/executive-onboarding-playbook

Executive Onboarding Example — Life Sciences

The sample.md example follows a VP Product into a SaaS company. This one follows the same playbook into Brightwater Biologics, a clinical-stage biotech whose product team builds Trialpath, the platform its trial sites and monitors run on.

Why the org shape changes the onboarding: the product organization is not the company's main event. The therapy program is. A product leader here has to establish what product work is for before establishing how it should run — and the answer determines whether the role is real.

Context

Marcus was hired as VP Product at Brightwater after eight years in enterprise SaaS. ~180 employees, roughly a quarter in clinical operations, no approved product, no product revenue. He inherits a team of four PMs and a platform two CRO partners have asked to license.

Phase 0 (Before Day 1): Pre-Entry Checks

Inputs gathered before accepting

The five questions, and what the CEO's answers revealed:

• First 90 days / first year? — "Get Trialpath ready to sell." Specific, and alarming. Nobody had assessed whether it could be sold.
• All-stars? — Named two PMs, both described in terms of responsiveness to clinical operations rather than product outcomes. Signal about what the org currently rewards.
• Gaps? — "The team is reactive." Marcus noted this as a hypothesis to test, not a finding — reactive teams are usually a structural symptom.
• Constraints? — Engineering capacity is shared with the trial data pipeline. The real constraint, stated plainly and early.
• Success at one year? — "Three external customers on Trialpath."

Risk signals identified

• Success defined as an outcome (three customers) that depends on a regulatory gate nobody had assessed — vendor-grade validation documentation
• Shared engineering with the trial program means every product decision is a capital allocation decision against the company's actual mission
• No product leadership predecessor; the function was run out of clinical operations

Decision

Accepted — with one negotiated change: the one-year goal was restated as "a validated, sellable platform with a demonstrated pilot," not three signed customers. Marcus's reasoning: he could commit to the work, not to a sales outcome gated by an unassessed regulatory question.

Why this matters: taking the original goal would have meant owning a number whose feasibility nobody had established. The negotiation was the diligence.

Phase 1 (Month 1): Diagnose

Actions

• 30-minute conversations with four PMs, the clinical ops director, the head of engineering, the CFO, and — critically — two study coordinators at partner sites who use Trialpath daily
• Included site coordinators deliberately: they're the users, they don't work for Brightwater, and no previous product leader had spoken to them

Pattern signals (3+ independent sources)

• Trialpath's roadmap is set by whichever clinical operations request is loudest that month
• "Validation documentation" surfaced in every engineering conversation and none of the leadership ones
• Coordinators at both sites had built spreadsheet workarounds for the same workflow

Single-source, held loosely

• One PM's assertion that the CRO partners "will definitely sign." Incentive noted: he had sourced the conversations.

Things he wanted to fix and did not

Phase 2 (Month 2): Validate

• Hypothesis: the team is reactive by disposition. Broke. The PMs had twice attempted quarterly planning; both times a trial timeline change invalidated it within weeks. They're responding rationally to genuine volatility. The CEO's diagnosis was wrong, and Marcus now had evidence rather than an opinion.
• Hypothesis: validation documentation is a compliance task. Broke. Regulatory confirmed it's a prerequisite for selling to anyone, and no one had scoped it. This is the gate on the CEO's entire one-year goal.
• Unwritten strategy: the company optimizes for the trial program, correctly. Product's real job is to make trials run better; licensing is a possibility, not a mandate. Nobody had said this out loud, and the stated goal implied the opposite.

Phase 3 (Month 3): Act with Evidence

Shared assessment (to CEO and team):

• The team is not reactive by disposition — it's structurally unable to hold a quarterly plan against trial volatility. Fixing it means changing the planning cadence, not the people
• Vendor-grade validation is the gate on external licensing, unscoped, and estimated at two engineer-quarters
• Recommendation: treat licensing as a funded pilot with a kill criterion, not a commitment. Assess validation first; decide after

Changes underway (three, not twenty):

1. Six-week planning cycles instead of quarterly, matching the volatility the team actually faces
2. Validation scoping as the first funded workstream
3. Standing monthly contact with two site coordinators — the users nobody was talking to

People: the PM described as an all-star was strong at clinical-ops responsiveness and had never been asked for product judgment. Given the validation workstream as a stretch assignment.

What this example teaches that the SaaS one can't

• The Phase 0 negotiation was the highest-leverage act of the whole onboarding. Restating the one-year goal from a sales outcome to a delivery outcome prevented owning a number gated by an unassessed regulatory question. That happened before day one.
• The CEO's people diagnosis was wrong, and evidence — not diplomacy — resolved it. "Reactive" was structural. Acting on the CEO's framing in Month 1 would have targeted the wrong problem and probably the wrong people.
• The product org isn't the main event, and pretending otherwise fails. Product's real job is to make trials run better. Naming the unwritten strategy out loud reframed licensing from mandate to option.
• The users didn't work for the company. Site coordinators had never been interviewed by a product leader. In SaaS your users are a support ticket away; here reaching them is a deliberate act that has to be built into the cadence.