The Summit Series is a series of six webinars exploring the concept of launch leadership. In today’s AI-dominated context, where launch is more complex than ever – with 85% of launches for specialty products and half of FDA approvals in rare disease – the margin for error is shrinking. However, there’s a growing appreciation that a launch leader’s ability to optimize and impact launch trajectory is on the rise. Paul Simms of Impatient Health hosted the first of the Summit Series webinars on March 31, 2026 – featuring launch leaders from AstraZeneca, Grifols, and Pfizer alongside Within3 founder and CEO Lance Hill. If you missed it, you can catch the recap here, or read on to discover some of the fascinating discussions and poll results captured from webinar attendees.
New signals, changing plans?
Before signing in to the session, attendees were asked: “when a new market signal challenges your launch plan, what typically happens next?” Just over half (50.8%) of attendees answered that they would hold a ‘cross-functional huddle’, and that ‘teams adjust within weeks’, which was interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that, clearly, multiple weeks is too long a timeframe to respond to a potentially meaningful market signal. The second involves the idea of cross-functional collaboration – notoriously tricky in pharma. Lance Hill speculated that much of that 50.8% would be made up of representatives of smaller biotech companies, as they tend to have fewer “entrenched silos”.
More promisingly, these results suggest that pharma leaders are becoming more mindful of new market signals and their potential impact on strategy. A cross-functional huddle is certainly a step in the right direction versus the 42% of leaders who, in a 2025 Impatient Health survey, reported that teams “simply ignored” market signals they didn’t expect to see.
Assessing leadership agility
Agility – the ability to react quickly and change direction when conditions dictate – is critical to launch excellence. The next poll question asked “when conditions change mid-launch, what is your default decision posture?” A small majority (33%) replied that they would “run a quick test, then commit with confidence” – implying an agile approach to peri-launch decision-making. 20%, however, prefer to “wait for strong confirmation before changing course”, while 9% tend to “avoid course changes unless performance forces it”. It’s clear that many launch teams remain reluctant to change direction once strategy has been set.
This data alone does not tell the whole story, however. Panellist Alex Condoleon of Pfizer accurately pointed out that “what we might think is an early signal” is quite different from “an insight that we’re actually confident deserves action.” And, crucially, “it’s equally consequential if we act on a subtle signal that turns out not to be the most important thing.” What launch leaders need, first and foremost, is more confidence in the information that informs their decisions. As Alex pointed out, launch decisions are consequential, and not acting on a potential signal is just as impactful as deciding on a specific course of action.
Revisiting your priors
We recently wrote about the concept of confirmation bias, and how preconceived ideas can impact our decision-making processes. The next poll asked how frequently launch leaders deliberately visit key assumptions during the peak launch period. A small majority (31%) answered “every two weeks, unless conditions force faster,” while marginally more attendees answered monthly (21%) than weekly (18%) and quarterly (15%). Such a close split implies that there’s no industry standard for reviewing key assumptions, with teams just as likely to revisit their priors once a week as once every three months.
Unless you’re regularly checking what you thought you knew against what market signals are telling you, you can’t tell whether or not your strategy is right on target, or missing the mark entirely. Alex Condoleon put the problem succinctly: “with some of the colleagues I work with, there’s a catchphrase: in the absence of data, you’re always right.“
Trusting AI-generated insights
We’re all becoming increasingly comfortable with generative AI. We understand what it’s capable of, but at the same time, we’ve all experienced ‘hallucinations’ and encountered AI-generated misinformation that leads us further from the truth. With that in mind, Impatient Health’s Paul Simms asked Summit Series attendees what would be necessary for them to act on an AI-generated insight. A strong majority (60%) answered that validation by a “trusted human owner” was necessary before any action could occur. This is a highly sensible approach, and mirrors our own processes here at Within3 – with ‘Human-in-the-Loop’ validation at the core of our Responsible AI philosophy. Just as interestingly, not a single attendee said that they’d “completely avoid AI for high-stakes calls” – demonstrating just how far trust in AI-generated insights has come.
Paul also asked attendees what would most undermine their trust in insights, and here, the result was more split. 31% answered that “perceived bias in what was collected or highlighted” most contributed to an erosion of trust, while a similar quantity (29%) said “conflicting sources with no agreed way to resolve”. This highlights the ongoing issue of siloed data and a lack of cross-functional integration. Teams often find themselves asking “can we get better corroboration across sources, or can we get a more reliable source?” as noted by AstraZeneca’s Stacey Gorski. A purpose-built Launch AI is equipped to sit above data silos, and serve as the connective tissue between strategy and sources including force activity, advisory boards, social sentiment, claims data, and much more – creating a single source of truth that increases confidence in insights and informs strategic decision-making.
Launch leadership: making decisions stick
While speed to insight has accelerated rapidly over the past decade, decision velocity still lags. Launch Intelligence™ can generate insights in minutes, but many teams still take weeks or even months to transform insight into action. With that in mind, the Summit Series panel asked attendees how reliably decisions translate into execution in their organizations, once a course of action has been decided upon. Just 16% answered “consistently,” while the rest of the attendees were split. 37% answered “mostly, with occasional drift in channels or markets,” while 32% said it was “uneven, depending on functions and local priorities.” This tells us that the pipeline from insight to action is still inconsistent. It’s the role of the launch leader to bridge that gap.
The panel’s final question was on this very subject. Attendees were asked “what would most improve launch leadership in your organization right now?,” and the results formed close to a consensus view. A strong majority (53%) answered “faster cross-functional cadence for key decisions,” with no other option coming close. This further underlines the importance of cross-functional collaboration in the pursuit of launch excellence – something that was echoed in our panellists’ closing comments. “You need to partner very hard when you’re getting ready for launch,” said Grifols’ Mark Montgomery. “If you’re a commercial team, what’s your medical team doing to shape the market? What’s your value and access doing to get the dossier ready?” The modern launch leader is “super collaborative,” he concluded, and “ruthlessly focused on the patients and the ability to apply technology to make decisions.“
The first session of the Summit Series sparked lively debate amongst the panellists and drove significant audience engagement. We came away with insightful observations from industry leaders that can help modern launch leaders refine their approaches in pursuit of launch excellence. You can watch the full recap of our first Summit Series webinar here, or sign up for the next installment here.
