Episode #18 - Vivian DeWoskin, Chief Commercial Officer at Faro Health

Concept to Care

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Episode #18 - Vivian DeWoskin, Chief Commercial Officer at Faro Health

Concept to Care

and

Omar Mousa

Apr 02, 2025

Transcript

Vivian DeWoskin is the Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy at Faro Health, a company on a mission to transform clinical trial design through intelligent, structured software. With a career spanning consulting, digital health startups, and enterprise commercialization, Vivian brings deep expertise in go-to-market strategy, team building, and customer development. At Faro, she’s driving cross-functional execution at the intersection of AI, clinical research, and scalable infrastructure—helping bring life-saving therapies to patients faster by making trials more efficient, inclusive, and patient-centric.

In our conversation, Vivian shares his insights on:

Faro’s Mission and Market Fit: How Faro Health is reinventing clinical trial design by digitizing and structuring protocols to reduce burden, improve quality, and accelerate research.
The Role of a Chief Commercial Officer & Head of Strategy: What this cross-functional leadership role entails, why startups need it, and how to grow into it.
Strategy vs. Tactics in Startups: Why the distinction matters, how to avoid common pitfalls, and how great leaders use second-order thinking to stay aligned.
Pricing Strategy from First Principles: How Vivian and the Faro team approached pricing to align incentives, drive value, and adapt to market feedback.
Strategic Flexibility with Real Options: How forward-looking companies avoid premature lock-in and keep multiple viable paths open.
Operationalizing Strategy with OKRs: A practical look at how Faro sets, cascades, and evolves organizational priorities without getting bogged down in process.
Achieving and Sustaining Product-Market Fit: How to recognize PMF, stay close to customer signals, and avoid complacency once it’s in place.
Career Growth and Leadership Advice: Vivian’s take on following curiosity, making your career narrative coherent, and owning your choices.

In this latest episode of Concept to Care, we had an engaging conversation with Vivian DeWoskin, Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy at Faro Health, a startup revolutionizing clinical trial design through AI-powered solutions. Vivian provided deep insights into her experiences in health tech, the nuances of effective strategic thinking, how to identify and sustain product-market fit, and shared practical advice for building successful cross-functional organizations.

Some takeaways:

Introducing Faro Health: Revolutionizing Clinical Trials through AI
1. What Faro does: Faro Health provides AI-powered software designed to streamline clinical trial design and optimize protocols.
2. Problem it solves: Clinical trial design often involves inefficient manual processes, high patient and site burden, costly amendments, and slow development cycles.
3. Who it serves: Faro primarily supports clinical development teams, particularly clinical scientists responsible for designing clinical studies.
4. Core product: Faro’s flagship tool, the Study Designer, enables structured, digital definitions of clinical protocols, paving the way for streamlined automation.
5. Impact & vision: The platform quantifies and reduces patient burden, optimizes site efficiency, lowers costs, improves quality, and accelerates the overall development and regulatory process—ultimately helping therapeutics reach patients faster.
Inside the Role: Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy: Vivian holds a dual role as Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Strategy at Faro Health, integrating commercial leadership with strategic oversight across multiple teams.
1. What the role entails: A cross-functional position focused on connecting teams like sales, marketing, product, and operations, ensuring they're all aligned around common goals.
2. Why companies need this role: Startups, especially in health tech, often require generalists who can look holistically across functions to maintain strategic coherence and efficient execution.
3. How to pursue this path: Vivian emphasizes gaining experiences that build strategic thinking, relationship-building skills, and the ability to synthesize cross-team insights. She highlights her background in consulting as particularly beneficial for preparing her for this role.
Strategy vs. Tactics: Clarifying the Confusion
1. Clarifying the terms:
  1. Strategy is your guiding principle—a framework that directs decision-making toward long-term objectives.
  2. Tactics are the specific actions you take to execute your strategy and achieve short-term goals.
2. Common Pitfall: Startups often blur strategy and tactics due to rapid decision-making, resulting in unclear long-term alignment.
3. Best Practice for Leaders: Regularly revisit strategic goals to ensure tactical choices stay aligned and coherent with the overall vision.
4. Strategy as Choice: Effective strategy clearly defines both what you will do and what you explicitly decide not to do, providing clarity and focus.
5. Second-Order Thinking: Strategic thinking involves anticipating downstream consequences, positioning your organization for flexibility and sustained success.
Pricing Strategy: Start with Principles, Evolve with the Market: Vivian walked through how Faro Health approached pricing from first principles and shared tactical lessons learned along the way. Here’s how she thinks about pricing strategy:
1. Start with internal logic, not market mimicry: Faro didn’t begin by copying competitors’ pricing—they built a model grounded in how their product delivers value and what they want to incentivize.
2. Design for behavioral signals: Pricing should reinforce the behavior you want from customers. For Faro, that meant encouraging engagement with the platform—not just per-license fees, but usage-based tiers that reflect value.
3. Ensure internal consistency: All pricing components—whether tied to modules, usage, or implementation—should make sense when viewed together. Vivian stressed that misalignment erodes credibility.
4. Make pricing explainable and defensible: A pricing model should be easy to articulate in a sales conversation. If your sales team can’t explain it clearly, it likely needs refinement.
5. Iterate with market feedback: Even with strong internal logic, pricing must evolve based on how customers react. Vivian described early pilots and customer conversations as critical inputs for refining pricing over time.
6. Avoid mispricing complexity: In health tech, pricing is often complicated by multi-stakeholder environments (e.g., pharma, CROs, procurement, users). Pricing needs to account for that complexity without overcomplicating the message.
7. Anchor pricing to value, not just features: Vivian emphasized anchoring pricing to outcomes or value created—such as reduced protocol amendments or faster study design timelines—rather than a laundry list of product features.
Strategic Thinking: The Power of Real Options: Vivian emphasized the value of strategic flexibility through “real options” thinking—keeping multiple paths open and anticipating what’s next. Successful companies, she noted, avoid premature decisions and think in second-order consequences. Here’s how she breaks it down:
1. Thinking in "Real Options": Strategic thinking involves creating multiple viable options today, allowing flexibility and responsiveness to future market developments.
2. Avoiding Premature Lock-in: Vivian advises against prematurely committing to a single rigid path. Instead, organizations should maintain strategic flexibility, enabling quick pivots as market conditions change.
3. Second-Order Thinking: Strong strategists practice second-order thinking, carefully considering the downstream consequences of today's decisions to better anticipate future outcomes.
4. Positioning Ahead of Trends: Effective strategy involves proactively positioning your company ahead of emerging industry trends, rather than merely reacting as they occur.
5. Balancing Flexibility and Focus: Companies must strike a balance between maintaining flexibility (to respond to opportunities or threats) and the need for clear, decisive action toward achieving strategic goals.
Turning Strategy into Action: Goals, OKRs, and Alignment: Vivian shared how Faro Health translates high-level strategic goals into actionable team plans using a structured but flexible OKR process:
1. Start with clear company priorities: At the beginning of the year, the leadership team defines and communicates a small set of focused organizational goals (e.g., four key priorities).
2. Cascade into team-level goals: Individual teams develop their OKRs by aligning them directly to the top-level company objectives.
3. Balance structure with flexibility: Faro keeps the OKR process lightweight—formal enough to drive focus, but not so rigid that it slows down execution.
