Episode #18 - Vivian DeWoskin, Chief Commercial Officer at Faro Health
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Description
Vivian DeWoskin is the Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy at Faro Health, a company on a mission to transform clinical trial design through intelligent, structured software. With a career spanning consulting, digital health startups, and enterprise commercialization, Vivian brings deep expertise in go-to-market strategy, team building, and customer development. At Faro, she’s driving cross-functional execution at the intersection of AI, clinical research, and scalable infrastructure—helping bring life-saving therapies to patients faster by making trials more efficient, inclusive, and patient-centric.
In our conversation, Vivian shares his insights on:
Faro’s Mission and Market Fit: How Faro Health is reinventing clinical trial design by digitizing and structuring protocols to reduce burden, improve quality, and accelerate research.
The Role of a Chief Commercial Officer & Head of Strategy: What this cross-functional leadership role entails, why startups need it, and how to grow into it.
Strategy vs. Tactics in Startups: Why the distinction matters, how to avoid common pitfalls, and how great leaders use second-order thinking to stay aligned.
Pricing Strategy from First Principles: How Vivian and the Faro team approached pricing to align incentives, drive value, and adapt to market feedback.
Strategic Flexibility with Real Options: How forward-looking companies avoid premature lock-in and keep multiple viable paths open.
Operationalizing Strategy with OKRs: A practical look at how Faro sets, cascades, and evolves organizational priorities without getting bogged down in process.
Achieving and Sustaining Product-Market Fit: How to recognize PMF, stay close to customer signals, and avoid complacency once it’s in place.
Career Growth and Leadership Advice: Vivian’s take on following curiosity, making your career narrative coherent, and owning your choices.
In this latest episode of Concept to Care, we had an engaging conversation with Vivian DeWoskin, Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy at Faro Health, a startup revolutionizing clinical trial design through AI-powered solutions. Vivian provided deep insights into her experiences in health tech, the nuances of effective strategic thinking, how to identify and sustain product-market fit, and shared practical advice for building successful cross-functional organizations.
Some takeaways:
Introducing Faro Health: Revolutionizing Clinical Trials through AI
What Faro does: Faro Health provides AI-powered software designed to streamline clinical trial design and optimize protocols.
Problem it solves: Clinical trial design often involves inefficient manual processes, high patient and site burden, costly amendments, and slow development cycles.
Who it serves: Faro primarily supports clinical development teams, particularly clinical scientists responsible for designing clinical studies.
Core product: Faro’s flagship tool, the Study Designer, enables structured, digital definitions of clinical protocols, paving the way for streamlined automation.
Impact & vision: The platform quantifies and reduces patient burden, optimizes site efficiency, lowers costs, improves quality, and accelerates the overall development and regulatory process—ultimately helping therapeutics reach patients faster.
Inside the Role: Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy: Vivian holds a dual role as Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy at Faro Health, integrating commercial leadership with strategic oversight across multiple teams.
What the role entails: A cross-functional position focused on connecting teams like sales, marketing, product, and operations, ensuring they're all aligned around common goals.
Why companies need this role: Startups, especially in health tech, often require generalists who can look holistically across functions to maintain strategic coherence and efficient execution.
How to pursue this path: Vivian emphasizes gaining experiences that build strategic thinking, relationship-building skills, and the ability to synthesize cross-team insights. She highlights her background in consulting as particularly beneficial for preparing her for this role.
Strategy vs. Tactics: Clarifying the Confusion
Clarifying the terms:
Strategy is your guiding principle—a framework that directs decision-making toward long-term objectives.
Tactics are the specific actions you take to execute your strategy and achieve short-term goals.
Common Pitfall: Startups often blur strategy and tactics due to rapid decision-making, resulting in unclear long-term alignment.
Best Practice for Leaders: Regularly revisit strategic goals to ensure tactical choices stay aligned and coherent with the overall vision.
Strategy as Choice: Effective strategy clearly defines both what you will do and what you explicitly decide not to do, providing clarity and focus.
Second-Order Thinking: Strategic thinking involves anticipating downstream consequences, positioning your organization for flexibility and sustained success.
Pricing Strategy: Start with Principles, Evolve with the Market: Vivian walked through how Faro Health approached pricing from first principles and shared tactical lessons learned along the way. Here’s how she thinks about pricing strategy:
Start with internal logic, not market mimicry: Faro didn’t begin by copying competitors’ pricing—they built a model grounded in how their product delivers value and what they want to incentivize.
Design for behavioral signals: Pricing should reinforce the behavior you want from customers. For Faro, that meant encouraging engagement with the platform—not just per-license fees, but usage-based tiers that reflect value.
Ensure internal consistency: All pricing components—whether tied to modules, usage, or implementation—should make sense when viewed together. Vivian stressed that misalignment erodes credibility.
Make pricing explainable and defensible: A pricing model should be easy to articulate in a sales conversation. If your sales team can’t explain it clearly, it likely needs refinement.
Iterate with market feedback: Even with strong internal logic, pricing must evolve based on how customers react. Vivian described early pilots and customer conversations as critical inputs for refining pricing over time.
Avoid mispricing complexity: In health tech, pricing is often complicated by multi-stakeholder environments (e.g., pharma, CROs, procurement, users). Pricing needs to account for that complexity without overcomplicating the message.
Anchor pricing to value, not just features: Vivian emphasized anchoring pricing to outcomes or value created—such as reduced protocol amendments or faster study design timelines—rather than a laundry list of product features.
Strategic Thinking: The Power of Real Options: Vivian emphasized the value of strategic flexibility through “real options” thinking—keeping multiple paths open and anticipating what’s next. Successful companies, she noted, avoid premature decisions and think in second-order consequences. Here’s how she breaks it down:
Thinking in "Real Options": Strategic thinking involves creating multiple viable options today, allowing flexibility and responsiveness to future market developments.
Avoiding Premature Lock-in: Vivian advises against prematurely committing to a single rigid path. Instead, organizations should maintain strategic flexibility, enabling quick pivots as market conditions change.
Second-Order Thinking: Strong strategists practice second-order thinking, carefully considering the downstream consequences of today's decisions to better anticipate future outcomes.
Positioning Ahead of Trends: Effective strategy involves proactively positioning your company ahead of emerging industry trends, rather than merely reacting as they occur.
Balancing Flexibility and Focus: Companies must strike a balance between maintaining flexibility (to respond to opportunities or threats) and the need for clear, decisive action toward achieving strategic goals.
Turning Strategy into Action: Goals, OKRs, and Alignment: Vivian shared how Faro Health translates high-level strategic goals into actionable team plans using a structured but flexible OKR process:
Start with clear company priorities: At the beginning of the year, the leadership team defines and communicates a small set of focused organizational goals (e.g., four key priorities).
Cascade into team-level goals: Individual teams develop their OKRs by aligning them directly to the top-level company objectives.
Balance structure with flexibility: Faro keeps the OKR process lightweight—formal enough to drive focus, but not so rigid that it slows down execution.
Quarterly check-ins: Teams revisit progress regularly, but not every goal is tied to a quarterly timeline—some objectives evolve more gradually.
Make goals measurable: Vivian emphasized that strong OKRs are quantifiable and falsifiable. If you can’t measure it or prove it didn’t happen, it probably shouldn’t be an OKR.
Achieving and Sustaining Product-Market Fit: Listen, Validate, Repeat: Vivian shared what product-market fit (PMF) looked like at Faro and how they’ve stayed intentional about maintaining it over time. Her take was both honest and tactical:
You’ll know when you don’t have it: Vivian emphasized that the absence of PMF is loud—sales feel like pushing a boulder uphill, customer interest is inconsistent, and the product struggles to land.
