Last month, Within3 was fortunate enough to attend the Momentum Launch Readiness Strategy Summit in Boston, MA. The summit gathered pharma industry leaders from medical affairs, commercial, and market access teams—as well as executive leadership—to discuss how to optimize launch in today’s faster, noisier, and more complex market.
For those who weren’t able to attend, this article summarizes some of the key findings and themes from the event – distilling the shared wisdom of speakers and attendees into a roadmap for launch readiness.
The Broader Context
The background to this year’s Momentum Launch Readiness Strategy Summit will be familiar to attendees and non-attendees alike. Today, launch teams are bombarded by information from all sides: more data, more stakeholders, more evidence, more technology, and more AI. Launch timelines are being crunched, and stakeholder expectations are growing more demanding.
In the words of Within3 CEO Erin Mistry during her spotlight presentation at the event:
“We’ve got more data, we’ve got more AI, we’ve got more stakeholders, we’ve got more evidence—but we’ve got less confidence in the decisions that we’re about to make.”
– Erin Mistry, CEO, Within3
With all this data at their fingertips, launch teams should be more confident and coordinated than ever—but summit attendees consistently revealed that this simply isn’t the case. We identified five themes that surfaced repeatedly during the two-day summit and that help explain why this surplus of information has resulted in a shortage of certainty.
Theme #1: Launch Readiness Begins Too Late
A theme that emerged time and again during the summit is that pharma companies are often too late to the draw when it comes to launch readiness. The consensus view was that launch readiness must begin much sooner—with critical market intelligence built before traditional launch organizations are even fully staffed.
Instead of coordinating intelligence only once medical, commercial, and market access teams are established, companies should prioritize building the intelligence those functions will ultimately inherit. By the time a commercial team is hired, it should ideally inherit one to two years of validated market signals—not face a blank page and an accelerated launch timeline.
Erin grounded this need for earlier intelligence in three deceptively simple questions:
“There are three things you need to think about when you’re launching a product. One: does it work? Two: does somebody want it? And three: can it get paid for?”
Answering those questions with confidence requires medical, commercial, market access, regulatory, and clinical teams to begin building a shared understanding of the market well before the traditional launch window.
This is not an issue that can be fixed simply by adding more data or technology. Commercialization readiness is an organizational capability that companies must begin building long before launch.
Theme #2: Cross-Functional Alignment Remains a Persistent Challenge
It should come as no surprise that cross-functional alignment emerged as one of the most persistent challenges discussed among summit attendees—such has been the case for years.
Speakers and attendees remarked on how medical, commercial, and market access teams must engage earlier, establish shared priorities, and continuously feed relevant intelligence back into the launch strategy. However, cross-functional alignment doesn’t mean eliminating separation between medical and commercial departments entirely. Above all, launch teams need a compliant way to share relevant intelligence while maintaining on-label and off-label firewalls.
The goal is not unrestricted information sharing, but a purposeful and compliant exchange shaped by what each function needs to act. As Erin asked:
“What does the commercial sales team need to know from medical to move the business forward? And what does medical need to know from commercial to help educate physicians better?”
As with the previous theme, this issue is at least as much organizational as it is technological. However, Erin’s spotlight presentation explored how Launch Intelligence can help bring medical and commercial teams together around shared intelligence while maintaining the necessary compliance boundaries. This message resonated powerfully with summit attendees. Launch teams understand the value of sharing intelligence but recognize how compliance concerns often slow or prevent that exchange.
Theme #3: Influence and Reputation Are Not the Same
Launch teams increasingly recognize how stakeholder strategy must extend beyond the most visible—or familiar—KOLs.
Historical KOL lists were built primarily on reputation: who published the most, who made the most congress speaker appearances, or effectively, who was the loudest voice in a particular disease community. But there’s now a growing acceptance that reputation does not equal influence. Clinical trial investigators and highly published experts may be important scientifically, but they aren’t always the same people who influence formulary access, referrals, community practice, guideline development, or treatment adoption.
The concept of the ‘invisible college’ struck a chord with summit attendees. Erin Mistry described this network of influencers as “the people who truly move your market” – emerging experts, DOLs, investigators, community physicians, formulary champions, referral networks, patient advocates, and payers whose influence is fluid and contextual, but nonetheless critical for launch teams. Without tools like network analytics, social listening, and stakeholder mapping, these experts might never make it onto traditional KOL lists.
Theme #4: Signals Are Fragmented and Isolated
Echoing the broader context established in our introduction, summit attendees regularly discussed the idea that launch teams are surrounded by data, yet decision-making remains no easier.
Market research, advisory board findings, congress intelligence, field insights, CRM records, social listening, and other data sources are often fragmented across systems and functions. As Erin observed:
“Launch readiness breaks down when intelligence stays fragmented.”
There’s an opportunity here for launch teams to connect public and private intelligence. Public data can reveal publications, networks, digital conversations, market events, and emerging trends, while private data adds the context captured through field teams, advisory boards, research, and internal engagement.
As Erin reminded attendees:
“Your market never stops talking.”
The challenge is no longer simply collecting more information. It is connecting the information teams already have and determining what deserves attention and action.
An AI-powered, decision-ready intelligence layer can help identify patterns across fragmented sources and surface critical signals that have a tangible impact on launch strategy. However, human input and interpretation will always remain essential. While AI may surface a signal, experienced teams must determine what it means, whether it is credible, and what action should come next.
Theme #5: The Value of an Insight Is in What It Changes
Finally, as launch teams grow more comfortable with the concept of insight reporting, there’s a growing appreciation of where the value of an insight actually lies. Teams now recognize that the true value of an insight is in what it changes in terms of launch strategy. Collecting more insights, producing more reports, or holding more engagements is not enough on its own unless that information influences evidence plans, stakeholder strategy, messaging, access preparation, field execution, or another meaningful decision.
Erin shared a striking example from a previous launch in which cross-functional work with regulatory resulted in a one-word label change. That single word opened an inpatient opportunity that had not been part of the company’s original commercial strategy. It ultimately affected reimbursement planning, fundraising, launch sequencing, field strategy, and the company’s broader direction.
“One word in the label opened up an entire inpatient market for us.”
The example underscores why insight value cannot be measured by the volume of information collected. Its value lies in whether it changes an evidence plan, stakeholder strategy, access pathway, label, resource allocation decision, or launch action.
This idea connects with the broader context around the summit: launch teams are drowning in signals, while decision-making certainty is harder to find than ever. In this context, more is not necessarily more.
“Speed without confidence is just risk.”
– Erin Mistry, CEO, Within3
Concluding Thoughts
These five themes emerged most consistently throughout this year’s Momentum Launch Readiness Strategy Summit. But underpinning everything was another idea—one that permeated practically every conversation we had at the event.
Persistent among speakers and attendees was the idea that launch readiness can no longer be thought of as a fixed plan or something to be handed off between functions. Instead, launch readiness is increasingly recognized as a process that should begin earlier than ever and operate as a continuous, cross-functional intelligence loop.
That loop must bring external and internal signals together to help teams adapt as evidence, stakeholder needs, access conditions, and market dynamics change.
Moving forward, a launch-ready organization will be one that continuously listens, learns, aligns around emerging signals, and acts decisively. But launch readiness is about more than speed to action. Speed without confidence is risk.
Teams need to make not only faster decisions, but better ones. They need stronger cross-functional collaboration. They need to identify the right experts earlier, and they need to utilize powerful tools like AI more effectively than ever before.
Adding an intelligence layer capable of synthesizing system data into decision-ready intelligence can give teams the clarity they need to act not only with speed, but with confidence.
