What Happens Between the Meetings: A Pharma Launch Story

The Three-Week Gap

There was a product launch in 2019 that I still think about. Not because it failed it didn't. The product launched on time, supply held, and the team got their bonuses. But somewhere in the middle of it, I realized we'd been planning for a launch that wasn't the one we were actually executing.

The Setup

The company was a mid-sized biotech with two commercial products already on the market. This was their third launch, so they had some muscle memory. They'd built out a formal launch readiness process after the chaos of their first product. Governance structures, cross-functional workstreams, stage gates, the whole framework. On paper, it looked like the kind of operation that could handle scale.

I came in about four months before the anticipated FDA approval. My role was to help align supply planning with the commercial forecast and make sure manufacturing capacity was locked in. Standard work. The kind of thing that should've been straightforward for a team that had done this twice before.

Three Teams, Three Numbers

The first sign something was off came during a routine S&OP review. We were walking through the 18-month demand plan, and I asked a simple question: "What assumption are we using for the first 90 days post-launch?"

The commercial lead said they were using a conservative ramp based on prior launch data. The supply planner said they were using the upper end of the range because manufacturing lead times didn't give them room to adjust quickly. Finance was using a different number entirely, something tied to revenue targets that had been set six months earlier.

Three teams. Three forecasts. Same launch.

Nobody seemed particularly bothered by this. It wasn't conflict, it was just how things worked. Commercial owned the market forecast. Supply owned the production plan. Finance owned the P&L. They all showed up to the same meetings, nodded at the same slides, and then went back to their own numbers.

What the Hallway Conversations Revealed

I started asking more questions. Not in the meetings those were too structured, too performative. I asked in hallways, over coffee, in the fifteen minutes before calls started. What I found was that everyone was working hard, and everyone believed they were aligned. But the alignment was theoretical. It lived in the governance documents and the stage gate reviews. It didn't live in the daily decisions people were making.

The planning cycles didn't help. The S&OP process ran monthly. Launch decisions were happening weekly, sometimes daily. By the time an issue surfaced in the formal planning cycle, it had already burned through two or three weeks of lead time. People were making workarounds to keep things moving, but the workarounds weren't visible to the people who were supposed to be governing the process.

The Constraint Nobody Mentioned

About eight weeks before the expected approval, the CDMO flagged a constraint. They could hit the initial build quantities, but if demand came in at the high end of the range, they didn't have capacity to flex without a twelve-week lead time for raw material. It was a planning issue, not a technical one, but it mattered.

The constraint had been there the whole time. It was in the capacity model. Someone on the supply team knew about it. But it hadn't made it into the launch readiness dashboard because the dashboard was designed to track milestones, not assumptions. And the assumption that demand would land in the middle of the forecast range was baked into every plan.

Changing the Rhythm

We didn't panic. There was no war room, no emergency escalation. We just started meeting differently.

Instead of waiting for the monthly S&OP cycle, we pulled together a small group five people, maybe six—and started meeting for twenty minutes every other day. No slides. No formal agenda. Just: what changed, what's at risk, who owns the next call. It wasn't pharma supply chain optimization in any formal sense. It was just practical coordination.

The meetings were almost boring. Most days, nothing had changed. But the rhythm mattered. It meant that when the CDMO constraint surfaced, it didn't sit in someone's inbox for a week waiting for the next governance meeting. It got discussed the next day. Commercial adjusted their launch assumptions. Supply locked in a secondary material source. Finance updated their risk model. It took three days to align, not three weeks.

What the Post-Launch Review Missed

The product launched six weeks later. The forecast came in slightly below the midpoint, so the CDMO constraint never became an issue. In the formal post-launch review, the project was marked as a success. The governance process was cited as a key enabler.

I didn't argue with that. The governance process mattered. It gave the organization a shared language and a structure for accountability. But the thing that actually kept the launch on track wasn't the process, it was the willingness to work outside of it when the pace of execution required it.

A few months later, I was talking with the VP of supply chain, and he asked me what I thought they should change for the next launch. I told him the process was fine, but they might want to think about how they handle the gap between planning cycles and decision cycles. He nodded, wrote something down, and we moved on.

The Gap Between Plans and Decisions

I don't know if they changed anything. I wasn't there for the next launch. But I think about that gap a lot. The space between when a plan gets made and when a decision needs to happen. Most organizations I've worked with have formal processes that assume those two things are synchronized. And most of the time, they're not.

The hard part isn't building the process. It's knowing when the process needs to pause so the work can happen.

I wonder sometimes if that's the thing nobody really talks about in launch readiness frameworks not whether you have the right structure, but whether you're willing to set it aside when it starts getting in the way.