Recently, I was speaking with a professional who had spent years working across launch teams — the kind of experience many people spend a decade trying to acquire.

Whenever a new initiative appeared, people thought of him. Whenever a complex project needed to be stood up, he was often pulled in. Over time, that experience became one of the strongest signals attached to his name.

And he was tired of it. At one point he said:

"I'm trying not to do any more launches. Whenever a new launch comes up, people assume I'll be involved."

Think about everything that’s happening in that one sentence.

His launch experience is the scarcest, most valuable signal he carries. The market is moving toward that signal right now, not away from it. But it's also the thing burning him out, so his instinct is to run from it.

That's what struck me. Not because his reasoning was wrong. Burnout changes how we see our own careers. But because the market wasn't reading his experience the way he was.

He was evaluating the work based on how it felt to carry it.

The market was evaluating it based on how difficult that experience is to replace.

Those are two very different calculations. This is what I mean when I say positioning isn't self-description. It's the conclusions people draw from your signals.

And the first person drawing conclusions from your signals is often you.

Here's the mechanism underneath all of it. A signal has no fixed meaning. Its meaning is assigned by the maturity of the asset reading it.

That's the part almost no one accounts for. We treat positioning as a stable thing: this is my experience, this is what I've done, this is who I am. Then the same logic wins one room and loses the next, and we reach for the usual explanations: not senior enough, bad chemistry, they went internal. Sometimes those are true. More often, a real strength got read against a stage where it isn't a strength.

There's a version of this people already understand. Say something vague in an interview, "I want more strategic input," or "I'm looking for more flexibility" — and you've left the room to fill in the blank, usually not in your favor. Vague signals get interpreted. The fix everyone teaches is to get specific.

But specificity alone doesn't solve it. You can be perfectly specific: "I built the field medical strategy for a first-in-class launch from the ground up," and still be read as wrong. Not because the signal was unclear. Because the room was reading it against a different stage than the one you're built for.

The vague signal fails because no one can read it. The clear signal fails because it's being read in the wrong context. The second one is harder. You did everything right and still lost the room.

Take that same clear sentence: "Built the field medical strategy from the ground up for a first-in-class launch."

To a pre-launch team, that's the whole ballgame: comfort in ambiguity, the ability to create a narrative where none exists, judgment without a playbook. To a team defending a mature asset losing share, the same sentence quietly reads as a mismatch. This person builds. We need someone to manage it. Will they reinvent a system that's working? Nothing about the candidate changed. The asset changed, and the asset reassigned the meaning of the signal.

It runs both directions. "Deep operational discipline, flawless execution inside an established system" is exactly what a growth-stage brand wants — and can read as only works when resources and systems are already in place, in a resource-strapped biotech still building toward Phase II.

I've seen this same gap inside the interview itself. A candidate walks in believing they're being evaluated for one job, while the hiring manager is quietly evaluating for a different need. The posting looks identical; the need isn't. One team needs someone to operate an existing system, another needs someone to build it, and candidates often don't realize which conversation they're actually in.

Nothing about the candidate changed. The room changed.

This is the same pattern organizations face as products and markets mature.

Scientific influence is weighted differently when a place in therapy is still forming than when adoption is already established. The capability doesn't disappear. The value of that capability shifts depending on where decisions are still being made.

Your signals work the same way. As an asset moves along the continuum — Phase II/III, launch, growth, mature, loss of exclusivity, the work changes, and so does the signal the room is listening for. Pre-launch listens for can you build. Mature listens for can you defend. The continuum doesn't just change the job. It changes which of your signals counts as evidence and which counts against you.

So the leader and the professional are looking at one phenomenon from two ends. An organization asks: what's required to stay competitive at this stage? A professional asks: which of my strengths matters most at this stage? Same question. Different altitude.

And the same line holds for both: qualified is not the same as clearly understood.

Here's something I keep noticing lately, and it changes the stakes.

A lot of the roles opening right now, and the ones about to open, are early. Pre-launch teams being built, first-in-class assets, emerging biotechs standing up a function from scratch. Far fewer are mature-brand maintenance roles. The market is weighted toward build at the moment.

If that's true, the build signal is the high-value currency right now, and the professionals most at risk of being misread are the deeply experienced ones whose signal reads as operate inside an established system. Their capability isn't lower. It's pointed at a stage the market is hiring less of.

That's not a reason to manufacture launch stories you don't have. It's a reason to find the genuine "built something from ambiguity" moments already in your history — the ones a polished operational résumé tends to bury, and put them where the room can read them.

The challenge isn't always experience. Sometimes the issue is market visibility.

I've seen professionals with years of valuable experience struggle to gain traction because the market can't easily see what they've done, understand the value they’ve created, or connect their experience to the problems being solved today.

When that happens, the only tool left is the slowest one there is:

One conversation.
One introduction.
One interview.
One explanation at a time.

Not just the missed opportunity, or the rejection you can't quite explain.

It's that you end up taking the longest route possible, re-earning credibility room by room that should already be working on your behalf.

The most capable professionals are often the most vulnerable to this because they assume their experience speaks for itself.

It doesn't.

Experience creates value.

Visibility creates leverage.

And there's a particular irony in how often this happens to the most capable people. The ones who can make a complex therapy legible to a skeptical room are frequently the worst at reading their own signals. Too close to it. You can't see your own signal the way the market does.

The work isn't to do more. Most people who feel stuck have done plenty. The work is to make the signal clear enough that the market can interpret it correctly, even when you're not in the room.

Positioning isn't self-description. It's the conclusions the market draws from what it can see. The hard part is that the person with the most to gain from seeing their own signal clearly is usually the last one who can.

If you've been told "great candidate, not a fit" more than once, it may not be your qualifications — it may be how the market is reading your stage, or whether it can read you at all. That is what the Market Signal Audit™ is designed to surface: what your positioning signals to the room making the decision, where a real strength is being read against the wrong stage, and which of your strongest signals are still invisible.

Because seeing the gap is often the part you can’t do alone.

P.S. Seeing the gap is step one. Closing it means rebuilding how your experience is positioned, learning how to read the room before you’re in it, and knowing which signal to lead with based on the role, asset, and team maturity. That is the work we do inside Position to Lead™, which restarts in August 2026. Get started here.

Send me your question — or the part of your background that feels hardest to translate. I’ll address a few in next week’s issue.