4. Quarterly check-ins: Teams revisit progress regularly, but not every goal is tied to a quarterly timeline—some objectives evolve more gradually.
5. Make goals measurable: Vivian emphasized that strong OKRs are quantifiable and falsifiable. If you can’t measure it or prove it didn’t happen, it probably shouldn’t be an OKR.
Achieving and Sustaining Product-Market Fit: Listen, Validate, Repeat: Vivian shared what product-market fit (PMF) looked like at Faro and how they’ve stayed intentional about maintaining it over time. Her take was both honest and tactical:
1. You’ll know when you don’t have it: Vivian emphasized that the absence of PMF is loud—sales feel like pushing a boulder uphill, customer interest is inconsistent, and the product struggles to land.
2. Signs you’re getting close: Repeatable sales, consistent inbound interest, and clearer messaging-market resonance are indicators that PMF is taking hold.
3. Don’t confuse early traction with fit: Even promising pilots or individual customers aren’t enough. PMF requires a pattern, not a one-off.
4. Stay close to the market: Vivian stressed the importance of staying in constant conversation with users and buyers. Don’t rely on internal assumptions—validate them continuously.
5. Avoid complacency: Achieving PMF is not a finish line. Markets evolve, competitors emerge, and buyer expectations shift. Vivian urged leaders to keep a healthy paranoia about maintaining fit over time.
6. Be decisive when it’s not working: If PMF hasn’t materialized, don’t cling to sunk costs. Vivian advocates for quick iteration and honest reflection rather than dragging out mismatched efforts.
Practicing Strategy in a Startup: Principles Over Playbooks: When Angela asked how someone “does strategy” at a startup, Vivian emphasized that strategy isn’t a one-time planning exercise — it’s a mindset. In her words: “It’s being the one who connects dots others aren’t connecting yet.” Here’s how she approaches it:
1. Be grounded in reality: Startup strategy must be rooted in what’s possible with the resources, people, and time you actually have.
2. Embrace fluidity: Strategy isn’t static — it's dynamic and emergent. Regularly pressure-test and evolve it as new data comes in.
3. Pattern recognition is key: Notice trends across teams, customers, and the market. Spotting and acting early on these insights is core to strategic leadership.
4. Tell the story internally: Strategy has to be understood by the whole team. Turn complex direction into a coherent, actionable narrative.
5. Know what you’re not doing: Strategy is about making trade-offs. Clear decisions about what not to pursue help teams stay focused and aligned.
Bridging Technical and Commercial Teams: Build Trust, Not Translation: Vivian emphasized that successful collaboration between technical and non-technical teams doesn’t come from acting as a translator, but from cultivating mutual understanding, trust, and shared goals. Here’s how she approaches it:
1. Foster curiosity and humility: Show genuine interest in how other teams think and work. Vivian makes it a point to ask questions and listen actively, especially when outside her area of expertise.
2. Build trust through transparency: Be honest about what you know and what you don’t. Trust grows when teammates feel you’re not bluffing your way through unfamiliar territory.
3. Don’t mediate—connect: Rather than act as a go-between, Vivian focuses on helping teams speak to each other by creating environments for direct dialogue and joint problem-solving.
4. Invest in shared context: When everyone understands the broader goals, they’re more likely to align their individual contributions. Strategy isn’t just for leadership—it’s fuel for collaboration.
5. Celebrate different lenses: Instead of smoothing over differences, Vivian encourages teams to embrace their unique perspectives as a strength in shaping better decisions.
Frameworks for Clarity: Tools to Anchor Strategy and Communication: Vivian shared how she uses structured frameworks to clarify business strategy and help teams align on direction. She highlighted two that have been particularly useful in her work at Faro:
1. Use the Business Model Canvas to define the system: Vivian recommends this classic framework to map out key elements of a business model—like value propositions, customer segments, revenue streams, and more—in a single view. It’s especially useful for startups navigating market fit and evolving their approach.
2. Apply "The Invincible Company" framework to evolve with intention: This framework, by Alex Osterwalder, helps teams understand how their business model fits into broader archetypes and strategic patterns. It visualizes a company’s position across innovation and scalability stages.
3. Make strategy visual: Vivian finds these tools helpful for turning abstract strategic conversations into visual artifacts that teams can gather around. It supports alignment and shared understanding across departments.
4. Contextualize where you are and where you’re going: These frameworks help teams place their current state in context—whether they’re still in discovery, validating, or building a long-term defensible advantage.
5. Teach strategy, don’t just tell it: Vivian uses these tools not only to guide decision-making, but to build organizational strategic literacy. Frameworks empower teams to think more critically and independently.
Personal & Professional Growth: Curiosity, Clarity, and Choice: Vivian closed the conversation with timeless advice for professionals looking to grow in strategic or cross-functional roles—especially in early-stage or health tech environments:
1. Build core strategic muscles: Invest in skills like synthesis, pattern recognition, and relationship-building. These are foundational for both strategy and commercial leadership roles.
2. Stay endlessly curious: Curiosity, not just ambition, is the long-term fuel for growth. Vivian encouraged following areas that genuinely interest you—even if they don't lead to a traditional title path.
3. Make your story make sense: Be intentional about your career path and articulate your narrative clearly. Your decisions don’t have to follow a straight line—but they should have a clear through-line when told aloud.
4. You always have a choice: Vivian emphasized that you’re never truly stuck. Knowing and exercising your agency—even in tough or ambiguous moments—is critical to crafting a meaningful career.