Signs you’re getting close: Repeatable sales, consistent inbound interest, and clearer messaging-market resonance are indicators that PMF is taking hold.
Don’t confuse early traction with fit: Even promising pilots or individual customers aren’t enough. PMF requires a pattern, not a one-off.
Stay close to the market: Vivian stressed the importance of staying in constant conversation with users and buyers. Don’t rely on internal assumptions—validate them continuously.
Avoid complacency: Achieving PMF is not a finish line. Markets evolve, competitors emerge, and buyer expectations shift. Vivian urged leaders to keep a healthy paranoia about maintaining fit over time.
Be decisive when it’s not working: If PMF hasn’t materialized, don’t cling to sunk costs. Vivian advocates for quick iteration and honest reflection rather than dragging out mismatched efforts.
Practicing Strategy in a Startup: Principles Over Playbooks: When Angela asked how someone “does strategy” at a startup, Vivian emphasized that strategy isn’t a one-time planning exercise — it’s a mindset. In her words: “It’s being the one who connects dots others aren’t connecting yet.” Here’s how she approaches it:
Be grounded in reality: Startup strategy must be rooted in what’s possible with the resources, people, and time you actually have.
Embrace fluidity: Strategy isn’t static — it's dynamic and emergent. Regularly pressure-test and evolve it as new data comes in.
Pattern recognition is key: Notice trends across teams, customers, and the market. Spotting and acting early on these insights is core to strategic leadership.
Tell the story internally: Strategy has to be understood by the whole team. Turn complex direction into a coherent, actionable narrative.
Know what you’re not doing: Strategy is about making trade-offs. Clear decisions about what not to pursue help teams stay focused and aligned.
Bridging Technical and Commercial Teams: Build Trust, Not Translation: Vivian emphasized that successful collaboration between technical and non-technical teams doesn’t come from acting as a translator, but from cultivating mutual understanding, trust, and shared goals. Here’s how she approaches it:
Foster curiosity and humility: Show genuine interest in how other teams think and work. Vivian makes it a point to ask questions and listen actively, especially when outside her area of expertise.
Build trust through transparency: Be honest about what you know and what you don’t. Trust grows when teammates feel you’re not bluffing your way through unfamiliar territory.
Don’t mediate—connect: Rather than act as a go-between, Vivian focuses on helping teams speak to each other by creating environments for direct dialogue and joint problem-solving.
Invest in shared context: When everyone understands the broader goals, they’re more likely to align their individual contributions. Strategy isn’t just for leadership—it’s fuel for collaboration.
Celebrate different lenses: Instead of smoothing over differences, Vivian encourages teams to embrace their unique perspectives as a strength in shaping better decisions.
Frameworks for Clarity: Tools to Anchor Strategy and Communication: Vivian shared how she uses structured frameworks to clarify business strategy and help teams align on direction. She highlighted two that have been particularly useful in her work at Faro:
Use the Business Model Canvas to define the system: Vivian recommends this classic framework to map out key elements of a business model—like value propositions, customer segments, revenue streams, and more—in a single view. It’s especially useful for startups navigating market fit and evolving their approach.
Apply "The Invincible Company" framework to evolve with intention: This framework, by Alex Osterwalder, helps teams understand how their business model fits into broader archetypes and strategic patterns. It visualizes a company’s position across innovation and scalability stages.
Make strategy visual: Vivian finds these tools helpful for turning abstract strategic conversations into visual artifacts that teams can gather around. It supports alignment and shared understanding across departments.
Contextualize where you are and where you’re going: These frameworks help teams place their current state in context—whether they’re still in discovery, validating, or building a long-term defensible advantage.
Teach strategy, don’t just tell it: Vivian uses these tools not only to guide decision-making, but to build organizational strategic literacy. Frameworks empower teams to think more critically and independently.
Personal & Professional Growth: Curiosity, Clarity, and Choice: Vivian closed the conversation with timeless advice for professionals looking to grow in strategic or cross-functional roles—especially in early-stage or health tech environments:
Build core strategic muscles: Invest in skills like synthesis, pattern recognition, and relationship-building. These are foundational for both strategy and commercial leadership roles.
Stay endlessly curious: Curiosity, not just ambition, is the long-term fuel for growth. Vivian encouraged following areas that genuinely interest you—even if they don't lead to a traditional title path.
Make your story make sense: Be intentional about your career path and articulate your narrative clearly. Your decisions don’t have to follow a straight line—but they should have a clear through-line when told aloud.
You always have a choice: Vivian emphasized that you’re never truly stuck. Knowing and exercising your agency—even in tough or ambiguous moments—is critical to crafting a meaningful career.
Show Notes
Where to find Vivian DeWoskin
Faro Health: https://farohealth.com/
—
Where to find Angela and Omar:
Angela Suthrave
Omar Mousa
—
Referenced:
Faro Health: https://farohealth.com/
Faro Study Designer: https://farohealth.com/study-designer/
Strategy vs. Tactics: https://nulab.com/learn/strategy-and-planning/strategy-vs-tactics/
The Chief Commercial Officer Explained: https://www.revenue.io/inside-sales-glossary/what-is-a-chief-commercial-officer-cco
The Chief Strategy Officer Explained: https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/Chief-Strategy-Officer-CSO
What/How to do tiered pricing strategy: https://stripe.com/resources/more/tiered-pricing-101-a-guide-for-a-strategic-approach
What is Second Order Thinking: https://fs.blog/second-order-thinking/
What is a “Real Option”: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/realoption.asp
Canvas Business Model: https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas
The Invincible Company: https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-invincible-company
Transcript
Vivian DeWoskin: [00:00:00] The difference between strategy and tactics is not well understood or articulated. A tactic is not a strategy. Strategy should be a guiding principle from which you develop the tactics to achieve said goal. But the tactics, the tactical execution is not the same as strategy. And, and I do think that's especially blurry in startup land where you make decisions quickly and then you immediately turn to implementation and so they, it gets It gets particularly muddy
Angela Suthrave: welcome to concept to care, where we hear candid stories of success and failure, discuss strategy and dive into the details that offer advice on what to do and what not to do in health tech,
Omar Mousa: whether you're a seasoned pro growing your career or just starting out.
Our aim for this podcast is to be relevant, real world and tactical. We're dedicated to not only entertaining you all, but also empowering you with actionable insights that can be applied beyond the podcast. One concept [00:01:00] at a time.
Angela Suthrave: This is Angela.
Omar Mousa: And this is Omar.
Angela Suthrave: Welcome to Concept2Care. Hi, everyone. Today, we're diving into the world of AI powered clinical trial design with Vivian Dvorskyn.
She is the Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy at Pharoah Health. Pharoah is revolutionizing how clinical protocols are built, and they do it with advanced, data driven software. In this conversation, Vivian is going to share her expertise on turning insights into action, how to find and sustain product market fit.
And how to thrive in a cross functional organization, whether you're building in health tech or scaling a product. This episode is packed with valuable insights. Let's get started.
Hello, Vivian. How are you? Hi, Angela. I'm
Vivian DeWoskin: great. How are you?
Angela Suthrave: Good. We're so excited for you to join us today.
Vivian DeWoskin: Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here.
Angela Suthrave: And can you tell us a [00:02:00] little bit about yourself to start?
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Vivian. I've spent my career working at the intersection of healthcare and technology.
Really specifically within life sciences, working adjacent to the life sciences and serving life sciences customers. Um. Gosh, I've always wanted, I knew from very early on in my career, I wanted to work somewhere in healthcare or health sciences. Um, I actually studied computational neuroscience in college and then I went into life sciences consulting to try to figure out my place in the healthcare ecosystem.
I did that for almost 10 years. I got my MBA along the way. I moved out here to California. And at some point I realized I was kind of missing using those computational skills, that side of my brain. So 2019, I jumped into health tech and I haven't looked back. And you find me today, right, as the chief commercial officer and head of strategy at Pharoah Health, which is the third startup I've worked in in health tech.
And I'm really excited to talk a little bit more about it on the course of our conversation today.
Omar Mousa: For that background. So, you know, [00:03:00] Pharoah Health, tell us a little bit more about Pharoah Health. What problem does it solve and who are your primary users?
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah. Pharoah is a really awesome company. Very cool product, very awesome vision and mission.
It was founded by our CEO, Scott to accelerate clinical development with data insights and ultimately automation. The core product that we started with our flagship product at Pharoah as a study designer. So we use that to work with clinical development teams and specifically clinical study teams, often like the clinical scientists that are designing clinical trials.
And use our platform to help them do that design process and to provide meaningful data and insights along the way, so that they can optimize their study design in practice. That means actually being able to quantify patient burden and therefore do something about it or quantify the impact to sites and therefore do something about it.
Meaningfully reduce costs, improve quality so that you can prevent [00:04:00] amendments. And in the long run, hopefully that means getting new therapeutics to patients faster and more efficiently. And that product to me is exciting all by itself, but while it's doing all of those things, while it's delivering value to clinical study teams, it's also laying the groundwork for, um, something that we call in the industry and in clinical development, digital data flow.
Um, and it's helping establish that data driven definition. Of a clinical protocol that can flow downstream and ultimately help us with that automation part of the mission that I alluded to earlier. So it's a really, really cool product and has a really great direction. I'm excited to be here and be able to work on it.
Angela Suthrave: That is so interesting. Can you maybe give us an example of that?
Vivian DeWoskin: Of digital data flow or? Yeah. So honestly, this is one of the reasons I joined Faro in the first place. Like I, like I said before, I think the study designer is so awesome and I think [00:05:00] absolutely. As a standalone product, it's fantastic. It delivers a huge amount of value to customers right out of the box, right on helping design their clinical studies in such a way that they could be really mindful of the other goals beyond just their scientific objectives.
But what actually had really sold me on Pharoah was this. Digital data flow vision. Let me give you a couple of, uh, a couple of examples, I think. Um, first I'll just start with, uh, the kind of just straightforward, like what does it mean if you have the definition of a protocol in a digital format, like a digital file format, and it's not a word document, then someone doesn't have to read a word document and then turn to the next system, like their EDC system, the electronic data capture system that you need in every clinical study and like type.
Things into that system actually just like, manually define the that you need the case report forms that are necessary for that study. Instead, you can actually just say, I have this digital definition and it just moves itself down the line to the [00:06:00] next system and programs it. The analogy I use with people who are not in the industry is like.
Getting a calendar invite, right? At one point in time, calendar invites as like a file type didn't exist. You'd talk to somebody maybe on the phone, you'd write the calendar, you know, appointment down in your date book, and you'd show up on time. And now, somebody just sends you that email, and the email's automatically on your calendar.
And it's, it's kind of like that, right? In a, in a sense, right? We're actually creating this new way of sharing information that cuts out a lot of the manual transcription steps. And also along the way is making it kind of higher quality because it's removing ambiguity. What did you mean by chemistry panel when you wrote that?
We now have a very clear definition with a light code, right? Or a CPT code associated with a particular assessment. That's one one example. Also, I joke a little bit, but having a structured data based definition of [00:07:00] a study gives you a really, really solid foundation to draw on if you're trying to Use AI based tools like generative AI to do, um, clinical content writing.
Like if you actually, at the end of the day, you still currently have to produce a written protocol document to send to the FDA before you can start a clinical trial. Somebody has to write that, but if you have this definition of the study that was designed in our system, now you have this file that can actually be used as the source of truth to create a, an AI generated document that conforms to the FDA's template, but is.
Not hallucinating things because it's based on this source of truth and it's constrained to that. So those are 2 examples, um, both of which we work on here at Barrow and in the long run, there's there's so many more examples of this across, um, the clinical development and life cycle of a study from the earliest stages of concept development all the way through trial execution, where if you don't work on it yourself, [00:08:00] right?
If you haven't been in this space, you might not realize how many steps are just. Very, very manual and require a lot of quality review and a lot of iteration and clarification, and it creates a whole bunch of opportunity for us to have a streamlined data flow going back to the original term I used.
Omar Mousa: I had a follow up on the AI portion.
Are you, is there a lot of unstructured data being produced in the platform that you would need to make those inferences against to generate kind of the output? Or, yeah, I just, I, that just dawned on me as we were talking.
Vivian DeWoskin: No, it's a great question. Effectively, what Pharoah's platform does is it takes a process that ordinarily would produce a lot of unstructured data.
Creates a structure for it, so it's kind of inherent in the process of designing a study and farro is the structuring of data for downstream use in the two examples I gave you and a whole host of others long term, [00:09:00] effectively, the longstanding kind of legacy way of designing. A clinical protocol is just that to do it in Microsoft word.
And quite honestly, to open up the last 1, you did and copy it into a new document and and start editing from there and there's a lot of. There's a lot there that is unstructured, even, even this like more structured parts of those documents, like tables aren't often enough to give you all the information you need, you've got to read six footnotes in order to interpret it.
And so something that our system is capable of doing is actually reading those footnotes, right, and doing the interpretation and then creating a structure out of it, so that by the time you get to the generation part, you're in a much better position, right, and again, can hopefully produce something that's higher quality.
Omar Mousa: You're the chief commercial officer and head of strategy. There's a lot of scope bundled up into that title.
Angela Suthrave: Yeah.
Omar Mousa: Um, can you tell us more about like some of the various [00:10:00] responsibilities that you have in that role, why the organization needs it? And then can you dive a little bit into like. The plan that you came up with, like the strategy after joining the organization and how that's kind of transpired over time.
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah, absolutely. When I first joined the company, I actually joined as in a strategy capacity. I joined as our chief strategy officer before ultimately now taking over the sales team and transitioning into what is more conventionally called the chief commercial officer. But I came in as our, as our chief strategy officer for kind of a reason.
And, and with some of my own opinions about what that should entail. I think I'll start at that part of the story and then I'll, I'll can transition into what else I do now. I have a strong opinion that more companies in health tech, particularly health tech startups, need a designated generalist or two, right, in their organization.
Somebody who's good at looking across [00:11:00] multiple different functions, all of whom are moving as fast as they possibly can, right. And make connections across them, or make sure that everyone is marching to the beat of the same drum effectively and working in tandem. I think that creates a much higher likelihood of overall success, right?
It creates a lot more coordination. And my background in, in strategy consulting and just the types of problems I like to work on lend themselves to that. I really like to work across disciplines. So I came in and, you know, officially I ran the marketing team and I ran our professional services team and I ran strategy, which was N of 1.
Just myself, but in that capacity, I was looking at a lot of different things related to generally our overall commercial strategy and our market strategy backing up a sack. I think when you hear strategy, there are some very clearly defined subcategories that people are maybe more familiar with than the overarching kind of role of a chief strategy officer.
Right? People understand kind of the concept of corporate strategy. Understand the concept of market [00:12:00] strategy. Product strategy, commercial strategy. I think effectively we, we grouped all of those. Under, under me at, at that point in time to be able to holistically look across them and harmonize them. So some of the things that I worked on when I first got started was evaluating our overall commercial strategy, pricing, our market segments, our competitive positioning within the markets.
