World-Class Talent Brings “Deeper Bench” to Early Stage Medical Device Company and Expeditiously Moves Organization Forward
“The best part about working with Acumen was working with Molly. She got me engaged quickly and has excellent strategic and business intuition. She knew the history; the personalities of the players; and well-understood the technology, mission, and vision. She did not overstate. There was ongoing dialouge and openess, respect, transparency, and active listening. Karen and Molly then ensured I wasn’t rammed through a process, but rather set up with an ongoing process of discovery and revelation” ~ Dr Linda M.,CMO, early-stage medical device
Challenge from Acumen’s perspective
Our client needed to hire a high-caliber Chief Medical Officer: an MD and Ph.D. with several rare attributes: world-class education and affiliations; experience working for both top-tier, multinational, and entrepreneurial complex medical device companies; someone who had experience conducting clinical trials and collecting the right data, who could bring another level of credibility to the organization. Additionally, they must be business-savvy, possess particular expertise in the clinical diagnostics arena, and also be a cultural fit.
Results
Leveraging their strong network on the West Coast, Acumen was able to locate and hire the company’s “dream candidate” who ticked every box on their lofty list of goals: a Stanford MD, Ph.D. with experience developing and managing clinical trials for some of the world’s top clinical diagnostic and medical device companies.
What the candidate liked best about working with Acumen:
” The best part about working with Acumen was working with Molly. Molly knew the position and the company deeply enough to land a hook and get me engaged. I gave her 15 minutes. She got me engaged quickly and has excellent strategic and business intuition.”
“Karen and Molly ensured I felt valued during the extensive exploratory process. Karen also ensured that there was a win/win when it came to negotiations.”
“Additionally, Molly knew enough about the industry to proactively address my level of comfort talking to CAMs (Complementary and Alternative Medicine providers) vs. more traditional medical providers. It’s all about addressing gaps and obtaining solid data, getting repeatable results.”
Challenge and successes from candidate’s perspective
Linda’s deep knowledge of the clinical diagnostics arena and the commercialization of diagnostic devices complemented and augmented the team well. She was able to bring expertise, strategy, and provide a “deeper bench” in this sphere. Her business savvy in the early stage arena (a rare attribute in CMO’s) also served her and the client well.
Our incoming CMO worked with the team to establish product claims to ensure they were tangible, in alignment with the data generation plan, and acceptable to regulatory bodies. She also assembled a multifunctional team to collaborate on a clinical road map, hosted a KOL, and forged solid relationships with the Board in short order.
Linda’s related big successes revolved around improved communications, collaboration, and strategy development by putting together a cross-functional team. For the Road map project: “This was run like a mini-McKinsey: I received a mandate from a board member to put together a strategy. I thought about who should be on the team and asked their managers if they could be involved. I then put together a project proposal. There was lots of formality. The diagnostic strategy ended up with a team engaged around the science and we delivered to the Board and received their nod of approval. Our new team was now leveraging all of our groundwork strategically, which the team enjoyed and ran with. Now this cohesive team all has assignments and are on a buddy system, which works very well. Each presented their parts of the project. I’m very proud of it. Even after the read-out presentations, the team has remained intact and redeployed to help develop clinical and science deliverables for product registration. This was a big win in terms of increasing engagement and development of people.” Our CMO was also able to inject more “scientific and patient-centric thinking” and ensured processes were more “buttoned up.”
Linda also helped bring in additional systems engineering expertise and orchestrated a solid partnership with a UC collaborator, their clinical trials partner resulting in an additional phase of studies being teed up for 2019.