The first 90 days in a pharmaceutical role: an evidence-led plan

Before day one: confirm the mandate

Re-read the offer, role brief and interview commitments. Write down the outcomes you believe the organisation expects, the scope you think you own and the points that remain ambiguous. Confirm these with your manager rather than treating recruitment language as an operating instruction.

Ask for an initial stakeholder map, core governance calendar and the controlled sources you are expected to use. Do not request confidential information on personal accounts or devices. The aim is to arrive ready to learn, not to arrive with conclusions based only on public material.

Days 1–30: learn the decision system

Map the product or service lifecycle, current priorities, evidence base, approval routes and recurring decisions connected to your role. Identify who recommends, challenges, approves and executes. A stakeholder’s influence may come from regulated accountability or subject expertise rather than organisational seniority.

Keep a decision-and-question log. Separate confirmed facts, local conventions and your own hypotheses. Learn document control, adverse-event reporting, promotional boundaries, information security and escalation routes relevant to your work before trying to accelerate a process.

Days 31–60: test priorities

Bring your observations back to the manager and agree which problems are real, material and within scope. Choose one or two improvements that can be delivered without bypassing governance. Define the baseline, intended result, dependencies and evidence that will show whether the change helped.

Build working relationships through useful contribution. Prepare well for governance meetings, close actions when promised and make uncertainty visible. Avoid trying to demonstrate speed by producing unreviewed materials that create work for medical, legal, regulatory or quality colleagues.

Days 61–90: deliver and reset

Complete an agreed output or decision milestone and document what changed. Where the outcome depends on longer timelines, demonstrate a credible controlled plan with ownership, risks and dates. Ask stakeholders for specific feedback on both technical quality and how you operated across the matrix.

At day 90, replace the recruitment-era assumptions with an agreed six-month plan. Confirm priorities that stopped, changed or emerged. Good onboarding is not proof that the original plan was perfect; it is a controlled transition from external expectation to internal evidence.

A practical review checklist

By the end of the period you should be able to explain: the role’s decision rights; relevant products and lifecycle stages; key internal and external stakeholders; principal governance forums; controlled source systems; material risks; expected outcomes; and the evidence used to judge progress.

If those foundations remain unclear, raise the ambiguity rather than filling it with assumptions. The most useful first-90-day plan is a conversation document owned with the manager, not a generic presentation created before the organisational context is understood.

The weekly evidence log

At the end of each week record one confirmed operating fact, one assumption corrected, one stakeholder dependency, one risk, one useful contribution and one question requiring manager guidance. Keep confidential information inside approved systems and avoid turning private reflections into an uncontrolled shadow record.

Use the log in manager check-ins to distinguish learning from delivery. By day 90 it should show how your understanding changed and which outcomes have evidence, creating a stronger basis for the next plan than a retrospective list of meetings attended.

Sources and further reading

Authoritative sources support the regulated or employment context. The practical framework and interpretation are original PTTF editorial work.

1. Compliance in the product lifecycle — European Medicines Agency
2. ABPI Code of Practice for the Pharmaceutical Industry — Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority