Welcome to the Splice of Life Science Marketing Podcast. With your hosts Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray.
This is the show for scientists who've stepped out of the lab and into marketing, learning the ropes as they go.
A Splice of Life Science Marketing
Claim This Podcastby Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Griuia-Gray | Strivenn
31 episodes
Updated Daily
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Podcast Overview
Welcome to the Splice of Life Science Marketing Podcast. With your hosts Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray. This is the show for scientists who've stepped out of the lab and into marketing, learning the ropes as they go.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
11/29/2025
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Recent Episodes
July 20, 2026
S2 Ep25: The Buyer in the Loop
<p>Matt Wilkinson explains organisational gravity and why his new book, The Buyer in the Loop, exists to stop the buyer's voice getting sanded out of marketing.</p><p>Every persona gets built with real insight, then filed in a drawer within a month. Matt Wilkinson has watched it happen to his own clients for a decade, and he finally wrote a book about why.</p><p>This episode is for commercial leaders, product marketers, and anyone who has sat through a persona workshop that never got used again.</p><p>Matt joins Jasmine to mark the publication of his book, The Buyer in the Loop. They cover organisational gravity, the pull of legal review and internal habit that strips a message down until it sounds like everything else the company has ever said, and how synthetic customers can keep a buyer's real voice in the room long after the research wraps.</p><p>The buyer never left the room. The room just stopped paying them any attention.</p><ul><li>Why personas lose their grounding within weeks of being built, and what behavioural economics has to do with it</li><li>The difference between a grounded synthetic customer model and one that is just an elaborate way of talking to yourself</li><li>Jasmine's seven-layer cake analogy for what proper grounding actually requires</li><li>Why cognitive surrender is less the risk than voice of customer amnesia</li><li>How organisational gravity operates like legal review, leadership sign-off, and old habit pulling every message back down before it reaches the buyer</li></ul><p><br /></p><p>Get a copy of The Buyer in the Loop, out 22 July: https://strivenn.com/the-buyer-in-the-loop </p><ul><li>[00:18] Cold open</li><li>[00:57] Organisational gravity introduced</li><li>[03:20] Alison, the composite persona</li><li>[06:31] Dune and the stakeholder review</li><li>[08:08] Legal, regulatory, and the sandbag problem</li><li>[09:08] Synthetic customers versus talking to yourself</li><li>[10:37] The seven-layer cake of grounding</li><li>[11:57] Cognitive surrender</li><li>[16:28] Voice of customer amnesia</li><li>[16:56] The vow at the end of the book</li><li>[18:52] Speaker bureaus and knowing your audience</li><li>[19:28] The one line for dinner parties</li><li>[20:15] Where to get the book</li></ul><p>Keywords: organisational gravity, synthetic customers, buyer persona, voice of customer, cognitive surrender, B2B marketing, life science marketing, The Buyer in the Loop, Matt Wilkinson, persona grounding, marketing approval process, customer obsession</p><p>Watch the full conversation, subscribe for new episodes of A Splice of Life Science Marketing, and visit strivenn.com to get your copy of The Buyer in the Loop https://strivenn.com/the-buyer-in-the-loop</p>
July 13, 2026
S2 Ep24: Kill the project, not the product manager
<p>Why most product teams cannot tell a dead project from an early one, and the three tests that separate a clean kill from a case worth tabling.</p> <h2>Shownotes</h2> <p>You have rebuilt the business case three times, the customer calls went fine, and it still feels like you are polishing a tombstone. The problem is rarely a missing kill decision or a missing budget, it is that a dead project and an early one look identical from the outside.</p> <p><strong>Who this is for:</strong> Product managers, R and D leads and gate committee members deciding whether to kill, fund or table a business case in life science tools and diagnostics.</p> <p>Jasmine Gruia-Gray gives Matt Wilkinson a three-test diagnostic for telling a genuinely dead case from one that is merely early: is the data gap objective or epistemic, what does your most resistant buyer say, and is this a product problem or a timing problem. She then defends the framework against three sharp objections, including the honest admission that tabling a case can quietly become a way to never decide. The episode closes with the two moves a nervous product manager can make on Monday and the one question that exposes a narrative dressed up as data.