The common misconception is that market access teams just set prices. In reality, they are a complete business leadership team with diverse expertise in health economics, strategy, and outcomes research. They must understand the entire business environment to demonstrate a therapy's value and ensure its commercial success, operating far beyond a simple pricing role.
Related Insights
By negotiating prices down from over $1,000 to as low as $150 per month, the government deal fundamentally shifts Ozempic's market position. It is no longer a high-end luxury akin to plastic surgery but an accessible wellness product comparable to a fancy gym membership, dramatically expanding its addressable market.
Product marketers often struggle to prove direct ROI. By influencing pricing strategy, they can make a tangible and measurable impact on revenue and ARR. Pricing is a form of value communication—a core PMM competency—making it a natural area for them to lead and demonstrate their contribution to the bottom line.
Rather than waiting for late-stage development, biotech startups should integrate commercial planning into early trials. This means building in data collection for payers, pricing, and patient access from the start. This "think with the end in mind" approach ensures the company has the right data for pivotal trials and market access.
A major organizational red flag is when the people who decide on pricing are different from those who decide feature priorities. This disconnect indicates a broken strategy loop where value creation and value capture are managed in separate, unaligned silos.
In pharma, one function's celebration is another's starting point. The regulatory team celebrating a successful dossier submission is a huge milestone for them, but for the market access team, it's the beginning of an arduous journey, highlighting a fundamental disconnect in goals.
Medical Affairs is shifting from a downstream compliance checkpoint to a strategic, upstream function. Using modern platforms, they now architect the core scientific narrative early in the product lifecycle, ensuring all subsequent commercial content is built on a consistent and compliant foundation.
True innovation in getting drugs to patients is not about pharma creating pricing models alone. It requires a multi-stakeholder partnership where payers, physicians, and manufacturers work together to solve problems for specific patient subgroups. This collaborative effort, not a unilateral one, is what truly saves lives and reduces costs.
Creating products customers love is only half the battle. Product leaders must also demonstrate and clearly communicate the product's business impact. This ability to speak to financial outcomes is crucial for getting project approval and necessary budget.
Before attempting to influence pricing, product managers must first document the existing process: who conducts research, who creates the model, and who holds final authority. This map reveals the true power structure and identifies concrete opportunities for engagement.
To create transformational enterprise solutions, focus on the core problems of the key buyers, not just the feature requests of technical users. For healthcare payers, this meant solving strategic issues like care management and risk management, which led to stickier, higher-value products than simply delivering another tool.