How we were setting ourselves up to succeed in that competitive environment, given our product roadmap, looking at our overall go to market strategy. I think I mentioned my medicine pricing a second ago already, and thinking about what was going to be the right next step to take in the evolution of Pharoah's business model as we gain greater maturity in the marketplace.
There's probably a dash of a lot of other things thrown in there, right? Market strategy wise, there's a whole bunch. I contribute working with the product team on things like market research engagements. I work with our CEO on the odd things here and there that come up, like partnerships, [00:13:00] things that could be in the corporate strategy realm, even though we haven't necessarily formalized that into a role where one person leads it.
Um, and I think this makes sense because in general is something I've found to be common, uh, amongst. Friends and colleagues who have strategy roles is that, uh, the strategy persons often intentionally. I'll use the word generalist again, or a jack of all trades, because it can be so valuable to have someone who knows a little bit about everything so that when you have a new problem come up, happens all the time when you're building company or you're building new products.
When something comes up and you don't know who's the right person to go and answer it, you can turn to the strategy person and say, help me figure this out. And so that's a lot of what I did in my first six months or so at Pharoah was really. Understanding us, our product, our market, and helping fill in all of the pieces and connect the dots across the organization so that we would work better together as a whole and have a more cohesive strategy moving forward.
And I'm carrying that skillset and personality type and [00:14:00] those, that area of interest, right into my role now as chief commercial officer, having taken over the sales team. I think a lot of what I was working on before translates really nicely into direct implementation. Um, now. And I'm excited to see what comes next, uh, as, as the company continues to evolve and probably the role too.
Angela Suthrave: I love what you said. And in particular, I would love to dive into pricing strategy. So let's say that I'm a listener, I'm at an organization, there is product market fit. How do you think about pricing? Do you do different experiments? How do you land on a pricing that feels right as you scale as an organization?
Vivian DeWoskin: It's a really good question and it's a very common one. I think it's kind of ubiquitous, right? But as you said, if you've got product market fit value, this is your next problem to solve. And I'm no pricing expert. I won't put myself out there and say I'm the professor that you should necessarily learn from.
I learned from a lot of amazing people. [00:15:00] Things that I think about are a few basic principles. So one is I really like, um, I like pricing structures that are internally consistent. Alex, I'll come back. And explain each of these in a minute. I like pricing structures that are internally consistent that are strongly aligned to your organizational and product goals, right?
They make sense in the first place and they push behavior in the market in the direction that you want. Three are easily explainable and understandable to your customers. And of course, for that, they're aligned to the value you're creating, right? And they're capturing as much of that consumer value as you possibly can.
Doing all of those things right, thoughtfully does take time and experimentation, but I think they're great principles to live by. So it's very common, right? For any say subscription product or a software product that you yourselves may have subscribed to, that there's tiers. I think tiers are great.
Tiers allow you to do price, price [00:16:00] discrimination. They allow you to access different parts of the market and provide the value that that market segment is looking for and tie your price to it, right? That's like the general principle, but it also has to make sense. They have to make sense together. And again, if you're trying to still say, you're trying to push people from your free or freemium tier to the enterprise tier, right?
You have to have Incentives that that align to it that really push them across, right? It can't just be purely linear, linear, for example, right or purely volume based pricing. If you want to push people in a particular direction, you also have to coming back to my 2nd point about being aligned organizational goals.
Think about do you want to push people in a particular direction or not? And that should be kind of formalized in your process. Like if what you want is multi year contracts. Then there has to be something inherent in the way you've set it up that over time is going to draw your target customers in that direction.
It could be something as simple as, okay, the [00:17:00] price may double, but the value more than doubles each time, right? Or it might be feature based where there's very clearly features that you reserve for a certain tier of customers. Come, I think this actually comes around to one of the, I think the third point that I've made, which is it has to be understandable to your customers.
And that's why I also strongly don't believe in having, like, different prices for different parts of your market. Like, you can't just say, well, my price for you, huge pharma company, is X, and my price for you, a small biotech, is, is Y. I think it actually has to make sense with, in terms of, say, your feature set or your service level offering.
I, personally, I think that's a lot more defensible and, again, understandable to your customers, and it's not arbitrary. Those are some of the things to, to, I guess, I recommend people think about. Those are the things I thought about. I set out to establish these principles early on, share it with the team and say, these are the things I'm thinking about and defining what I think our price should be.
And then you do at a certain point have to pick a number [00:18:00] and you might have done formal pricing research and tested it or you might not have had time or the market size to do formal pricing research and actually like run surveys, but you're going to test it in the market one way or the other. And I think just it's important to capture that feedback and to make sure that your feedback mechanism is structured and it comes back into this principled based approach where there's.
logic and clear kind of goals behind how you set up your pricing.
Omar Mousa: That's interesting. There's definitely psychology, right? Especially with the tiered pricing, right? Sometimes they don't, you don't necessarily want your entire customer base to go towards the most expensive tier, right? Like you kind of present options to generate a, a psychology or a line of thinking.
So I, I totally, that resonates. I think it's funny about like non, Or like industry agnostic products that service healthcare as a product person, I'm always frustrated because the BAA or HIPAA compliant [00:19:00] product is always tacked in behind the enterprise tier. And I'm like, God darn it. I just need this.
Yeah. So frustrating. But at least you're, you're, you're fully servicing healthcare. So none of that's going on. You said earlier strategy, like people know corporate strategy, people know pricing strategy. I actually have a hot take. I think strategy. The word strategy is too liberally used and it's used incorrectly by folks sometimes.
Vivian DeWoskin: I agree with you.
Omar Mousa: I'm wondering, like, the term kind of has a vagueness. And so can you kind of help dispel or define strategy and make sure folks aren't in meetings just throwing the word strategy around?
Vivian DeWoskin: Well, I probably can't stop them from doing that. Let's be honest, everybody's going to keep doing it because it sounds nice and fancy and a little bit important.
But you raise a good point. I do think it's applied too liberally. And I also think that the difference between strategy and tactics is not well [00:20:00] understood or articulated. A tactic is not a strategy. Strategy should be a guiding principle from which you develop the tactics to achieve said goal. But the tactics, the tactical execution is not the same as strategy.
And I do think that's especially blurry in startups. Land where you make decisions quickly and then you immediately turn to implementation and so they it gets it gets particularly muddy That's that's one thing though that I do think is is not as that's really well understood or articulated The second thing that I think about strategy is I like I like in strategy, too There's a couple of different ways that I think about it One is just the concept of second order thinking to me strategy It involves being able to do that to say, I'm taking this action now because I expect X to happen at a certain point in time.
Another way to think about this is the [00:21:00] concept of a real option. Like, you know what an option is if you've ever gotten stock options, it's the choice to like buy some, you know, buy a piece of a stock in your company. But there is such a thing as a real option, which is like a real thing in the world. And I think a lot of strategy is actually anticipating what are those positions you might want to put yourself in in the future and giving yourself the opportunity, right?
Giving yourself the option, should that thing happen in the market or should that, should customers give you a certain feedback that you can respond to it? And those in and of themselves are still a little bit like, again, slightly verging on tactical, like the choices that you make. But I do think a lot of what is actually like strategic thinking involves that, like second order thinking, like getting ahead of some kind of trend in the marketplace near term or longterm.
Right. And, and identifying those opportunities where you can take some kind of course of action now to position yourself [00:22:00] well in the path of, of a trend or give yourself again, the option to take, to make a choice downstream so that you're not. Locked into the wrong one. Hopefully that made sense.
Angela Suthrave: Yeah.
