The Board You Have Answers a Different Question
Your advisory board met in March. Eight names, six of whom have co-authored with each other, on a scientific advisory board that R&D convened and you were invited to attend. Three of them had already run the new multiplex ELISA panel in their own labs. They liked it, and they were specific about why: lower background than the kit they use now, and the 8-plex format saved them a second run on precious sample. The minutes recorded all of it.
Eighteen months after launch, consumable attach rate has not cleared 15 percent and the second-year reorder has not come.
The advisory board was not wrong, and nobody was flattering you. They answered a question about the science, accurately, from evidence. You needed an answer about the market.
The Romans had a god for that gap.
Mercury went to the place his messages came from
Mercury carried messages between the mythological gods, and also between the living and the dead. Unlike most Roman mythological deities, who stayed in their own domain and sent word across it, he went down to the underworld himself, escorted the dead, and came back. He had been to the place his messages came from.
Your scientific advisory board may not have the commercial messages a Product Manager (PM) needs.
Ask a principal investigator (PI) whether your multiplex ELISA panel will sell and you will get a real answer, and a genuinely useful one about their own purchase. A PI buys reagents and they know what their grant may carry and what their bench will tolerate. What they cannot tell you is what happens in a laboratory that runs a validated standard operating procedure (SOP) under audit, where adopting your panel means revalidating a method and defending that cost to someone who never touches a pipette. The words travel, but the conditions that produced them stay in the lab.
Most product managers do not have an advisory board
Most PMs have visiting rights to the advisory board meeting run by R&D. The scientific advisory board is already contracted, already convened on a cycle, and already staffed with the people whose names carry weight in the field. A second board has to be funded from scratch. Instead, the commercial questions get added to the scientific agenda, and they come back answered or with vague answers.
One question tells you whether this is happening to you. In the board you currently sit on, has advisory input ever caused the company to spend money toward solving a commercialization issue that was not budgeted, or move a date already committed to the business? Reshaping a spec does not count. If you inherited the board, ask your predecessor. If the answer is no, that is still a legitimate board to run, provided its minutes stop appearing in gate documentation as evidence of demand.
The two boards need different experts. A PI can tell you whether a method is sound. A quality control (QC) manager in a regulated lab can tell you what it costs to revalidate an existing SOP, which for a regulated lab is usually the largest single barrier to switching, and which no PI has ever had to pay. Neither type of advisory board is a substitute for the other, and the distinction is worth making explicit before your next Stage-Gate® review in the new product development (NPD) process.
| Advisor type | Can tell you | Cannot tell you | How PMs misuse them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scientific and technicalPIs, method developers, assay leads | Whether the science holds, which performance claims are credible, what fails and why | Whether anyone buys it, at what price, displacing what | Reading enthusiasm for the method as demand for the product. Their professional currency is scientific advancement, drug or diagnostic discovery. |
| Commercial and marketCore facility directors, QC managers, procurement leads, distributors | Switching cost, revalidation burden, budget cycle, who signs the order | Whether the chemistry survives scale-up or holds across lots | Not convening them at all, because R&D's board already exists and this one has to be funded |
Price decides how far the gap runs. On an $80,000 benchtop, the core facility director usually signs, so one advisory conversation reaches the person who decides. On a $400,000 platform, that director is one voice inside a capex committee that also includes finance, environmental health and safety, and a department vice chair who will never touch the instrument. A director-level advisor may sit on that committee, or present to it. But the directors on your board are the ones whose case succeeded. They can tell you how they won, not why other sites said no.
For that you need someone who has sat on the other side of the recommendation: a procurement lead, a finance business partner from a comparable account, or a distributor who has watched a dozen of these committees reach a decision.
Move 1: Write the question at the top of the agenda
Before the advisory board agenda goes out, write one line at the top of it. This board answers scientific questions, or this board answers commercial questions. Then move every question belonging to the other one onto a separate list which becomes the specification for the board you do not have yet.
Moving a question off the agenda does not mean nobody asks it. Until the second board exists, ask it in the scientific session as before, and record the answer under the heading it belongs to. Separating them does something narrower: a commercial answer from a scientific advisor enters your gate documentation labeled as what it is, which is an informed guess from someone who has not been in the room where the financial decisions are made.
Four commercialization advisors, ninety minutes, twice a year, run virtually, costs less than a mid-tier trade show booth. That is the number to take for approval, alongside the list of questions.
