How Commercial Leaders Can Optimize Their Relationships With The Board

By Bennett Smith

As life sciences companies move from the laboratory to the market, the relationship between the commercial leader and the board becomes both more complicated and more consequential. When it works well, this partnership becomes an accelerant for value creation; when it doesn’t, it can slow crucial decisions and wind up impacting key stages like a product launch or the valuation of an asset.

Having led commercial for a range of life sciences organizations, from established public biotech companies to early-stage startups, I have seen what works and what doesn't. Here is what I believe every commercial leader needs to know — and get right — to put their company in the strongest position to win.

In the earliest stages of a life sciences business, most boards are dominated by scientists and investors who live and breathe things like mechanism of action and trial design. Commercial thinking can feel far off, which is exactly why the commercial leader’s first job with the board is education.

The task is to help the board understand why commercialization work must start years before launch, and to ground that message in real case studies showing how early investment correlates with launch success. It is equally important to convey that even if the company intends to sell the asset pre‑launch, sophisticated buyers will treat topics like payer strategy and KOL engagement as markers of value.

Commercial planning should be positioned as de‑risking. Better visibility into price, uptake, and access reduces uncertainty in financing rounds and M&A and ultimately supports stronger valuations. A McKinsey study found that leading pharma-product launchers begin building their team as early as 18 months before launch.

Navigating Different Kinds Of Boards

There is meaningful upside to having board members from adjacent domains, such as consumer tech, who have or no life sciences experience. These directors often ask the so-called dumb questions that force the team to be more rigorous in its analytics and less reliant on “this is how the industry does it.”

Indeed, the board composition shapes how the commercial leader should show up. I am currently building the launch-year dashboard and forecast at Beren Therapeutics, which is focused on both rare and general population disorders. My strategy when I present to the board (which comes largely from tech) is shaped by a simple but high-stakes reality: a first launch gives you one chance to establish credibility.

If you put a number in front of the board and don't perform against it, that trust is very hard to recover. That's why I’ve focused not just on what our patient identification model for the company produced, but on how my team built it: the clinical characteristics we used, where we applied thresholds, and why. Walking through the validation steps and being explicit about my degree of confidence at each stage turned what could have been a black box into something the board felt they could stress-test.

“Transparency from the commercial leader is critical,” said Jeff Kindler, CEO of Centrexion Therapeutics and director or chair of multiple boards. “I want to know how they came up with their recommendations. When you lack that visibility, it’s a confidence killer.”

Warning Signs

Most breakdowns between commercial leaders and boards do not appear first as dramatic confrontations — they surface as subtle but consistent patterns. One early warning sign is when the board repeatedly revisits “settled” questions because directors never fully bought into the rationale. A more serious signal is when individual directors begin running their own shadow conversations with management or external advisors because they don’t trust that they are getting the full picture in the boardroom.​

When these signs emerge, the commercial leader must reset the engagement, shifting from dense slide decks to more narrative explanations and replacing jargon with explicit links to the enterprise-level decisions the board must actually make.

Don’t Drown Board Members

Today’s policy and pricing environment — distinctions like Medicare Part B vs. Part D — is complicated enough to merit its own textbook. The board does not need that textbook. It needs clarity on business impact. Effective commercial leaders structure policy discussions around three simple questions: what has changed or may change in policy; how do those changes affect access, net price, or channel strategy over the next one to three years; and what specific decisions or trade‑offs are they asking the board to endorse.

Every board has one or two members who like to dive into the weeds. This is where tight coordination with the CEO and board chair becomes essential. Before each meeting, the commercial leader should align with them on what belongs in the room and what is better handled in one‑on‑one or small‑group discussions. Those deeper sessions are also an opportunity to pressure‑test assumptions and refine the story that will be brought back to the full board.

The Year-One Launch Dashboard

In the first year of launch, boards understandably fixate on revenue. But revenue is a lagging indicator, and in many launches, early P&L looks worse than the underlying momentum would suggest. The dashboard the commercial leader shares with the board should elevate the leading indicators that truly predict success.​

Across therapeutic areas, several elements usually matter most:

• Demand (scripts or “enrollments”)
• Reimbursement and payer dynamics
• Site activation and channel readiness (if the treatment is administered at a site)
• Competitive dynamics or share​

Revenue still belongs in the conversation, but as part of a coherent story: Here is the demand we are generating, and the trajectory we see for the next several quarters.

This commercial leader-board dynamic is only going to matter more as pricing pressure and policy complexity increase. The leaders who figure it out early will have a clear edge.

About The Author:

Bennett Smith is a biopharma commercial leader focused on turning scientific breakthroughs into market successes. He has driven significant growth and revenue for companies including Orchard Therapeutics, Akebia Therapeutics, Regeneron and Novo Nordisk. He is currently SVP of Commercial at at Beren Therapeutics.