</p> <p><strong>Key idea:</strong> Most teams do not have a kill problem or a funding problem; they cannot tell a dead project from an early one, and three tests separate them.</p> <p><strong>What you will learn:</strong></p> <ul> <li>How to tell an objective data gap, which belongs in an assumption log, from an epistemic one, which means nobody has asked the right question yet</li> <li>Why running the case against your most resistant buyer surfaces adoption costs a favourable panel will never show you, using concordance data as the worked example</li> <li>How to separate a product problem from a timing problem, and when tabling with a dated re-entry trigger beats killing</li> <li>Why the synthetic buyer panel replaces the broken step of rebuilding the model rather than adding a fourth checkpoint</li> <li>Where the framework is exposed: a tabled case with no external owner tends to fade rather than die</li> <li>The two Monday moves and the one-sentence evidence test that tells you whether you have a business case or a story</li> </ul> <p><strong>Keywords:</strong> stage gate process, business case, product management, kill or table decision, synthetic buyer panel, voice of customer, life science tools, diagnostics commercialisation, R and D pipeline, market timing, PersonaAI, go-to-market</p> <p><strong>Watch, subscribe and go deeper:</strong> Read the full piece, When to Walk Away: Kill the Business Case or Just Table It, at strivenn.com under Thinking. If you want help running this diagnostic on your own pipeline, including the synthetic buyer panel, Strivenn offers a free thirty minute PersonaAI consultation with concrete next steps either way. Subscribe to A Splice of Life Science Marketing and find the details at strivenn.com.</p>
July 6, 2026
S2 Ep23: Your stage gate is a cheerleading session in disguise
<p>For life science PMs: at the gate, treat dissenting customers as evidence. Enthusiast quotes only confirm what you hoped.</p><p>Most stage gate reviews are built to help a product pass. Whether it should pass is a different question, and the gate rarely asks it. That design produces confident decks and expensive mistakes.</p><p>Who this is for: product managers, commercial leaders and gate committee members in life science tools and diagnostics companies.</p><p>Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray examine why gate processes reward building a strong case, and why that skill has little to do with whether the product should exist. They walk through a falsification approach that asks what would kill a programme, then get specific about revenue forecasts, customer research and the one question that exposes a weak case. The falsification shift changes the question the gate asks. It leaves the template alone.</p><p><br></p><p>What you will learn:</p><ul><li>Why a skilled PM can pass a gate the product should have failed</li><li>How to apply a falsification test to technical claims and to revenue forecasts</li><li>The three questions that decide whether a forecast survives the room</li><li>What to write on Monday when your gate template has no field for failure conditions</li><li>Why one customer who already solved the problem tells you more than ten enthusiasts</li><li>The one question to ask R and D, and why a pause is the signal you want</li></ul><p>Chapters:</p><ul><li>[00:18] How gates end up rewarding optimism</li><li>[01:38] The system is working as designed</li><li>[02:15] Can the committee catch a well-built case?</li><li>[03:04] The falsification shift: prove yourself wrong</li><li>[03:48] Technical claims and revenue forecasts</li><li>[05:03] Experience does not immunise a committee</li><li>[05:41] The transparency penalty for honest PMs</li><li>[06:30] The culture problem and the post-launch debrief</li><li>[07:35] One experiment before the feasibility gate</li><li>[08:23] Getting R and D to test what they believe in</li><li>[08:57] Your first move on Monday</li><li>[09:31] Rethinking the customer research section</li><li>[09:54] The one question that cuts across all of it</li><li>[10:19] Where to go next</li></ul><p><br></p><p>Keywords: stage gate process, life science product management, product commercialisation, falsification testing, revenue forecasting, gate review, pre-mortem, buyer evidence, life science tools marketing, go-to-market strategy, product feasibility, commercial due diligence</p><p>Watch the full episode and subscribe to A Splice of Life Science Marketing. </p><p><br></p><p>Jasmine's full article, including the two-track Evidence Tier Framework and the gate-by-gate evidence standards for Feasibility, Development, Launch and Lifecycle, is at https://strivenn.com/thinking/stage-gates-should-ask-for-evidence-not-optimism. </p><p>If you have a gate coming up, book a growth consultation at https://strivenn.com/contact or find Jasmine on LinkedIn.</p>
31 total episodes available
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