Key takeaways

• CCOs should intentionally shape the role of commercial operations to equip the entire commercial function to evolve after launch, not just be ready for launch.
• Before launch, CCOs should ask their leadership team to document critical assumptions, clearly define accountability across commercial and IT and establish processes for interpreting new market evidence.
• After launch, CCOs should lead their team in evolving commercial strategy in a unified way to avoid siloed decision-making and reduce cross-function friction.

Chief commercial officers (CCOs) spend enormous energy ensuring their leadership team confidently answers yes to this question: “Will we be ready on launch day?” Obviously, this is a crucial question to get right.

But in our experience, another question gets far less attention: Will the commercial organization recognize what it got wrong and adapt quickly once launch plans encounter market realities?

The commercial operations function is central to both preparing for launch and adapting after launch. Before launch, it helps the rest of the commercial team build the engine. After launch, it should help the commercial team run and tune it.

How the CCO vision for commercial operations can align teams, data and decisions

Commercial operations doesn’t own every part of commercial strategy. Marketing builds the brand plan and tactics. Sales leads field execution. Market access shapes pricing, contracting and distribution. Patient services build the support model.

Commercial operations provides the connective tissue across these functions: The data and enabling systems infrastructure, customer insights, forecasting, incentive compensation and performance reporting that allows the commercial organization to operate, ideally, as a unified system. That integration is the north star. After launch, commercial operations helps the commercial team sense what’s changing, learn and adapt.

CCOs ask their commercial operations leader to build critical launch infrastructure but often miss setting the expectation for their cross-functional influence that is needed to connect signals afterward. The CCO must ensure commercial leaders share a common set of assumptions, understand what evidence would challenge them and agree on who will act when the market doesn’t behave as expected.

CCOs should think through two critical priorities to make this transition much easier. Both should be addressed before launch, while roles, systems and investments are still flexible.

Priority 1: Help define a vision for cross-functional influence and collaboration

The CCO and commercial operations leader must work together to explicitly define the vision and expectations for the commercial operations function. Should it act as a broad strategic partner that helps shape performance, a focused enabling function that equips the business or as a back-office order taker?

That choice of vision and expectation determines how effectively the commercial operations team will be able to challenge assumptions, connect cross-functional evidence and influence decisions after launch. Once expectations are established, they are much harder to change.

Build the right emerging pharma launch capabilities at the right time and scale

The commercial team will rely on commercial options to help prioritize and build a wide range of capabilities to support the launch. If left up to individual commercial functions, the marketing, sales and market access leaders may design systems that are either overkill or inadequate.

The empowered commercial operations leader can help avoid those extremes and ensure the entire ecosystem works together. The ideal goal is to build a foundation that is reliable at launch, efficient at the company’s early scale and flexible to evolve as the market becomes clearer.

Commercial operations capabilities can be separated into three groups:

1. Capabilities that must work on day one
2. Capabilities that need a foundation but can mature after launch
3. Capabilities that should be stage-gated until specific milestones are met

Commercial operations can help guide the entire commercial team into aligning on where capabilities should fit and how they will interact with one another.

Strong commercial operations starts with clear ownership and connected data

Too many CCOs miss the opportunity to help commercial operations broker an effective partnership with the IT function. Commercial operations, IT and business leadership should also agree early on the accountability and decision rights to key capabilities, including data strategy and architecture, CRM and performance management solutions.

While the CCO doesn’t need to understand the data governance plan in detail, they should be asking their commercial operations leader and IT leadership if they have aligned on one. If market access has selected a distribution strategy with multiple specialty pharmacies, then the commercial operations and IT team need to have a plan to establish a data aggregation capability to provide accurate insight into how the business is performing.

While commercial operations doesn’t own pricing, distribution or the patient support model, it must make sure the relevant data and operating processes connect. Without that connectivity, the CCO cannot confidently lead her team through the market feedback that comes after launch.

CCO action items: Set the vision for how commercial operations will interact with other functions. Clarify decision authority and accountability across commercial operations, IT and other commercial leaders.

Priority 2: Document your team’s critical assumptions to evolve your strategy after launch

No first-launch plan will unfold exactly as expected. The patient journey may look different. Access barriers may emerge in new places. Field productivity, account dynamics or data coverage may challenge the forecast. That doesn’t mean the planning was poor. It means the company is finally replacing assumptions with evidence.

Organizations get tripped up when they wait until performance falls short of expectations to ask what the original assumptions were. Before launch, the commercial leadership team should document the beliefs that matter most across the patient journey, prescriber behavior, access, field capacity, data availability, uptake and persistence.

Make assumptions visible before the market proves them wrong

Each commercial function should own the assumptions behind their part of the strategy and the decisions that follow. Commercial operations should make those assumptions visible, connect the evidence and help facilitate turning learning into action.

For each assumption, commercial leadership should know:

• What evidence will confirm or challenge it?
• When should that evidence be available?
• Who owns interpreting the evidence and making the decision?
• What action could that evidence trigger?

A simple assumption tracker gives the leadership team a common starting point when the market doesn’t behave as expected.

Turn early market signals into faster, better emerging pharma commercial decisions

Before launch, the company should establish a shared approach to performance management. That includes agreeing on the questions leadership will use to interpret early market signals: Which indicators are truly leading? Which measures reflect activity rather than outcomes? What level of variation requires intervention? How much weight will leadership place on field judgment and local market conditions?

Early launch success depends on rapid learning, shared decisions and follow-through

Early launch data will be incomplete and sometimes contradictory: Central analytics may identify a pattern without explaining it, field teams may spot an issue without knowing whether it’s local or widespread and other functions may hold another part of the answer. Commercial operations should connect those views, but the leadership team must interpret them together. The goal is for leaders to develop a shared view of what’s happening and agree on what to do next.

Organizations should use the months just after launch to establish short feedback loops and rapid issue resolution. CCOs can normalize the expectation that assumptions will be challenged and pivots will need to happen by scheduling formal reviews at 30, 90 and 180 days, followed by a broader reset near the end of year one. Each review should ask: Which assumptions were wrong and what do we need to change?

The relevant functional leaders should own the resulting changes while commercial operations makes sure the decisions connect and the organization follows through.

CCO action items: Ask each commercial function to document its most consequential assumptions. Assign clear owners, define the evidence that would challenge each assumption and put postlaunch reset meetings on the calendar before launch. Plan to normalize the process of reflecting and pivoting to avoid finger pointing and downplaying gaps in prelaunch assumptions.

Build a commercial organization that can change its mind

The commercial operations function must make sure critical systems are ready for launch. However, if commercial operations is only focused on the readiness of critical systems, then the broader commercial organization is likely not prepared to learn and evolve after launch.

The best commercial operations teams help organizations learn faster

Before launch, commercial operations helps leaders make good decisions before they have meaningful market data. After launch, it helps them make better decisions because they now have data and experience.

Companies that manage this transition well are careful to build a practical foundation, make their assumptions explicit and plan to evolve their commercial strategy before the pressure arrives. Great CCOs know their launch plan can never be perfect, so they help their team anticipate how to learn and adapt quickly.

A CCO should be able to ask these three questions and get clear, specific answers:

1. Is the entire commercial team clear on what commercial operations owns, what it enables and what belongs to the other commercial functions or IT?
2. What are the five biggest assumptions behind our launch plan, and who owns each one?
3. How will we know when those assumptions are wrong and how will the leadership team decide what to change?

The goal is not to have a perfect answer to every question. Instead, the goal is to know that the choices are being made consciously, ownership is clear and commercial operations has the support it needs to keep the commercial system connected as the market changes.