Case study 01 · Strategy · Execution

Charting the critical path to launch.

A Fast Track designation, seventeen months to anticipated approval, and more than forty interconnected commercial strategy decisions: a clinical-stage biotech’s first launch, with no room to decide anything twice.

An overwhelming number of decisions and tasks.
Clear view of the critical path to launch.
WHAT THRIVE DID

The few choices that decide the launch.

The Fast Track letter changed the clock. Suddenly the company was seventeen months from anticipated approval, and every corporate function was staring at its own long list of launch decisions, with no launch organization, no planning process, and no view of what had to be decided by whom, and when. The danger was the classic one: missing the forest, the few critical strategic choices that disproportionately decide launch success, for the trees, the hundreds of activities everyone was busy executing. THRIVE was engaged by the CEO and the board to find the forest and cut the road through it.

Launch Decision Jumpstart Workshop
A one-day working session with the cross-functional leadership team, prepared through stakeholder pre-work, that surfaced more than 40 commercial strategy choices and introduced the choice architecture: options, reasons to believe, information required, decision makers, timing.
Classification and critical-path selection
All 40-plus choices classified on strategic importance, urgency, and cross-functionality, then narrowed to the 16 critical choices and organized under Where to Play, How to Win, and How to Execute.
Choice-level decision architecture
For each of the 16: the realistic options, what must be true for each option to be the right move, the information required to decide with owner and date, precursor and dependent choices, and who decides with whose input.
Launch decision dashboard and critical path
The full decision system mapped onto one dashboard: the sequence in which decisions fall, the interdependencies between them, and the committee and board meetings that endorse them. Tracked on an ongoing basis as the foundation for all further launch planning.
Gaps surfaced, business cases built
Gaps found early enough to plan, fund, and close them, each with a business case prepared for board decision.
The system, at a glance

Forty-plus choices. Sixteen that decide.

Over 40 commercial strategy decisions; no line of sight between them
→
IMPORTANCE
URGENCY
CROSS-FUNCTIONALITY
Classified on three criteria
→
Play
Win
Execute
16 critical choices under Where to Play, How to Win, How to Execute
→
One critical path to launch readiness
Some of the most valuable output was never on the original list: entire workstreams critical to launch that no one had been planning, or budgeting, for. The decision system made the gaps visible in time to close them.
Key insight moment
100s → 16
From hundreds of decisions and tasks to the sixteen choices that decide launch success.
One path
Every critical choice sequenced, with committee and board endorsements on the calendar.
Read the service deep dive: THRIVE Launch Strategy Sprint → All THRIVE services →

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