And Vivian, like you're, you're saying, give yourself the option to do something in the future. It's also of my belief that your strategy should also guide you as to things that you don't want to do. That you don't. Mm hmm. Right? And I think that's really hard for startups because you don't really get to be choosy when you're really early as to what, uh, you can sell.
And if a customer is asking you for something and they're ready to pay you for it, it becomes particularly challenging to say, no, we don't do that thing. Oh yeah. And so how have you handled that? It's
Vivian DeWoskin: especially hard as a chief commercial officer, right? Like responsible for bringing in revenue to the organization.
But you're absolutely right. And I think that's where strategy and like long term thinking has to be tied actually to your commercial execution [00:23:00] at a leadership level. Because it is very easy to just find the next nearest dollar. And say, yes, absolutely. We can do that thing, but it will hurt. It may hurt most likely will hurt your long term opportunity.
If you do that every single time, like no one has infinite resources and can't you cannot do everything. So I think as you said, having some kind of strategy that guides your organization in terms of what you care about, what type of company you just want to be, what do you want to be when you grow up matters a lot here and like, you have to think about it.
And even if your five year plan is not a crystal ball, like kind of having an idea of where you think you want to go and consistently asking yourself, is this on the way to that? Or is this a detour? And if it's a detour, is it worth me taking it? Is it creating a potential new opportunity that I will learn from and, and may change my mind?
It's still worth I think in some circumstances like asking [00:24:00] yourself that question because you never know everything, but I think you have to be really critical of those opportunities when they come up and ask yourself hard questions and make hard decisions sometimes to say no to something in my experience with that like an easy way.
As easy as this ever is, but an easy way to do that is just to ask, like, is this going to be something we build for one customer? And if it's a, is this a one customer thing, or is this a signal of. A need in the marketplace that we actually should address and is going to turn into a new feature or a new product line for us over time.
And I think you can't make that decision based on just 1 customer asking you and promising to pay you to build this thing. You have to go and do a little bit of research. You have to and I think. It's easy to think also of strategy as being something that you do once and it's fixed, but I actually don't think that's true.
I think you're constantly like reminding yourself [00:25:00] of what it is and, and asking the right questions to either validate your strategy or identify the times where you, you know, have to have to make a pivot or have to change from it. But you've done so with kind of rigor and discipline and have taken like a principled approach to deciding if you're going to take those detours.
Angela Suthrave: If I'm listening to this right now and I'm at a brand new startup and you want, you want to do strategy, tell us what, what you do, like step by step and maybe what you could do is share what happened when you landed at Faro and you're the head of strategy. Like what did you do to set up the organization?
How did you learn about it? So I'm
Vivian DeWoskin: guessing if you're somebody that wants to be in strategy. You're a particular type of person who who likes learning things who likes maybe has high context needs for making decisions like you like to know you like knowing a lot [00:26:00] about a lot of different things in order to make better decisions, right?
So if you're like that, then maybe you have a similar learning style to me, which is jump in completely headfirst. Shadow as many different departments and people and meetings as you possibly can and just listen, I think that people who are really good at strategy tend to be people who I said have a desire for information right across disciplines, but who also tend to be good at finding the patterns in that information and making interesting connections across disciplines that.
Someone who's a real specialist in something might not see because they are focused on that particular more narrow discipline. So maybe you come in and you introduce yourself and you tell everyone a little bit about who you are, what you do, the way that you like to learn. I think it's important to tell people this before you start jumping in and shadowing their meetings.
But then you do that. And I think that it's really important to take a little bit of time to, [00:27:00] to learn and listen and observe. The second thing though, is while I'm doing that, I am defining kind of like we've done a little bit in this conversation, what strategy is if, if you're at a brand new startup, like in the scenario you've, you've, you've laid out, then probably nobody else has that title yet.
Right. And so you have to decide what's in your purview, what's not explain it to the rest of the organization. So they have some kind of a clue as to what you're going to be working on and how they might work with you. And then also confirm that with your senior leadership, right? Is this what you also agree this role, this role is, right?
Where are the guardrails? What are the things that I, I shouldn't maybe focus my time on versus I should focus my time on. So I did those things. I jumped in right away. I just started listening. I started trying to participate, asking a lot of questions, reminding people I was joining their meetings to just to learn and inviting them [00:28:00] to.
Kind of proverbially like, like, or like, throw, you know, take everything out of the, the silverware drawer and throw it on the floor. Like, I don't actually want the silverware drawer all cleaned up. I want you to throw everything out so that I can pick up the pieces and organize them myself. I kind of told people that's what I was going to do.
And one of the first things I worked on was I think like a relatively core. Kind of strategic project where I just looked across everything I was hearing across different teams and I said, I think we could do a better job of describing our company and our vision and our mission the same way across the organization because everybody's doing different things.
And therefore can articulate their job and the way that it connects to the product and the overall company's mission a little bit differently. I think we could do a better job of articulating that and making sure we're all saying it the same way and that we're clear as a leadership team also. On what exactly, again, we, we set out to do and why we're doing it.
And then just for fun, I often like introduce people [00:29:00] to like strategic frameworks that I like using and I, there was a lunch and learn we had where kind of described like, Hey, now that we've done this work to realign our vision mission, make sure we're talking about ourselves the same way, make sure we're thinking about our strategy the same way.
Let me, let me explain to you in somebody else's terms, not just mine, why this strategy makes sense. And what we're trying to do and give you analogs that might not be in our industry, but of other companies, right. That have pursued similar strategies and found success. So those were some of the things I did in my first few weeks.
I also jumped in on market research and I jumped in on pricing and I just jumped, I jumped in where people needed an extra hand where I thought I might be able to be the glue that pulls it together and I think, I don't know. I feel like that's fairly typical for strategy at a startup. Maybe it's not typical for strategy in a larger organization, but those are some of my Those are some of the first steps I took.
If that answered your question.
Angela Suthrave: Yeah. And tell us about what strategic frameworks you like.
Omar Mousa: [00:30:00] And the one that you did the lunch and learned on.
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah. So when I was in business school, I really liked the, the business model canvas, which is a tool, right. And for ideation, right. And coming up with your, your next great idea.
And in that same series, I I'm, I'm sorry that I'll forget the author's name, but there's a similar, there's another book in that same series called the invincible company. I actually sat down with our, our CTO and we both looked at the invincible company together and thought this would be a great way to explain to the organization why we're making the choices that we're making right now as to what we're prioritizing on our roadmap and why they aren't tangents.
Even if we're building co building them with a customer, for example, right? Why we're not just saying yes to the next dollar and why this makes sense in our long term vision. And one thing I like about that book is that it uses these archetypes of different types of companies. And I think one of them that really very strongly aligns to startups, right?
Is the visionary, right? Kind of archetype. And you're doing [00:31:00] something new, creating a category. You have to tell the world about it. And you have to kind of be the best at that thing because it didn't exist. Before and then there's another type of our archetype in there. I think that are called gravity creators and they are ones that through the, they're not only their product, but their business model kind of ink.
Make, create more of a moat and make it harder for customers to come in and out of their, their, their product, right? You're a little bit more locked in if you will, or it's become more integral to the customer's business. So it's harder to leave. And we had a great conversation about how one might move from being a visionary company to a gravity creator and one that is a much more integral part of.
Your customer's business process and not the shiny new upstart thing and and most companies once you get to a certain size, you have a mix of different types of products, right? That are in different stages. So you might still have a category [00:32:00] defining visionary product over here, but some other kind of product that is much more mature and stable and.
If you've done it right, it's a little bit more kind of guaranteed revenue, right? Aligned to your customers. So we had a really fun conversation in that lunch and learn about why the things that we're doing right now, even though they are currently visionary are on the path to maybe making us a much more.
