If you registered for Session 03 of Sidebar with Sanket on Friday, June 26 and couldn't get into the Zoom room — I'm sorry.

About fifty of you signed up. A panelist messaged me at 12:02 that the link in his calendar wasn't the link I was hosting on. I pushed an email out mid-session. The damage was already done. Most of you couldn't get in.

This is the second consecutive session where the Zoom layer broke. That's one too many.

So before anything else: I'm hiring expert help to fix the scheduling stack end-to-end before Session 03. Calendly, Zoom, Beehiiv, the website. All of it gets audited, rebuilt, and verified by the panelists 48 hours before the next session. No more "let's hope it works." A second failure isn't a glitch — it's a pattern. Patterns get fixed at the root.

If you registered, you'll get the video recording and a written transcript. The full session is worth your time. Below is what we covered. If you can only read the next 600 words, you'll still walk away with something useful.

Video Recording Link (start at 2:15)

Four panelists asked questions on Friday. A first-year PhD student. A new PhD entering pharma direct. A recent MSc looking for a first job. A vendor-side leader running a fifty-person team and thinking about the jump. Different decades of career — same underlying question.

What do I need to be excellent at, by when, to stay in this game?

Here's what we landed on.

Three cardinal rules. Memorize them.

Know how the money flows. Every cross-functional partner — market access, medical affairs, commercial, regulatory — has incentives tied to specific outcomes. Bonuses. OKRs. Compensation. Your job is not to deliver data and research. Your job is to deliver solutions to problems those people have. When you understand incentives, you understand how to deliver wins. Pharma is a people game. Process and structure are fine. But people run the business and people make decisions about your future. You need people fighting for you.

Optics matter as much as outcomes. Doing good work is table stakes. That's how you got the job. The harder skill is making sure your work is seen. When your study reads out, when a publication moves a KOL's heart, when market access uses your value proposition in a price negotiation — you have to talk about it. Internally. At the highest level. HEOR lead is always selling — and the customer who matters most for your first three years is your own leadership team.

Get comfortable with chaos. Reorgs. Trial failures. New leaders reshuffling the deck. This is pharma. There are people who ride change well and people who don't. The first two rules build the customer base that vouches for you when the chaos arrives. Everyone is a line item on the P&L. Credibility is what makes you the one they fight to keep.

Question two came from a vendor-side leader who'd been handed an HEOR / RWE function nobody had defined. He inherited it because he had a stats background. He didn't say no. He built the team. He grew the capability. He delivered the work. He's now wondering whether he needs a PhD to make the jump to pharma.

The answer surprised him.

That sequence — I inherited something undefined, didn't say no, built it, delivered it, grew it — is the leadership story. That was the interview. He just hadn't told it yet.

This is the part most people get wrong about job-seeking in HEOR. They think the credential is the story. The credential is just a marker. The story is the trajectory: a problem nobody owned, a person who took it on, an outcome that didn't exist before. If you can tell that story with confidence in the room where the decision gets made, you've done more than the PhD does. The PhD is a means to an end. The story is the end itself.

Question three came from a first-year PhD student excited about every trend in HEOR. He wanted to know when to specialize and how to be sure his niche would still matter in five years.

The advice was the opposite of what most students hear.

Pick the most boring, predictable, bread-and-butter skill in the field. Pricing. Access. Reimbursement. Anything that determines the parameters of the one equation pharma runs on:

As long as there's reimbursement, someone owns pricing. As long as there's AI in market access, someone has to validate it. As long as there's a clinical trial, someone has to design it for HTA. The exotic methods come and go. The boring ones compound.

We're at an inflection point right now. HEOR teams are being dissolved while payer burden goes up. That's a counterproductive move and it has a half-life. In four to seven years, the cycle reverses. The students who picked boring win the next wave.

How do I build a network?

The honest answer is the most boring possible procedure:

Pick the next ISPOR or AMCP. Force yourself to have one coffee, one lunch, and one dinner with a new person every day of the conference. Collect their card. Stay in touch for the next year. If that's too big — go smaller. Collect ten cards. Send the LinkedIn follow-up. Ask the one basic question: How did you get to where you are? Then shut up and listen. Five-minute ask, six months out. Calendar it. Repeat.

That's it. That's the network. There's no shortcut and there's no software for this.

Session 03 is Friday, July 24 at 12:00 PM ET. Same place. Working Zoom link. Verified panelists. Cleaned-up stack.

If you want to ask a question, register at calendly.com/d/cxzg-338-yn7. Active Q&A slots are limited. Observer seats are not.

And to the four panelists who showed up Friday — thank you for staying generous when the room was thin. The session was the better for it.

All my best always!

Sanket

P.S. Several of you wrote in over the weekend to ask whether the next Codex piece will be on the three cardinal rules. Yes. That one's at the top of the stack.

#HEOR #MarketAccess #PharmaCareers #RealWorldEvidence #OfficeHours