Skills Applied
Scale
Part of Eli Lilly & Company, the largest pharmaceutical company by market cap of $1T, the newly formed Private Ecosystem team builds strategic B2B2C partnerships to advance access to GLP-1 care for patients in Germany.
Scope
Over the course of my internship, I owned five distinct initiatives to grow the German market, including:
- (a)Driving Lilly's AI capabilities in the commercial space
- (b)Pioneering Lilly Germany's first consumer-retail health partnership with one of the largest consumer brands
- (c)Developing a weighted scoring methodology to assess 100+ B2B partners and initiate partnership negotiations with priority targets.
Constraints
The prohibition of consumer marketing outside of disease-awareness campaigns for pharma companies posed a significant constraint. Simultaneously, it allowed me to adapt quickly and explore entirely new frontiers. There was no existing internal playbook for a consumer-retail partnership or a standardized partner-scoring methodology. In a new industry, I built from scratch.
Project 1
Streamlining Commercial Operations with Agentic AI
The Challenge
Many companies still underutilize AI's capabilities by merely encouraging individual use instead of investing in robust, tailored AI capabilities. Per Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, the highest-value use cases, such as decision support, remain untapped.
The Product
Express gives commercial team members a personalized, Outlook-connected briefing tool that scans tracked sources, summarizes what matters, and preps them for every meeting, automatically.
Source Scanning
Scans 53 pre-defined sources by default, in addition to targeted web search. Sources can be customized to tailor the workflow.
Quick Onboarding
Customizable through 3 onboarding questions: time window to cover, which executive's calendar to scan, and an optional link to include.
Interactive Report
Interactive, shareable HTML report, including meeting preparation.
Outlook Integration
Connects to the user's Outlook email and calendar to generate personalized meeting prep.
My Approach
- Defined Requirements: Scoped the tool using a structured, self-developed problem-exploration questionnaire covering product goals, users, integrations, constraints, and timeline.
- Built the MVP: Created Express, a Claude Skill that scans a set of named German healthcare and regulatory newsletters, runs live web research across tracked categories, and outputs key insights in an executive summary supported by source links.
- Ran User Test: Ran a 1-hour session watching a core user test the product, then refined source selection and verification based on the feedback.
- Added Outlook Integration via MCP: Expanded functionality to reference upcoming meetings as inputs, refining search parameters. Each meeting-prep card contains an overview, suggested questions, and a watch-out.
- Built Knowledge with a Lunch & Learn: Ran a CMH-wide "AI Lunch & Learn" teaching 15+ colleagues what Claude Skills are and how to scope their own, launching a gamified "Claude Skills Challenge" to push adoption across the marketing org, with Express as the live demo.
The Lunch & Learn Deck
What I Achieved
- Expanded market and competitive intelligence ~9× (4 → 53 data points) by prototyping and rolling out Express, an AI-powered market scan with Outlook integration that auto-briefs users ahead of meetings, adopted by 11 colleagues.
- Built Lilly Germany's AI capabilities by hosting a 30-minute presentation on Claude automations and skills for 15+ colleagues, resulting in the development of two additional automations to advance consumer insights and sales enablement.
Project 2
Building Lilly Germany's First Consumer Brand Partnership
The Challenge
Although 25M Germans (20%) live with obesity, Lilly's GLP-1 treatments don't reach patients where they actually are on a daily basis. Most consumers' habitual, trusted touchpoints sit entirely outside Lilly's existing distribution and awareness channels.
The Insight
A consumer-retail partnership could reach an estimated 2% of Lilly's serviceable addressable market per day by riding on the retailer's existing trusted foot traffic, rather than building awareness from scratch. But Lilly hadn't done this before.
My Approach
- Researched: Shortlisted B2C brands by assessing product portfolio, strategic priorities, target customer, and cultural fit, using a self-developed weighted-scoring framework built from the involved teams' priorities.
- Built the Case: Built a €1M business case for 3 shortlisted candidates, distilling partnership rationale, value proposition for the prospect, partnership model, and outreach materials, aligning a cross-functional team of 5 departments and 2 agencies.
- Gained C-Suite Buy-In: Pitched the business case internally to secure sponsorship from Lilly Germany's CEO within 3 weeks, resulting in C-Suite-level involvement for the partnership outreach, then led outreach to the prospect.
- Ran the Relationship Forward: Prepared a C-Suite-level kick-off meeting, an NDA process, and a co-created scoping workshop alongside an external agency.
What I Achieved
- Initiated and actively progressed Lilly Germany's first consumer-channel care-pathway exploration with a partner that reaches 2M+ daily customers across 2,000+ stores.
- Built a reusable Consumer Brand Selection framework and execution blueprint, outlasting the one partnership and becoming a repeatable process for future consumer-retail deals.
Project 3
Enabling Strategic Growth Partner Selection at Scale
The Challenge
Fueled by the spiking growth of the German GLP-1 market, the B2B landscape of potential partners surrounding Lilly Germany is hard to oversee. Many telehealth platforms, doctor-finder platforms, and related digital health channels are flooding the market as new entrants. The commercial team had no standardized way of assessing and prioritizing potential partners, relying on gut feeling rather than comparable, benchmarked performance.
My Approach
- Uncovered Relevant Partnership Criteria: Interviewed stakeholders to develop mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) categories of performance indicators for B2B players in Germany.
- Assessed the Landscape: Landscaped an extensive ecosystem of 100+ B2B partners, producing an ecosystem map covering current and prospective partners.
- Designed the Scorecard: Developed a reference-heavy Excel scorecard consisting of 5 overall performance categories with adjustable weights, each broken into an additional 5 scored criteria.
- Synthesized: Consolidated landscaping results into an executive briefing on current partnership performance and high-priority partnership targets, to initiate negotiations.
What I Achieved
- Built a scalable, weighted scoring methodology by defining a 5-category performance scorecard and evaluating 100+ accounts against it, to initiate partnership negotiations with 3 prioritized business partners based on benchmarked performance metrics.