I know I've used the word integral a few times, but you know, much more like fixed part of the customer's ecosystem
Omar Mousa: Real quick. Just if, if, is there something that you guys do to kind of make sure that the strategy is working or OKR is part of the equation or like, what's the tool?
Vivian DeWoskin: We, we do have OKRs. I think they're, they're, I've seen companies that are less formalized in them and I've seen companies that are more formalized in them. I'd say we're somewhere in the middle. We, one thing that I think is really important is just setting goals, at least for the year, right? Very, very clearly at [00:33:00] a leadership level, an executive team level.
Something we make sure to do as we, we start the year by being extremely clear to everyone. New York. Hey, these are the 4 things we care about right now. These are our 4 goals as an org this year. And here's why those are the right goals for us. And we roll those out at the end of last year for 2025. And we said, okay, now, if you're developing your team, okay, ours or your team goals, like, let's connect them back to the overall.
You know, strategic goals for the company for the year. And it's incumbent on us as an order to make sure those strategic goals, like, for the year, tie back to strategic goals in the long term, what we want to be when we grow up. But we, we do check in on them on at least a quarterly basis. Not every goal is done in a quarter, right?
Not everything can be neatly divided into these somewhat arbitrary time blocks, but I do think it's really important that anything that you're doing in. An OKR like process is quantifiable, falsifiable, is [00:34:00] actually something you can measure, or it doesn't really make a lot of sense to have it be an, an, an OKR.
And so we try to keep them fairly, fairly streamlined, right, and focused so that we're not creating too much process, um, that gets in, gets in the way, but we're still measuring ourselves against the things that matter.
Angela Suthrave: Do you believe in North Stars? And if so, how many North Stars do you have? And I ask this because for me, you know, a lot of times it's not just about revenue or gross margins.
It's also about, you know, the, the value that you're delivering. And so a lot of times what I hear is, well, how do you have multiple North Stars?
Vivian DeWoskin: I mean, I kind of think you're right. I think like, well, I think that's probably another term that gets thrown around, like strategy, right? Where it's not necessarily, it's straight a little bit from maybe what it was intended to be when whoever coined that term, coined that term.
That's why I like using goals instead of Northstar, right? I think you can have multiple goals, but I [00:35:00] think for me, if I were going to interpret what I think a Northstar is like, I would actually just come back to like, what is our vision or what is our mission as a company at the end of the day, if you.
If you are a startup founder, or if even you joined a startup, you likely did so because you believe in something, right? Like. You have choice of what you do with your career and how you spend your life. You could probably make more money and have fewer hours, you know, doing something else. Why didn't you do that?
Right. And I think whoever the founder is of the company, like has asked themselves that question, right? A million times over by the time you've joined their startup or they've raised any money and they have a product out in the world. And so ultimately I think. What I would call a North Star is just like, what is your reason for being and what did you set out to build here and why did you set out to build it?
And it's easy to sometimes forget that when it's when you're in the slog of the day to day and you have quarterly revenue goals or you [00:36:00] have a board meeting coming up. I'm not saying that it's easy by any stretch, but I do think that that's my interpretation of a North Star is like, what is. What are, what are we just trying to do here?
And I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to say that a North Star is kind of equivalent to like an annual goal. I guess that's just not the way that I would use it.
Omar Mousa: Um, let's switch gears a little bit here, Vivian. Let's talk about product market fit, finding it and sustaining it. At Pharoah, have you noticed or seen signals or even you know, identified a moment in which you all hit product market fit and what steps did you all take to kind of Build on that momentum,
Vivian DeWoskin: I think I actually think that the company achieved it or achieved a good measure of it just before I joined the company and that was actually something I was looking for when finding my next role was do do we have that?
Are we still really searching for it? Or have we honed in and we we think we have it now is the [00:37:00] time to Expand on it and really take advantage. And I think I think far did that. And I think one of the ways that that we could tell was the core product itself that we built that's in production, right? Was in demand and was consistent.
Like, we could say we could be very consistent in how we describe the product, what it does and And Multiple people are buying, um, and are seeing the value in it. The second kind of indicator was actually kind of pull from the market and demand coming inbound. It meant to me that we, that the company really had gotten kind of in front of those trends that I mentioned before, and had thought about how to best position the organization and the product to take advantage when the time was right.
So I think obviously most everyone will, you know, will resonate with product market fit makes. You know, you can tell you've gotten to product market fit if [00:38:00] people are buying it, but I also think it's the consistency, right? It's that you aren't changing it every time to get the, the buyer to say, yes, you're coming in in a repeatable fashion and it's still desirable, right?
By multiple different companies in your marketplace. Uh, and I think Farah was lucky to get there, right? And to, like I said, be well positioned in front of trends that are happening industry wide that are helping us and helping others in the space to accelerate innovation.
Angela Suthrave: What if you find that you don't have product market fit, you know, so can you share a story where you've ever had to pivot or adjust to better align with what the market wanted?
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah, I think of a couple of things. So I can think of, you know, a circumstance I was in at a previous company where the technology that we were building hadn't quite gotten to product market fit yet, and it [00:39:00] was, it became really clear, right. When you don't. People to buy it. Everyone's interested and they think what you're doing is really cool, but they say, okay, come back later when it's a bit more mature and and that's a really clear indicator that you haven't gotten it right yet.
Right? You are missing something and when that happens, you have to very quickly. I think be there and honest with yourselves about what it would take to get to it because at that point, if you've got enough feedback from the market where they've said, okay, come back when When you have X, Y, Z, you've collected a lot of data on, on what would lead to market fit and you've probably been looking at competition and thinking, how do I differ from them if they are selling and my product is not, that's where you have to make really, really hard choices because you might not have the funding to make the change that would get that particular product to market fit.
Or you might have to sacrifice some things you've been working on really, really hard that cost a lot of people's time and energy and, [00:40:00] and frankly, money. And it's very hard to get out of the sunk cost fallacy, but I think that the only way to have a good outcome there is to act really fast and, and be decisive and not treat everything as kind of too precious, right?
Remind yourself, I guess, of what your North star is, what did you set out to do and figure out what is the best way that I can. Move toward that, that is feasible, right? Given where I am today, right? Where I am in this decision tree, like what are the options currently available to me? And, and pick one, right?
And move forward. I think being too slow to recognize that you're at that point, being dishonest with yourself or saying, Oh, let's just wait another six months and see maybe we're wrong. And, or being too slow to ultimately like pick the next path, are all of the ways that. You know, you fizzle out. Right.
And I I've been in, in situations where we, it's been really, really hard to make those decisions, right. And [00:41:00] to, to pick the right path forward or, or, you know, you know what the right path forward is, but you have to, you know, significantly cut your burn somehow in order to get to that point. Right. Those are the hard decisions.
Omar Mousa: You talked about joining Faro after, just as they hit product market fit, which kudos to you for calling it out. Lynn. Like, you know, evaluating company, you know, when you go to evaluate a company, like, have you hit this target, which I think is great, you know, now that farrow has product market fit, what are you all doing to ensure that you're continuing to meet market needs and no one comes and eats your lunch?
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah, I think this is so underappreciated how much work it is to maintain product market fit once you have it, especially if you. Are working in a space where you're defining a new category because now you've shown others that there's a path here There's a there there and you're going to have people following in your footsteps and looking Much like you did when you found you when you started out as your startup right looking for ways to improve upon it [00:42:00] So for us, it really means Even if we're innovating or we're adding new products and we're looking for new things to do You can't ignore your core And I, I've been in at least one role in my past where I felt like we moved too quickly away from one of our flagship core products and quickly onto something else.
