The lessons that shaped my career

During this period of time off after leaving Akebia and as I look for my next opportunity in biopharma, I’m reminded of some of the important advice and encouragement I’ve received throughout my career.?I’ve often had the chance to share this with individuals in my team or mentees, but I thought I’d take a moment to post here as well.?So here we go…

When you know how to do your job, it’s time to move on. I’m sure those aren’t the exact words from an old boss Lucy at one of my early jobs after college. But during the time I worked with her, I learned that it’s important to reach out and take that next step, even when (and perhaps especially when) it scares you a bit.

I remind myself of my first months in the Oncology Pricing & Contracting group at Genentech. I had a bunch of experience in marketing but was now responsible for a complicated network of distribution and pricing contracts that were inherited from the Roche US business. And I remember the first sit-down with my colleague who was explaining it to me and realizing how foreign this all was. Yet, a couple months later I was one of the few folks in the organization who could understand and communicate the rationale of these agreements and advise how to manage them. There have been other examples since, and several with bigger stretches where the learning curve has felt longer.?But each time I’ve landed on my feet and ultimately excelled. Sometimes?I need to remind myself I know more than I think and to trust my good instincts. So far it has always worked out.

Embrace your unique profile.?Don’t try to be someone else’s stereotype.?I joined the Roche organization in 2005 in Switzerland, and relocated to New Jersey in 2007. When the Roche-Genentech merger happened in 2009, all of the in-line commercial jobs relocated to San Francisco. It was a hard move – I had no connections to the west coast and had no desire to uproot. Yet it turned out to be one the best places I’ve ever lived and some of my closest friends are from the Bay area.?But I digress. ?Not long after the move, I was still working on Boniva marketing and was asked to join a task force working on the launch of taspoglutide. I wasn’t given a full new position – I was ‘on loan’ from my former team – but there was a lot of urgent work to get done and they needed people would could roll up their sleeves. Unfortunately, the product ended up being discontinued several months thereafter, which also coincided with other business challenges for Genentech and Roche (new donut hole payments, Avastin breast cancer withdrawal, etc). Barely 12 months after I moved to San Francisco, my headcount was on the chopping block.?

So I started looking for a new role in the organization and applied for another marketing role. As I was gearing up for the interview process, my boss John pointed out that I was trying to pitch myself as a cookie-cutter sales and marketing person.?Except that I wasn’t.?Rather it was my unique background and experiences (combined, of course, with some traditional ingredients) that had made me successful in my current role.?And if I tried to position myself as the cookie-cutter profile, I would ultimately compare poorly to other candidates.?

This has been one of the most important things I’ve learned and now it’s central to my career and job search.?The path I’ve led has given me a unique and diverse set of experiences and enables me to bring value in so many different settings and in so many impactful ways. Meanwhile, if a hiring manager only wants a traditional cookie-cutter profile, that’s ok too – it just means the role is probably not the right fit for me.?

Be open to opportunities you hadn’t anticipated.?This quote from Joseph Campbell has always resonated with me: ?We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. ?My path has certainly not been as planned (in work or life for that matter) but I’m so much the better for it. The role I mentioned earlier in the Pricing & Contracting group came through a business unit head’s suggestion that it could be a good fit for me.?I met the head of the new group and was as much influenced by his leadership and the desire to join his team as anything in the job description.?It turns out market access doesn’t get me out of bed each day, but I learned so much from that role and it’s one of many key components in my tool kit that makes me successful (and allows me to talk intelligently to the people who do get out of bed for market access). More recently, during my first years at Akebia, my boss Michel invited me to lead the Alliance Management group.?I wasn’t sure about it since I wasn’t sure what kind of a career-path it would be and wasn't even sure what it would look like. But I got to keep marketing too so I figured it was ok to take the leap.?Well, it was the first step of several that got me out of my commercially-rooted experience into all things development.?A few more growth opportunities followed, and in my last year at Akebia I ended up leading a program team for a Phase 2 asset.?Were it not for being open to those left turns along the way, I don’t think I could have done that job and certainly not as successfully.?

There have been many other influential people and other lessons and stories I could share, but these are some of the most important.?As said at the outset, even now, I’m reminded of each of these as I search for my next adventure. ?