Practice 03 · Launch excellence
LEX.
An outcome-governed launch system. Nine domain practices, five gates and a control tower — running from T-36 through post-launch, with the decisions recorded as they are made rather than reconstructed by whoever is left.
Nine pillars · five gates · sixteen live feeds
01Why it exists
Readiness reviews report status. Almost none report what fails first.
Green, amber, red, by workstream, updated fortnightly. That format tells a launch director where each function thinks it is. It does not tell them the one thing they need, which is what breaks when the schedule compresses — and something always compresses.
The failure is rarely inside a workstream. It is a dependency between two of them that neither owns, discovered in the week it matters. Milestone tracking cannot see it, because a dependency is not a milestone.
LEX is a governance system rather than a project plan. Gates can be failed. Trajectory is monitored against a committed target rather than against a schedule. And the assumptions underneath the plan are registered, so when one breaks the system knows what else has to move.
What arrives: readiness ranked by what fails first under pressure, every cross-functional dependency owned by name, gate criteria agreed in advance — and a decision record that survives the launch team dispersing.
02Nine practices
Each owns a domain. The System Layer owns the joins.
Nine pillars, sequenced but not siloed — each with its own gate obligations and its own feeds into the control tower.
Decide · pillar 1 of 9
Strategy & value ambition
The value target, scenario model and assumption register that govern every later revision. A commitment with named assumptions and explicit conditions for revising them, not a forecast.
03Gate governance
Five gates. Each one can be failed.
A gate is not a review meeting. It carries exit criteria agreed in advance, so the conversation is about whether the evidence exists rather than about whether the date can be held.
Ambition committed
The value target and its assumptions are on the record, with the conditions that would force a revision.
Evidence and position locked
The evidentiary floor is met and the claim is backable. The most consequential gate in the system.
Field and science active
Scientific engagement running, commercial model dimensioned against the access architecture.
Launch readiness
Supply, quality and patient infrastructure able to meet the demand the engine is about to create.
Trajectory governed
Post-launch. The system now runs on signals rather than on plan, with revision conditions live.
04The control tower
Sixteen feeds, and rules agreed before anyone needs them.
Prescribing and share, new-to-brand, share of voice, field reach, formulary tier movement, hub enrolment, first-fill conversion, persistence, safety signals, real-world evidence milestones, inventory, opinion-leader sentiment, competitive movement.
The feeds are the easy half. What makes it governance rather than reporting is that each carries a threshold and a pre-agreed response — so a divergence produces an action rather than a discussion about whether it is significant.
Three response arcs sit behind it: a tactical dispatch when a signal moves, a strategic revision when the assumption underneath it breaks, and a system-level review that runs regardless of whether anything appears to be wrong.
05The boundary
Where it stops
LEX does not run your launch and does not fill the gaps it finds. We assess, sequence, govern and record; your organisation executes. A firm that both writes the readiness assessment and sells the remediation has an incentive problem it cannot argue its way out of — and the assessment is worth less for it.
And one claim we will not make
You will find launch methodologies advertised with a time-to-peak improvement attached. We do not publish one. We have not measured it, the counterfactual is unobservable, and a number nobody can check is worth nothing to a launch director who has to defend the choice internally.
06Fit
Who this is for, and who it isn’t.
It fits
A launch director, commercial lead or country GM carrying a date they cannot move, with several functions to align and authority over almost none of them. It fits best when there is still time to fail a gate.
It does not fit
A launch already inside sixty days. At that point the useful work is execution support, not governance, and we would be selling a system you have no time to operate.
07Proof
Read the output, not a case study.
Our clients have not agreed to be named, and a track record described by the firm that produced it is worth nothing to a buyer doing their job. So we bring the artefact to the first conversation instead — every section of what an engagement hands over, walked through before you commit to anything.