scaling as the program progresses through key data milestones. Investing in advance of a Phase III data readout enables cross-functional collaboration and alignment in the long-term while ensuring flexibility to address unexpected issues and opportunities as detailed below:

• Early involvement from Commercial and Medical leaders helps the teams stay closely aligned with R&D to build a deep understanding of trial design and clinical endpoints to define the brand narrative and identify early market-shaping opportunities
• Market Access leaders play a pivotal role in defining payer strategy and identifying early opportunities to build relationships that will optimize pricing and reimbursement in key markets
• The Launch Lead, ideally in place 18 months before launch, drives the activation of the brand launch plan in markets to ensure cross-functional alignment to the brand strategy at the earliest stages of planning

As commercialization looms, organizations should shift focus to identifying key launch milestones that communicate a clear plan for engagement throughout the launch process. Kick-off meetings and planning workshops help align the team to the asset strategy approximately 18 to 24 months in advance of launch. Effective kick-off activities help identify key leaders, define project governance, and create clear ways of working across functional teams. This includes finalizing the core launch team (comprised of additional functional representatives across teams such as Insights & Analytics, Competitive Intelligence, Communications, and Policy), assigning roles and responsibilities, and fostering engagement and collaboration.

Although often overlooked, it is critical to establish process elements like meeting cadence, progress tracking, and tool development early in the planning phase to increase efficiency and remove barriers to successful project management. Wide adoption of processes and tools, such as launch plans, risk registers, and status dashboards, is essential to promoting collaboration, awareness, and strategic alignment. Simplicity is key to success. Strategic launch navigators work to tailor governance processes and structure the cross-functional team to fit the specific launch scenario and team culture. Early, well-organized teams lay the groundwork for alignment, momentum, and seamless execution.

Invest in comprehensive market research

Market research plays a crucial role in understanding customer needs, competitive dynamics, and potential barriers to adoption. In-depth, data-driven insights guide strategic decision-making, ensuring that the product resonates with the target audience and effectively addresses unmet needs. Investing in market research plays a crucial role in shaping effective market education initiatives and helps identify key insights into healthcare provider (HCP) behaviors, patient needs, payer priorities, and competitive dynamics that drive brand strategy. Understanding these insights allows companies to highlight the product’s unique clinical benefits and competitive advantages to differentiate it in the market.

Incorporating real-world evidence (RWE) and health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) into market research further strengthens the product’s value proposition by providing data on cost-effectiveness, patient outcomes, and quality of life improvements. This is not only critical for HCPs, but also for engaging payers and regulatory bodies who make reimbursement and access decisions. Conducting research with patient advocacy groups can also help ensure the product aligns with patient needs and preferences, increasing the likelihood of acceptance.

By investing in comprehensive market research well before launch, companies can create a data-driven strategy that optimally targets key stakeholders, ensuring that by the time the product is ready for market, HCPs, payers, regulators, and patients are well-informed and supportive. This significantly reduces barriers at launch, accelerates adoption, and ensures that the product is positioned for long-term success in the complex and competitive landscape of the life sciences sector.

Define success with precision

As launch teams form and the product profile becomes well understood, grounding on key success factors is essential to keep the focus on what matters most. Our experience working alongside our industry partners suggests that engaging key functions in the development of strategic objectives creates shared accountability and ownership of launch activities. As launch teams are typically organized in a matrix-fashion with team members reporting to leaders with different ideas of success, planning in a silo can lead to team members driving to conflicting objectives, re-work, and missed timelines. Early planning must be cross-functional to lay the groundwork for collaboration and foster a culture of launch excellence.

Dedicated planning workshops can effectively unite the team around a common goal and shared purpose. Once the team aligns on brand-level strategic imperatives, they can develop precise objectives to guide tactical planning as functional activities should support these strategic imperatives and drive measurable outcomes. Teams can use aligned strategic imperatives to more effectively identify launch opportunities and activities, address challenges, and map critical dependencies. Defining success with clarity from the start ensures that cross-functional teams remain aligned with a unified mission throughout launch execution while enabling flexibility and agility to changes that arise throughout the planning process.

Scenario plan proactively

Robust launch planning efforts help leaders, cross-functional launch teams, and external partners align on what needs to be accomplished to meet organizational goals; however, executing a product launch is complex and requires a nimble approach to delivery. While considering launch analogues helps identify potential risks and opportunities, no two launches are the same – proactive and ongoing scenario planning is a critical cultural element to ensuring launch excellence.

Common examples of internal and external scenarios with uncertain outcomes include:

• Regulatory review may yield information requests requiring additional team member effort, label changes that impact promotion and supply, and timeline uncertainty impacting go-to-market strategy
• Ongoing demand planning efforts are impacted by internal (cross-portfolio synchronization, geo-expansion, organization prioritization) and external (contract negotiation, label uncertainty, epidemiology trends, competitor activity) factors
• External events such as clinical trial data releases, regulatory approvals, and advisory committee read outs give insight into potential competitive differentiators and helps drive asset lifecycle management

By mapping out key assumptions, potential risks, implications, and opportunities, teams will proactively manage risk and remain agile when unexpected opportunities or challenges arise. No launch can succeed off one planning session alone – launch teams that prioritize adaptive performance in tandem with robust launch planning will differentiate against competition.  It is critical that all key workstreams embed scenario planning into their processes as they seek alignment with leadership, ensuring they set ambitious launch goals while also effectively mitigating risk.

Shape the market early

Early market-shaping efforts are crucial. For example, early team engagement with key opinion leaders (KOLs) creates the foundation for strong market entry. Positive endorsements from KOLs enhance credibility, shape perceptions, and drive adoption as they can amplify messaging and facilitate peer-to-peer education. By involving KOLs early, organizations build credibility and ensure that the clinical and therapeutic value of their product is clearly communicated to the broader medical community, helping to overcome skepticism and accelerate integration into clinical practice.

While a cross-functional engagement strategy helps drive Medical and Commercial team activities, other launch team initiatives can help raise awareness and create a launch-ready environment for success. Delivering a robust policy/advocacy strategy, engaging with community-based organizations, and promoting disease state awareness campaigns help proactively shape the market before the official product launch. This pre-launch preparation helps reduce consumer hesitancy, enables faster uptake, and establishes a strong market position to facilitate long-term success against competition.

Coordinate across the portfolio for strategic alignment

Pharmaceutical leaders are constantly thinking about their long-term strategic priorities and how to maximize the reach and performance of their organization’s portfolio of products, indications, and pipeline assets. A robust portfolio strategy helps mitigate risk and facilitate expansion as drug development becomes more expensive. When considering the cost of failures, the average investment of developing a drug is over $500 million.² Therefore, coordinating product launches as part of a broader portfolio strategy has never been more important.

There is no one-size fits all approach for portfolio coordination at launch, but launch teams should leverage synergies to maximize resources, strengthen brand positioning, and amplify overall market impact. Below are a few examples of ways organizations can transform their launch execution process by executing a comprehensive portfolio management strategy:

• Optimize field operations to focus resources on related launches depending on priority and peak selling seasons
• Coordinate promotional materials across brands/indications to build off organization heritage, establish portfolio leadership, and differentiate against competition
• Leverage historical relationships with KOLs across therapeutic areas to amplify messaging and reach key HCPs

Conclusion

In the fast-paced and competitive world of pharmaceutical launches, the importance of early planning cannot be overstated. By building the right team early, defining clear success factors, and proactively shaping the market, organizations can enhance the likelihood of a successful launch. Strategic portfolio alignment and scenario planning further mitigate risks and position the product for long-term success. Ultimately, a well-executed, data-driven, and collaborative launch strategy is key to ensuring market readiness, accelerating adoption, and maximizing the impact of new therapies in the life sciences industry.

At Vynamic, we partner with life sciences organizations to deliver impactful product launches. Our approach is rooted in the principles of launch excellence, starting with clear objectives and well-defined workstreams that bridge strategy with execution. We design integrated launch plans that prioritize outcomes over process, ensuring cross-functional alignment and effective communication to empower teams to adapt and deliver with precision. By embedding an agile, iterative process with continuous feedback loops, we help brand teams swiftly respond to market shifts and foster ongoing improvement. Our approach helps organizations exceed launch goals and lays the groundwork for sustained success and growth.

 Vynamic empowers Commercial and Medical teams to transform launch strategy into action and elevates team performance by cultivating a cohesive and high-performing team culture.

 To learn more about how we help organizations build a culture of launch excellence, reach out to our Launch Excellence Lead, Felice Walter.

Sources 

1. PharmaVoice, 2024
2. JAMA Network, 2024