Against the Wind: Alliance Management in a Sea of Change

It has been said before that alliance management is at its heart a change management discipline. Alliances are impacted by external forces—COVID, geopolitical tension, market competition, and most recently, the Inflation Reduction Act, to name a few—as well as internal developments, such as turnover of alliance managers, executive sponsors, and CEOs, changes in company strategy, and portfolio reprioritization. 

All of these examples were shouted out by attendees at the beginning of the 2023 ASAP BioPharma Conference session “Wind Shifts: Adapting Alliance Management Capabilities for an Evolving Environment” at the behest of three presenters from Amgen, which laid the groundwork for the trio to divulge how their alliance management group dealt with “headwinds”—forces that “impede or inhibit an AM organization’s ability to maximize the value of alliances and its portfolio,” as defined by Dustin Ritter, PhD, alliance manager and business development executive at Amgen—and “wind shifts,” that is, “any change to an AM organization’s environment that prompts a reactive adaptation,” as Ritter explained. 

Personal Accountability: “Functionally Agnostic” Product Leaders Head Alliances

Tracy Blois, PhD, head of alliance management and executive director of business development at Amgen, took listeners through the evolution of the Southern California–based biopharmaceutical industry institution’s alliance management function, which has been utilized in unique ways since 2015 after a thorough audit of alliance operations found that Amgen was not “maximizing the value of partnerships because of either unclear roles and responsibilities or a lack of accountability for some of the partnership activities or both,” Blois recalled.  

Shortly after the review of the practice, Amgen organized itself into Partnership Management Teams (PMTs) consisting of four main players: 1) a global product general manager (GPGM), 2) a program manager, 3) an alliance manager, and 4) a finance lead. The GPGM served as a “functionally agnostic product leader,” according to Mio Sekine, head of late-stage and commercial alliances at Amgen. Anything related to a particular partnered product or asset was that person’s responsibility, providing a “single point of accountability.” 

“It’s hard to assign accountability to a team. We’re a big believer at Amgen in assigning accountability to a person,” Sekine added. 

A Stronger Brand: Alliance Managers Get a “Seat at the Table” 

Did this arrangement diminish the alliance manager’s role? Not in the slightest, said Blois.

“In fact, it was the opposite. Because you had the alliance manager in very close partnership with this senior leader for that product, it elevated the role of the alliance manager. It gave them more of a seat at the table,” she said. 

Of course, as Sekine noted, “it takes a village” outside of these four team representatives to execute a strategic alliance. The program manager was charged with the critical responsibility of making sure other functions and subteams followed through on alliance-related duties; for example, Sekine mentioned that the product manager sat on the brand team that devised marketing campaigns for these assets. 

For the Love of Elevation: Alliance Managers Reach New Heights Within Product Teams 

In 2021, this staffing structure changed again. The GPGM morphed into what Amgen labeled a  Product Team Leader (PTL). Where GPGMs drove product strategy independently of the functions—they worked with other departments as needed in the context of their product-related alliance responsibilities—PTLs got much more deeply involved in the affairs of the other parts of the organization. This functional and cross-functional “dual-hat role” demanded so much time and energy from PTLs, alliance affairs were taking a backseat. Thus, Amgen decided to transfer the partnership lead role away from PTLs to alliance managers, at least for “key late-stage, commercial programs,” according to Sekine, collaborations that merited “white-glove” treatment.

These high-stakes commercial collaborations needed an alliance manager’s touch to handle the large volume of launch-related ramp-up activities. Loaded with complex codevelopment and cocommercialization components, these alliances required a singular focus that, again, PTLs couldn’t bring; alliance managers were in better position to adapt these partnerships to Amgen’s evolving portfolio and product life cycle priorities. 

As was the case with the old GPGM model, the new staffing paradigm elevated alliance management to new heights. As program leaders, alliance management professionals again took their “seat at the table” of the core product team. Some of the most senior alliance managers were now actively involved in subteam discussions about product strategy and learning all aspects of the business. 

The alliance manager became a “core member of the product team,” said Sekine. “That opens up a lot of career development opportunities for our folks.”

“The Weather Doesn’t Hate You” 

Amgen’s story prompted Nick Palmer, partner and director of North America for BTD Consulting, to note during the Q&A session that concluded the presentation that “most big organization changes aren’t done with alliance management in mind,” and that alliance management groups, which generally tend to be downstream from where big company restructuring decisions are made, have to adapt to them without playing the victim card

“The weather doesn’t hate you,” he quipped. “The hurricane wasn’t angry at you.”

After all, alliance managers are masters of converting headwinds into tailwinds.