/product-strategy-session

Product Strategy Session Example — Life Sciences

Brightwater Biologics runs multi-site clinical trials. Its internal product team built Trialpath, the platform its coordinators, monitors, and CRO partners use to run those studies.

The strategy question: two CRO partners have asked to license Trialpath for studies that have nothing to do with Brightwater. Should an internal tool become a product?

Why this domain changes strategy work: revenue arrives years after the evidence that justifies it, the buyer is rarely the user, and the option you're comparing against isn't a competitor — it's "keep spending that engineering capacity on the therapy program that is the actual company."

Example: Should Trialpath become a product?

Phase 1 — Positioning

• Ran positioning-workshop. First attempt targeted "clinical trial sponsors," which collapsed immediately — a 40-person biotech and a global CRO buy nothing alike
• Segmented to three candidates: small sponsors without a platform, CROs running studies for others, and large sponsors already on incumbent systems
• Third segment eliminated in the session: displacing an incumbent validated system means the customer re-validates everything. Nobody does that for a feature advantage
• Proto-personas built for the two survivors: "First-Study Farrah" (ops lead at a small sponsor running her first multi-site trial) and "Margin-Watch Marcus" (CRO operations director whose economics are staffing ratios)
• JTBD split sharply. Farrah: "help me run a compliant study without hiring a systems team." Marcus: "help me run more studies per coordinator."
• Draft positioning, small-sponsor segment: For clinical-stage sponsors running their first multi-site studies, who need a compliant trial platform without an internal systems team, Trialpath is a trial operations platform that ships preconfigured to the workflows a study actually runs on — unlike enterprise systems that assume a validation team you don't have.

Phase 2 — Problem Framing

• Ran problem-framing-canvas on the internal question, not the customer's
• Look inward: Trialpath is built for Brightwater's protocols. Two CROs asking is not a market. Every hour on it is an hour off the therapy program
• Look outward: small sponsors genuinely lack good options, and the incumbents price for enterprise. The pull is real
• Reframe: the question isn't "is there demand." It's "can we serve it without taxing the program that is the actual company?"
• Named the strategic risk plainly: Brightwater is a biotech. A software line competes for the same scarce engineering, and its revenue arrives on a slower clock than the trials it would fund

Phase 3 — Discovery

• Six interviews: 4 small-sponsor ops leads, 2 CRO directors
• Small sponsors confirmed the pain and revealed the blocker: they need a validated system, and validation documentation was the first question in every conversation. Brightwater had validated Trialpath for its own use — not as a vendor-supplied system
• CROs wanted the opposite: deep configurability per client, which is a services business wearing a software costume
• Killed the CRO segment. Marcus's job needs staffing leverage; that's consulting, not licensing
• Sized it honestly: roughly 300 addressable small sponsors, realistic reach far lower. Not a business that changes Brightwater's trajectory. Possibly one that funds a team

Phase 4 — Roadmap and Decision

• Ran roadmap-planning against a deliberately narrow bet
• Decision: a limited pilot, not a product line. License to three small sponsors at cost, for eighteen months, with a named exit
• Sequenced: vendor-grade validation documentation → multi-tenant isolation → configuration for non-Brightwater protocols. The first item is the gate; the other two don't matter if it fails
• The kill criterion, written before starting: if vendor-grade validation documentation takes more than two engineer-quarters, stop. That is the cost that would begin taxing the therapy program
• Explicit non-goals: no CRO segment, no incumbent displacement, no sales hires
• Review at 18 months against one question — did this fund itself without slowing a trial?

What this example teaches that the SaaS one can't

• The strategy question was internal, not competitive. The real alternative wasn't a rival platform; it was spending the same engineers on the drug. Phase 2 named that instead of assuming growth is always good.
• A segment died on regulatory mechanics, not on demand. Large sponsors want it and will never buy, because switching means re-validating. Constraints, not preferences, eliminated that segment in one session.
• Validation documentation was the whole gate. Every small-sponsor interview opened with it, and it became the first roadmap item and the kill criterion. In a regulated market the compliance artifact often is the product decision.
• A segment was killed for being services in disguise. CRO configurability sounds like product demand and behaves like consulting revenue. Naming it early avoided years of building bespoke configuration for two accounts.
• The honest sizing was "this doesn't change our trajectory." ~300 addressable sponsors. That didn't stop the bet — it right-sized it into an eighteen-month pilot with a written exit, rather than a product line with a hiring plan.