Train Wrecks: Avoiding Common Mistakes That Derail a Product’s Commercial Success
Today’s pharmaceutical environment allows little room for error. In a world of stringent regulations, aggressive competition, and reduced periods of exclusivity, marketers can’t afford the months or, worse, years of recovery time that result from missing the mark on any aspect of commercialization. Over the next months, experts from Campbell Alliance will examine common mistakes brand managers make that can derail a product’s commercial success and outline ways to avoid them.

KEEPING A PRODUCT LAUNCH ON TRACK
BY TOM LUGINBILL
The following story is true; however, key details have been changed to protect anonymity.
Background
Jade was a Product Manager working on the U.S. launch of her company’s most promising asset, Product X, which promised a peak-year revenue forecast in excess of $500 million.
Product X was a small molecule with a new MOA for the treatment of otitis media, and Jade had been working on the brand for six months. PDUFA was still 12 months in the future, and launch planning had begun in earnest. In fact, eight teams had been assembled to support the launch—all of them subteams of the larger Product X Launch Team, of which Jade was a key member.
A cross-functional launch plan for Product X had been developed and approved by an Executive Steering Committee responsible for the brand. The launch plan included identification of deliverables and timelines by functional area, and the launch plan was being tracked using a spreadsheet file placed on a shared drive. Jade knew all of this because one of her roles on the launch team was to watch over launch logistics and report status to the organization.

SITUATION
Jade’s extended launch team was in full execution mode. They met every month to update one another, and every month, Jade reported launch progress for all eight subteams to the Executive Steering Committee. Jade’s reports consolidated what she learned at the launch update meetings and the content that individual subteam leaders placed into the shared spreadsheet file. The extended team had agreed that each subteam leader would update the status of his or her action items in the shared file on a regular basis. This process had been in place for six months.

ACTION
Updates for the Executive Steering Committee were scheduled quarterly, and then monthly for the last six months prior to PDUFA. Jade scheduled and attended the monthly meetings as planned. The monthly meetings had a day-long agenda that consisted of updates from each functional area and developing action plans for any “delayed” items. Meetings were happening. Key individuals had agreed to update one another. A reporting mechanism was in place. Jade felt ready.

RESULT
Jade became the communication “hub” for the launch team, communicating cross-functional deliverable status in monthly reports after each meeting. The monthly meetings were long and tedious but necessary. Few big issues ever surfaced at the meetings. Things seemed to be running smoothly. At any one meeting, probably two thirds of the subteam leaders actually attended—which Jade thought was to be expected given her company’s corporate culture.
Late one Friday afternoon, Jade was called into her boss’s office. “I just got a call from our VP of Sales and Marketing,” he said. “He says there’s no way tooling for the sample packs will be ready by launch, so we’ll have to launch without our planned samples. Is that true?” Jade agreed to look into it and respond on Monday morning.
Jade worked late that Friday evening to get her head around the problem. The manufacturing subteam leader had already left for the weekend. For hours, Jade looked through past e-mail updates from manufacturing and finally found a message written more than a year ago that mentioned something about sample tooling and a tight timeline, but nothing about missing launch. Jade realized that maybe her report had been in error. Maybe the “status okay” she had issued for manufacturing was wrong. Maybe there really was a problem.
Jade began to think—if there is a problem on the report with manufacturing, then what other problems might there be? She went to look at her shared spreadsheet file. It wouldn’t open. She couldn’t believe this was happening and that her IT colleague wouldn’t be back until Monday morning. She went to an older version of the file she had saved on her hard drive but was not sure of when it was last updated. As she scrutinized the report, she began to see lots of errors. She suddenly realized that the spreadsheet report she issued had been riddled with errors. Subteam leaders had not been updating the file as they had agreed.
A host of questions began to course through Jade’s mind. “Why didn’t people update the file?” “Why didn’t they surface key issues on the report or at the meeting so everyone would know?” “Why hadn’t the manufacturing issue been discussed at the monthly meeting?” “What other land mines haven’t I yet discovered?” “How am I going to send out such a major correction to the report?”
Jade knew instinctively that the reasons behind the errors didn’t matter. She had circulated bad information, and she knew that on Monday she would be asked questions she couldn’t yet fully answer. She knew that to some extent her own credibility would be at stake. It was going to be a very long weekend.

LESSONS LEARNED
1) People Sometimes Hide Problems. Everyone knows this, but somehow it still catches us all by surprise when it happens. It’s a fact that sometimes even good people obscure potential issues, especially in a public forum where uncertainty might make them look bad. The antidote is to create a “safe” forum where issues can be surfaced, discussed, and addressed.
2) Day-Long Launch Update Meetings Should Be Avoided. They’re boring, they sap productivity, and they’re unnecessary. Instead, there should be a reliable mechanism to surface and prioritize key issues before an update meeting, so custom agendas can be set to focus on the things that matter. Falling attendance at regular launch update meetings should be an indicator that something is wrong.
3) Get Ahead of the Details. Effective launch plans contain hundreds of deliverables. To set the stage for a successful launch, the launch team must develop and execute a work plan with the following characteristics:

• Identifies the functional areas (subteams) involved
• Outlines the key deliverables to be completed by each subteam
• Defines the deliverables to ensure transparency across subteams
• Assigns realistic timelines for deliverable development
• Outlines the specific tasks that must be conducted to complete the deliverable
• Identifies interdependencies within and across subteams
• Assigns individual accountabilities for each deliverable

Once the detail has been defined, the next step must be to stay on top of it all through a reliable tracking mechanism.
4) Have a Reliable Tracking Mechanism. A file on a shared drive isn’t the solution. Files get damaged, there are version control issues, and the available ways to limit access are imperfect at best. It’s simply difficult for multiple users to update a single document on an ongoing basis. Success using this method is the exception, rather than the norm.
Tracking software should ideally offer multi-user access and the ability to easily track, report, modify, and add deliverables, tasks, and inter-dependencies. A logistics coordinator should make sure the overall tracking system is working as designed.
5) Give Reliable Updates to Senior Management. Many companies develop Executive Steering Committees to oversee a launch. It usually pays to keep this committee up to date about a product’s progress toward launch. An effective means of doing this is to build report templates that communicate key pieces of information from the launch plan into short, easy-to-read flash reports. Such reports should reveal how each subteam is performing against the plan by quickly communicating status (for instance, a stoplight approach). Because the subteam members know the reports go to the Executive Steering Committee, this process can help motivate everyone to stay on schedule, update their items in the tracking tool, and attend key meetings.

Tom Luginbill is Vice President of the Brand Management Practice at Campbell Alliance (www.CampbellAlliance.com). Based in Chicago, IL, he welcomes comments at 888-297-2001, x 7220.