S2: Ep 19 Measuring What Matters: OKRs, KPIs and Stage Gates

A regulatory milestone is not an objective; the market position after clearance is. For life science product teams.

Shownotes

Three years into a development program, R and D says it won, commercial says it lost, and regulatory says everything was fine. They were all measuring different things, and nobody caught it at the gate where it mattered.

This episode is for life science product managers, commercial leaders, and regulatory affairs leads running stage-gated development programs.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray explains why most teams write their failure mode into the program at the first gate by treating success criteria as a flat KPI list. She walks through nesting objectives, key results, and KPIs into one picture at different altitudes, why the bet has to be agreed in the room rather than circulated as a draft, and how the gate itself becomes the forcing function that earlier OKR rollouts never had.

The one idea to remember: a regulatory milestone is not an objective. The 510(k) clearance date is a milestone on the critical path. The market position after clearance is the objective.

What you will learn:

• Why a flat list of KPIs called "success criteria" guarantees three functions will disagree about whether the program won.
• How to nest the objective, three key results, and the function-owned KPIs into one picture at three altitudes.
• Why agreeing the bet in the room beats circulating a draft that everyone signs and nobody owns.
• What makes a gate-centred OKR structurally different from the planning-exercise rollouts that quietly died after Q1.
• How to handle a competitor entering your segment six months in without reopening the objective.
• The single first move for a product manager whose template has only a KPI field.
  
  

Chapters:

• [00:17] Where teams write the failure mode in at MS1
• [01:42] Nesting OKRs and KPIs instead of running parallel tracks
• [02:34] Why the bet has to be agreed in the room
• [03:38] What makes this different from OKR rollouts that died
• [04:20] A regulatory milestone is not an objective
• [05:06] When a competitor enters and the bet looks stale
• [06:21] The product manager's first move at MS1
• [07:06] The same structure at every gate
• [08:03] Where to find the full blog and book a consultation

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Read Jasmine's blog post on buyer presence here.