And it left it really vulnerable to, you know, the, the next competitor, right. Who was laser focused on building a better version of the thing that, that we have. So I think. Quite simply, it's just don't neglect your kind of core product, the one that hooks people and you know, resist the temptation to say like, Oh, we've made it.
It's going to be fine. And put all of your resources toward building the next shiny thing. That's going to expand your market opportunity because you can very [00:43:00] quickly lose your base if you do that. And so, you know, we listen to our customers. Quite honestly, I think that's like the best way to stay competitive.
Listen to what they're saying, listen to what they're asking for, do your research, stay apprised of what the competition is, know who they are. Every competitor is, you know, not a bad thing. Like it's important that we have competition. And honestly, a lot of the other startups in our space, like push us to do better.
But like, I do think it takes a little bit of thoughtfulness to know who are the. The competitors to, to pay attention to, right. And kind of coming back to a point you raised earlier, Angela, about not getting, you know, doing too many things at once. Don't get too distracted by all of the different competitors.
Lean into your core value proposition and listen to your customers.
Angela Suthrave: Say more about that. So when you listen to your customers have, do you have best practices on how to gather feedback, interpret the feedback? Is it subjective? Do you try to [00:44:00] have it be more quantitative? It's usually some combination of both,
Vivian DeWoskin: right?
There's a certain amount of subjective feedback that you're going to get at all times, or qualitative feedback, I guess is the way I'd put it, um, from your customer success team, or even, um, the things people are submitting, right? Through, uh, your kind of chat or help bot that is getting filed in product board.
And you can, but you can quantify some of that also after the fact, right? And we have a process for kind of going back through all of these requests or questions and looking for the trends and being able to kind of categorize things so that you have some kind of quantitative analysis. I also am just really big on tech.
Actually formally testing new ideas, uh, features products, both with your existing customers where that makes sense, but also with prospects right out in the marketplace, blinded or unblinded market research. I'm a big fan and then we do something [00:45:00] that we call our Faro community. And we created this kind of forum in which both customers or prospect, it's a little bit less formalized and solely farrow serving than like an advisory board.
It's, it's intended to foster community across our customers. But that's another thing that we're doing to make sure that we're facilitating the types of conversations our customers want to have. And through that process, we're also learning more about what they want and we're gaining consensus across multiple different customers and prospects.
And we're not just focusing too much on the requests of one customer over another.
Omar Mousa: You know, product management has this issue across cross functional orgs. It's like finding a place, making sure everybody understands the role and the function strategy. I feel like has, you know, given that product has its own, there's product strategy and then strategy as a function has its own challenge set of challenges.
So talk to us about how, like strap the strategy or collaborates across other [00:46:00] teams, such as. Product engineering, marketing, and then you have sales. So I'm sure it's pretty tight knit, but.
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah, I think that's an absolutely essential part of the job. I think it's kind of core to the description actually of strategy is that you have to be able to work across all of these different functions in the organization and work with them well, and understand what the goals are of these different, of, of can be different stakeholders, what their needs are and tie them all back in some way to something cohesive.
So I think that. Beyond just being kind of a, you know, good, rational kind of analytical thinker and strategy, you also have to be good, a good communicator and you have to develop strong relationships. I, on a regular basis, try to share out what I'm working on in the same way that product or marketing shares out what they're working on like strategy.
I think especially. Especially strategy because there's a little bit of this murky vagueness about what it means like hat can't be a black hole and you have to have updates [00:47:00] in, you know, if we do an all hands and everybody gives a department update strategy better have one too. What is strategy doing?
What does it mean? Because it's, it's easier to understand what sales is doing and marketing is doing and product is doing, but if you, if I think it's easy sometimes for strategy to kind of sit back and say, like, oh, we don't have a department update. We're just thinking. We're thinking really hard. So that's, that's one thing, right?
It's just actually communicating what we are working on and why and how our, our thinking evolves over time. So that when, when I go and I try and work with teams on the roadmap, or I work on our overall, see like go to market strategy, or we think about. Corporate strategy and partnership potential, right?
I have the relationship capital, right? To be able to have those conversations and kind of frankly, get a little bit up in other people's business, right? Of how they run their teams and the decisions they're making and to do so from a place of like shared, shared incentives, shared goals, right? We're both working toward the same thing and that I'm reciprocating, right?
By [00:48:00] sharing out what I'm doing with that information and making it deliberately, not a black box and not hiding behind a curtain called strategy.
Angela Suthrave: Vivian, in your role, obviously you're working really closely with product and engineering teams. And so curious about how you foster strong relationships between technical and non technical folks alike.
Vivian DeWoskin: I'm glad you asked the question because I think that this is a, can be in a lot of organizations challenging to maintain alignment and to foster real team collaboration across that kind of like technical non technical divide, or even like the technical commercial divide, right? In particular where.
There's a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong and kind of get lost in translation. My particular take on this is to just lead with openness and curiosity. in all things. I think it's really easy to sometimes forget that other, again, kind of back to the strategy point, that other people don't know what you do.
Like other people [00:49:00] don't know your job and that you don't necessarily know theirs either. Um, I come from a computational background. I know a little bit about how to code and that helped me in like earlier days of trying to figure this out and earlier in my career and strategy, um, to, to bridge this divide.
Part of it was based on like competence and showing up and demonstrating I understand you. But I can't always do that, right? I'm nowhere like close to any of our actual technical team for true skill, right? I don't really know what, what they do day to day, but I can be honest about that. And I can want to learn what they're working on and I can validate their concerns and I can answer their questions.
And I can be transparent about what my goals are and what I'm trying to accomplish on the commercial side of the house. And I, I come back to the point I made before about relationships. I think the best way to bridge this divide is to [00:50:00] maintain good ones. And it comes back to a little bit of like basic human decency and strong communication skills, listening openly, asking good questions, caring about what people do with their time and about how they answer your questions, validating their concerns, and then explaining really transparently.
What you need from them or why you're asking the thing that you're asking and then being able to do the same interest in return. Right? Hopefully it can create an environment where those teams can ask us questions and without getting defensive or shutting down or kind of slipping up and kind of rolling your eyes.
Like, oh, you don't know that already. Just answering, answering them truthfully and honestly. And I think I'm fortunate to have a really, really great relationship with our CTO. And that helps to bridge this, right? We are not at odds. We are both looking at the, we were on the city on the same side of the table, looking at the opportunity and saying, how can we do this together?
And we also have transparent conversations about this exact thing. Very often, right? When I say, Hey, it's very common for people to be [00:51:00] afraid of what the sales team is out there selling, right? Or be worried that we're. Committing them to a thing that is going to take them weeks to build, right? Or will you help me make sure that we are maintaining relationships?
Will you sitting where you sit, you know, leading the technical teams, look out for those moments and like, keep me in the loop and help me find opportunities to demonstrate that we are kind of trustworthy stewards of the business. And that we are on the same team and I think that's the only way you can do it right is to create a sense of being on the same team, even when you're making difficult decisions that are affecting somebody's working hours or somebody's compensation if they're going to hit their sales goal, right?
It's easier said than done. But I, I think it can be done if you build the right culture on both sides. And then one thing I really liked from a company I used to, [00:52:00] I used to be at, one of the corporate values was deliver wow. And I really liked that because it appealed to both the technical and non technical teams, right?
It inspired the product and the technical teams to build really awesome things that delighted people. And it inspired kind of the commercial, the marketing and sales teams to present what we had in such a way that it really wowed people. And I just, I liked it because it was one of the ways that you kind of foster a sense of camaraderie of being on the same side and like having a shared goal, even when, again, you're making difficult decisions that sometimes are a little bit at odds with one another.
