From the lab bench to the field

When I joined Novo Nordisk's Customer Engagement department, the team had just been formed. The function was being built from the ground up, originally under the name Innovation and Business Excellence and later restructured into the customer-facing function it is today, covering four interconnected areas — Customer Insights, CRM, Multichannel Engagement (later Customer Experience, where I worked) and Commercial Excellence. We were six people at the start. The department now counts more than twenty. Growing with it meant seeing how a function takes shape in a large organisation, from a small team trying to define its own value to an established part of the commercial structure.

The first phase was about adoption. Multichannel engagement was being introduced into an organisation where many teams had been working successfully in a more traditional way for years. The work involved supporting brand, medical and field teams in building new channels into their long-term strategies, defining KPIs, and starting to measure what was working and where effort needed to shift. The technical part was the smaller challenge. The cultural one took longer, and it was where the real work happened: introducing measurement frameworks that could shift how teams allocated effort, without disrupting what was already working.

Once adoption increased, the dynamic shifted. The channels were now in demand across the organisation, and the priority moved from driving adoption to managing saturation. Coordination across products and therapeutic areas became central — balancing affiliate priorities, protecting customers and the field force from disconnected campaigns, and aligning brand plans with channel capacity. One of the initiatives I proposed during that period was a communication calendar and an internal newsletter. The calendar gave central teams visibility on what was being launched across channels. The newsletter brought the same visibility to the sales force. Over time, both became practical tools that reduced friction between office and field, and brought more discipline into how channel activity was planned.

Across the four years, the scope of the work covered the main therapeutic areas — diabetes and obesity, with their respective specialist audiences — as well as smaller areas such as rare diseases and pre-commercial therapeutic spaces, where scientific communication and early stakeholder engagement carried most of the weight. That mix meant working with Medical on evidence-based materials and clinical content, supporting both pre-launch preparation and post-launch execution, and designing training programmes to help the field force adopt new channels and engagement approaches as the portfolio evolved. Agency coordination was part of the work too — sitting with Medical, Marketing and digital teams to align on strategy and brief external partners.

The second part of the experience that shaped the role was a year in the field. I relocated to Murcia and managed a greenfield territory across two regions, supporting a new launch in the obesity portfolio. The rotation gave me direct experience of territory planning, forecasting, and execution against targets, alongside the daily reality of building relationships with healthcare professionals and adapting central strategy to what actually works in front of a customer. Returning to the office afterwards, I was able to act as a more credible bridge between strategy and execution, and to involve the sales team in improvements rather than ask them to absorb decisions made elsewhere.

Looking back, what made the experience valuable was the breadth: working across customer insights, CRM, brand planning, multichannel strategy, KPI definition, scientific communication, launch and post-launch execution, agency coordination and field reality. More than a marketing or digital function, customer engagement at Novo was about helping different parts of the commercial organisation work from a shared view of the customer.