Stack page: UCB_Interview_Stack.html · Reference: UCB_Interview_Reference.html
"Where is your commercial pharma experience?"
Commercial P&L first — $23M across seven states at Syncor — plus business-requirements ownership for the $13M CRM running order fulfillment. At AVOXI I built omnichannel journeys on Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Journey Builder, Automation Studio); at Street Grace, chatbots on the Salesforce platform — Apex, Visualforce, custom objects. I've carried the P&L, owned CRM requirements, built the journey orchestration layer. Pharmacist active since 1984 — I've been the HCP on the receiving end of pharma engagement ever since.
Next: "What have you commercially owned since Syncor?" AVOXI retention, Invistics commercialization to 300+ hospitals, Evernorth payer economics — continuity, not nostalgia. "How do pharmacy relationships translate to brand marketing?" Concede the difference; the identical muscle is selling into hospitals and knowing what earns a clinician's trust — plus the platform and journey work on top.
"What does CRM evolution mean? First 90 days?"
Two things at once: the CRM gets rebuilt on Veeva Vault CRM — end-of-support was just accelerated to December 31, 2029, and the peer set has already moved: Novo, Lilly, Regeneron, Biogen — and its role changes: from a database reps type into, to the system of record that AI agents orchestrate around, people still approving what goes out. I've done both halves: governed GenAI layer at Amgen — narrow start, expansion earned at a production milestone; multi-year compliant migration at J&J. Ninety days: audit workflows and stack, stand up one small governed pilot, deliver the readout with a build-versus-buy roadmap tied to patient journey optimization. Expansion is earned, not promised — the Amgen pattern.
Next: "How do you sequence a CRM migration against launch calendars?" Migrate between launch waves, pilot on the calmest brand calendar, never freeze a launch team. "What would you deliberately not do in six months?" Rip-and-replace — the migration is a program, not this contract. My job is the decision architecture and the first governed agent.
"Design an agentic solution for omnichannel HCP engagement."
The CRM stays the system of record; agents orchestrate around it. Nothing reaches an HCP without passing the MLR gate. Two pieces first: a pre-call agent briefing the rep with a recommended next-best-action and the reason visible; voice-to-CRM capture, human-confirmed. Agents recommend, people approve — human-in-the-loop is the architecture; everything logged for audit. That loop is what I built at Amgen under GxP — the Invistics scored-routing and NewsRx parallel-run patterns, applied to commercial. One design question I'd evaluate first: Veeva's agents run on AWS Bedrock, and UCB's stack is Azure — Veeva's Azure AI Foundry carve-out is where I'd test the fit.
Next: "What breaks when the agent is wrong, and who catches it?" The rep catches it — the recommendation arrives with its reasoning visible; wrong-but-confident is caught at the recommendation, not in front of the HCP. "How do you earn a rep's trust?" One win in their own workflow — voice capture first: hours back, nothing customer-facing.
"How do you measure ROI? Name the KPIs."
Baseline first, measurement plan in the charter, kill-or-scale gate at the pilot. KPIs: rep hours returned, next-best-action acceptance rates, channel engagement vs. baseline, MLR cycle time — control group before anyone claims revenue. At Amgen the number was 40% drafting time saved, verified at a milestone; that number earned Board approval. Same discipline here: small KPI set agreed with finance upfront, value tracking reported at every governance gate.
Next: "Which KPI would a brand team game if their bonus depended on it?" Acceptance rates — if reps can one-click without reading, so acceptance pairs with outcome sampling. Metrics come in pairs, never alone. "Would your 40% survive our CFO?" It survived a Board — time-per-document, same writers, same document types, before and after. A stopwatch, not a survey.
"Three vendors, a platform owner, skeptics — your plan?"
The first failure mode is decision rights, not technology — governance week one: Patient Impact owns priorities, DT AI owns the platform, I own delivery and the vendor scorecard, biweekly gate for spend. Month one: audit, score three vendors on one framework. Months 2–4: prove one workflow end to end, not three demos. Months 5–6: harden, hand off. Month six delivers a pilot in production with audited KPIs, a build-versus-buy decision, governance in writing. Done under this clock before — NewsRx: eight-week SOW scoped for four, delivered solo, converted to production MVP.
Next: "Why a contractor instead of an FTE?" The decision doesn't need permanent headcount — it needs concentrated senior delivery for six months, then the capability lives in DT AI. "Biggest failure on a program like this?" One real story, ready — own your part, state what changed.