Omar Mousa: I think you're very right about fostering trust, demonstrating curiosity, trying to understand. Product sits at the intersection of business design and technology. You see that triangle all the time. And you know, I don't have any influential capital if there's no trust or someone thinks they don't understand my function.
So therefore it just, you [00:53:00] can't get stuff done. So that resonates.
Vivian DeWoskin: I was going to say what you just said really resonates with me too, because something I didn't mention earlier when talking about strategy roles is that it's really, really common that strategy roles are, um, a matrix role, right? And you don't have direct authority, um, to tell someone what to do.
The only thing you can do is influence through relational capital, right? And, and evidence and transparency. And I. I think what you said about product feels really similar.
Omar Mousa: Matrix orgs are hard. Vivian, you have a really cool job, really cool scope. Awesome. You know, you're just like an awesome career. Is there anything that you can say to the audience that help that guide an individual to kind of following your footsteps, your track, is there a track?
That sort of thing.
Vivian DeWoskin: Well, on the kind of commercial strategy side, I definitely. I definitely didn't think or know I [00:54:00] was on a track along the way, but I certainly think that being a consultant helped kind of push me in the direction that I've gone in. There's a lot of different ways you can go from consulting, right?
That's actually part of the beauty of it is that I think it gives you a lot of foundational skills that are applicable for for lots of different career paths. But I look back and I think, well, the way that you're taught to think as a consultant really does Translate into strategy roles. You are also really taught to take in information from a lot of different places to be able to work with a lot of different people to build and foster relationships, to make insightful connections and kind of get to the point quickly.
And I think those are all things that really matter for, for a strategy role. Maybe a little, uh, on the commercial side of things, while I, while I think strategy skill sets and commercial skills that should go hand in hand more often, they, they don't always, right. And I think there's like a traditional commercial leadership path that goes through [00:55:00] sales.
I, I spent, I spent time in sales, but I think my experience as a sales rep was. Heavily influenced by having been a consultant, right. And being a seller doer, I love that experience for me too, right. On this, this track that I realized I was on because you also become very honest about what you're selling because you have to go do it.
I think right now, kind of back to our last conversation from a moment ago, it helps me be more trustworthy with my technical team members, because I know what it feels like to sell something that you can't deliver on, right. And I don't want to do that either. So, you know, not to sound like a broken record, but I did find that consulting really, really helped me personally from a broader, from a broader perspective, right?
I think the single thing that has helped me in my career is just following the things I'm curious about and passionate about and letting that shine through in how I show up to [00:56:00] interview or how I pursue the next opportunity. I think at every single point along the way in my career journey, There were multiple like maybe options or maybe the choice that I made wasn't the one that somebody else would have made in that same situation.
But to me, they made sense. I was still a through line for me personally. And I think rather than saying, well, I've got to be in this track and this is what the track looks like. Which is very tempting, right? And it's kind of. Easy if you will to like say like this is the prescription for how I get to doing Vivian's job I would actually say it makes it make it's it's more important that you see the through line and that you can Communicate that effectively to the next person along your career journey as to like why it makes sense that you are there right now Asking for this job and interviewing for it And that's always been really clear to me because I was truly following the thing I was interested in and it made sense and I just made sure to tell people why this thing made sense.
And so that's [00:57:00] generally my advice, right? Because I, I don't really While there are, you could, you could say that there are such things as tracks, right? Just because there's common outcomes, uh, from different types of jobs, right? And going in different directions. I, I think that's a little bit boring. And I also think that you have a lot of actually choice in your career that people sometimes forget they have.
And one of the fastest ways to kind of regain it is to truly follow something that you're, you're very interested in, passionate about, and you can articulate to somebody why you are doing this and why you're the right fit for it along the way.
Omar Mousa: Best quote ever. You have a choice.
Vivian DeWoskin: Yeah,
Omar Mousa: you have a choice.
Vivian DeWoskin: I'm glad you think so. Yeah,
Angela Suthrave: Vivian, we have reached the conclusion part of our [00:58:00] podcast, the concept closing call. And so we've already talked a little bit about frameworks, but maybe you could tell us your favorite one.
Vivian DeWoskin: Well, in true consultant fashion, I love a good two by two. Like I love, I just, I think it's really easy to explain to people sometimes, like just.
Pick, like, two dimensions that matter to a decision or to a problem that you're trying to explain, and it's a very fast way to communicate a lot of different things. It's, like, very utilitarian in that way. So, maybe not the most interesting answer to that, but I, I think, uh, I like things that can be used in a lot of different, um, situations to communicate a lot of different types of concepts.
Omar Mousa: What is a tool that you use? Often that's highly valuable that you think others shouldn't use
Vivian DeWoskin: tool like a framework or like,
Omar Mousa: no, no, someone once told us a pencil. Yeah. Anything.
Vivian DeWoskin: Oh my gosh. I love [00:59:00] that. Um, uh, a musical instrument.
Omar Mousa: I have to ask what I play the guitar.
Vivian DeWoskin: Okay. So I, I, I, I think having some kind of like artistic creative pursuit in your life makes it makes it richer.
And more people should, should do it. More people should just pick up something and try it out.
Angela Suthrave: What concepts in healthcare excite you right now?
Vivian DeWoskin: Ooh, that's an excellent question. Well, I've been a big, just data nerd for a long time. And so kind of speaking to. The reason I joined Barrow, I'm really just, I've just generally for a long time, been interested in data interoperability and in, and in data flow and in honestly data architecture.
And it's not specific to healthcare, but I do think that the ubiquitousness now of AI, especially in the form of LLMs has taught a lot more people that AI and data are two sides of the same coin. And that you don't get good AI without good [01:00:00] data. And I I'm just excited to see more people kind of recognize that just generally across industries.
And then within healthcare in my space, I think it's helping people realize that there are more things that like are data or could be data than like what they conceive of when they think the word, right? If people, if your first thought is like, it's a number in a spreadsheet, you're a little bit too limited.
And I think, especially working in the life sciences with a lot of folks who aren't necessarily. Who don't share that that same background or maybe aren't data scientists themselves, like realizing that there is data in this thing that you weren't previously structuring is really exciting.
Omar Mousa: Saying you care about data architecture is a great way to get engineers to trust you.
So look at you doing that. Just planting it right here for everybody to hear. Um, last question, Vivian, where can people get in contact with you? Do you have any shameless plugs?
Vivian DeWoskin: Oh gosh, you will. You can always reach me on LinkedIn. I'm there all too [01:01:00] often. I am chronically online, but I'm a little bit of a lurker on social media.
So I'm not sure that you can find me. In most of those places, but you can find me at faro. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me at the next clinical development conference in our space. And I guess, shameless plug, do I have, uh, pretty, it's a little bit boring to say a shameless plug for us here at Pharo, but if you are, you know, in the life sciences and you're interested in what we were talking about, I'd love to hear from you if you're interested in, uh, a career or doing the types of things where we're doing, check out our careers page because we're always looking for fantastic people.
We're based in San Diego, so it's a pretty nice place to live and work. I can recommend it.
Angela Suthrave: Vivian, thank you so much for being on our podcast. Thank you
Vivian DeWoskin: so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun.
Omar Mousa: Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show. If you liked this episode, don't forget to leave us a rating and a review on your podcast app of choice, and make sure to [01:02:00] click the follow button so you never miss a new episode.
This episode was produced and edited by Marvin Yue with research help from Aditi Atreya. We're Angela and Omar, and you've been listening to Concept2Care.