With innovations happening across the spectrum in pharma, integrating agility into your strategic planning, budgeting, and talent management processes is the key to staying competitive.

Today, the pace of science is moving incredibly fast. Advances are emerging rapidly in areas like immunotherapy, precision medicine, and in the use of artificial intelligence for diagnostics and treatment. For the pharmaceutical industry, keeping pace with these trends is mission-critical and will impact not only what organizations work on but how they work.

This is especially true in disease states like oncology. As the American Association of Cancer Research reported earlier this year, “in 2024, we saw the approval of oncology drugs for more than 50 indications, including 11 first-in-class therapeutics.” 

The competitive landscape is changing, too, with new entrants driving cutting-edge innovations and legacy players undergoing transformation by adopting new technologies and new approaches.

With so many new developments, breakthroughs, competitors, and external shocks impacting pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations today, we’ve got to adopt a more agile mindset and move beyond linear planning towards scenario-based approaches. 

The challenge is, we’re operating in an industry plagued by lagging access to data. Two- to three-month information delays make real-time decision-making more difficult. How can we adapt quickly and remain flexible with strategic planning in this complex landscape? 

Strategic Planning Must Change: 5 Key Considerations

1. Expect Change and Disruption. As we saw back in March 2020 with pandemic-induced global shutdowns and, more recently, with widespread regulatory, funding, and tariff changes, strategic assumptions made a few months ago can be rendered utterly irrelevant in a matter of weeks. Strategic planning itself needs to become change-ready and resilient. 

2. Bake Agility Into Planning. You still need to make bets based on a strategic plan founded on assumptions about the market, but be ready to revisit those assumptions more regularly and pivot the strategy as needed. Unplanned events will continue to happen, and strategies based on outdated assumptions must be jettisoned quickly in favor of flexible approaches that accommodate new realities.

For example, pharma marketing teams should plan ahead and assess various scenarios so they’re prepared to pivot in order to keep pace with fast-evolving trends and maintain their competitiveness.  

Some of these scenarios and contingencies that pharma marketers should plan for include:

• Delayed or accelerated FDA approval timelines: The timing of a new product launch or updated label has a huge impact on the immediate and longer-term success for a brand.  FDA timelines can be adjusted for various reasons, so marketing teams need to make robust plans and investments, while also being ready to pivot as timelines shift.

• New market entrants: When a new competitor enters the market, specifically in an area where you already compete, your brand team needs to have in-depth plans ready to counter the entrant’s positioning and messaging, and to clearly differentiate themselves from the new entrant. 

• Unexpected market shifts: The pharmaceutical market can shift on a dime for various reasons, including market consolidation, the emergence of a blockbuster drug or new treatment options, regulatory changes, economic recession, supply chain disruptions, and more. Marketers need to build contingency plans to accommodate all of these highly-disruptive market shifts.

3. Use “Agile Budgeting.” In order to accommodate the unexpected, Kayva Gopal, GSK Head of Oncology, recommended in a talk at Pharma USA 2025 that marketing teams should have an “agile budget.” This focuses on:

• maintaining flexibility and responsiveness, 
• allocating resources based on real-time performance, and
• adjusting to shifting priorities.

What this agile budgeting could mean in practice is following the 90/10 rule to maximize innovation: 90% of the budget goes to necessary tasks, while 10% goes to experimentation. By earmarking 10% of budget towards experimentation, change can be implemented more seamlessly.

4. Leverage Outside Expertise. The ability to access and deploy the right expertise at the right time can also help you make necessary shifts. Tapping into a pre-vetted virtual talent bench of on-demand senior strategists and/or former marketing leaders can help pharma organizations keep pace with the evolving competitive environment.

By easily accessing and seamlessly deploying the expertise you need when you need it, you can maintain operational agility and adjust your strategic plans to changing industry circumstances. 

Building early warning systems to flag inevitable changes, adopting practical frameworks for scenario planning, and bringing in the fresh expertise of external strategists can prevent pharma teams from experiencing pitfalls of market share erosion, lost opportunities and sub-optimal launches.