Most healthcare marketers treat launch planning like a checklist: materials, messaging, channels, done.
In reality, launches succeed when sales and marketing align around critical customer decision points — not when they produce more materials.
When these “moments that matter” are overlooked, you end up with well-polished materials that don’t actually move behavior — or worse, a sales team that’s out of sync with marketing.
We recently worked with a client preparing for a major product launch. Instead of defaulting to push-based engagement tactics, we used design thinking to answer the question:
“What if we built our go-to-market around the moments when our customers actually need us?”
Here’s the sprint-based approach we laid out:
1. Discovery
Deep-dive interviews with HCPs, advisors, and patients to understand their current reality, not our assumptions. Synthesize insights into empathy maps and identify where traditional engagement is missing the mark.
2. Build
Interactive workshop to co-create customer journey maps, surface “moments that matter,” and ideate pull-based engagement concepts. Prioritize ideas based on impact vs. effort and define pilot hypotheses with clear success metrics.
3. Blueprint
Build pilot roadmap with clear owners, timelines, and measurement plans. Package everything into a leadership-ready playbook that could be adapted for other markets.
This matters because most launch plans fail not from lack of effort, but from lack of alignment on what actually drives customer decisions. Design thinking forces teams to challenge assumptions, test quickly, and design around real-world customer needs — not what looks good in a deck.
Pressure-testing your go-to-market approach for an upcoming launch?
Let’s talk!