Move 2: Staff it, then audit who you staffed it with
Mercury was useful because of where he had been, not because of how well he spoke. Staff for that.
Create a one-page charter with:
- Purpose: which of the two question types this board answers
- Composition: which customer segments hold seats, and what percentage of current revenue each of those segments actually represents in the NPD business case
- Cadence: how often, and where the sessions sit relative to gate dates
- Terms: one to three years with a defined renewal, so seats refresh without an awkward conversation
- Confidentiality: what advisors may repeat outside the room, what they may not, and for how long
The composition line is the one that does the work. On an inherited board the roster was chosen by R&D, on scientific reputation, for scientific purposes. That was the right basis for their question. Nobody has since checked it against where the money comes from, because the board does not belong to the person asking the commercial question. Check it anyway, even though you cannot change it: knowing which segments your advisors do not represent tells you which of their answers to treat as anecdote.
If 60 percent of your western blot imaging revenue comes from mid-size contract research organizations running routine quantitation, and the board is five academic PIs doing novel multiplexed work, the roster is not wrong. It is answering R&D's question correctly. It will keep surfacing development questions your revenue base will never ask.
The audit looks different on capital equipment. If you sell a $400,000 platform and every advisor on your roster will run the instrument, every seat is held by a site that got the purchase approved. None of them lost the argument for your instrument, and losing that argument is the outcome you most need to understand. At least one seat should belong to a site that evaluated a comparable platform and bought something else.
The same discipline applies to any proxy for the buyer, including a synthetic customer panel and a beta cohort. If you have already read why your beta program may be lying to you, the failure mode here is a similar one: a group recruited for availability and goodwill, reporting back on conditions that were never the customer's.
Move 3: Ask at Feasibility, and ask what killed it
Advisor time is the scarcest input in any of this, and you have just budgeted for very little of it. Spending that time on questions you could have narrowed beforehand is the most expensive mistake available to you.
A synthetic customer panel earns its place upstream of the session. Put the positioning in front of it, run the configuration options past it, and watch which objections come back consistently rather than once. Some of what surfaces is noise. Some of it is a question you did not know you had. A few are patterns worth checking against real buyers. The synthetic panel tells you where to point the ninety minutes and which assumptions are worth a pre-mortem. Confirming what is actually true still needs someone who has been there.
The right people in the room still produce nothing if you ask them the wrong thing at the wrong time. A board convened after the capital request has cleared will agree with the plan, because the money is committed and the meeting has nowhere else to go. Hold the session at Feasibility, and change the question.
Gary Klein's pre-mortem framework suggests that instead of asking what could go wrong, you state that the product has already failed and ask what killed it. He cites research finding that people asked to imagine an event has already happened are 30 percent better at working out why it happened. The session takes twenty to thirty minutes.
For a commercial board, that means asking them this:
The product launched eighteen months ago. Consumable attach rate never cleared 15 percent, the second-year reorder did not happen, and the line has been written off. Before anyone speaks, write down what killed it.
Three rules decide whether the session produces anything.
Executives leave the room. Klein's method depends on people naming problems freely, and advisors will not name a problem that implies criticism of the person who funded the work, particularly when that person is sitting across the table and controls whether they are invited back.
Everyone writes before anyone speaks. Independent silent writing, then a round robin. Without it, the first advisor to speak sets the range and the rest calibrate to it. Anita Woolley's team found that groups do better when conversational turn-taking is evenly distributed and worse when one voice dominates. Writing first tells you whether four advisors independently identified the same failure, which is a much stronger signal than four advisors agreeing out loud.
Take your logo off the concept. Put it in front of them alongside two anonymized alternatives, one of them a competitor's. Branded stimulus produces branded answers, and you will find out whether your differentiation is real in ten minutes rather than across a full session of asking what they think of yours.
What Mercury actually did for a living
The messages were never the difficult part. Any herald can carry words across a border. What made Mercury worth having was that he had been on the other side, so he knew what the words meant when they arrived.
Your scientific advisors are excellent at their own domain and will willingly share their experiences about it. Not all of them are equipped to tell you what happens in a procurement committee, a QC lab, or a budget cycle, because most have never been there.
Not every reader can convene a board or find a budget for one. The first move costs nothing and needs no authority: write the question at the top of the agenda. Ask the science question of scientists. Then go and find the people who have been where the buying happens, and ask them separately.
