BALSA Alumni Update - Steve Snyder, Ph.D.

The BALSA Group is proud of its alumni, and this quarter we caught up with Steve Snyder, Ph.D., for our BALSA Alumni Spotlight. Steve is currently a Director of Innovation at Abbvie. Steve joined BALSA in 2015 and served as a Project Manager and Director of Finance.

What led you to join BALSA?
I knew about halfway through grad school that I didn’t want to do academic research. I had always been interested in the stock market and investing and discovered that there were jobs as equity researchers on Wall Street for people with PhDs – places that were looking for PhDs to understand and communicate the underlying value of the science. I found that these jobs were also looking for people with business experience and that’s when a friend recommended I join BALSA. BALSA sounded fun and relevant to what I was thinking I wanted to do. So I joined BALSA and really liked it – there was a different problem every few months and after a few rounds of experience in 2016 to 2017 I became the Director of Finance. I would say joining BALSA was great for exposing me to business, and becoming an officer helped even further for me to gain leadership experience that I could take along as I began networking and interviewing.

Can you tell us about your role as an Innovation Director at Abbvie?
What I do as part of the innovation team for Abbvie is to provide extra support and capacity on the high impact projects that the company is focused on. The two areas I work on are 1. The asset development side of drug development, where our team works to accelerate clinical trials and get drugs to market faster, and 2. Accelerating large cross-functional initiatives, for example, re-defining our clinical trial monitoring operating model. Asset development is where our team runs initiatives that can be easily plugged in to improve the efficiency of Abbvie’s clinical trials. As an Innovation Director I also work with Associate Directors to help them develop slide decks and plans for the innovation team. There’s a considerable part of my role where I serve as a relationship manager – getting a bunch of people with different perspectives into the same room and trying to find common ground or common direction to help move drug development forward.   

What does a typical day look like in your role at Abbvie?
In these positions, it is really variable, but there are typically meetings to direct and steer projects, and there’s a lot of relationships that I’m always working to manage. In my sub-team, my work is focused on driving the content for our larger team meetings as well as the messaging surrounding that content.

When you’re leading and making decisions in many of these meetings, can you speak on the skills you’ve gained in the past that you’re applying in those meetings? At what stages of your career did you develop and hone those skills?
There are three skills that I’m using in most of my meetings. The first is relationship management, and this is the primary skill for a lot of these meetings, where you come into a room with a focus on agreement. Second, are the skills in conceptualizing problems and making a cohesive story line around that problem and its resolution. For instance, when I talk with leadership, my team needs to describe what’s going on, why it’s going on, and what we’re doing about it. Finally, there are the people management skills. These are something you don’t often learn in graduate school, and they take time. You really have to learn how to get the best out of your people. I started learning my story lining and problem conceptualization skills in BALSA, and then really honed my story lining, people management, and relationship management skills as a consultant at BCG.
 
What was your path between BALSA and graduate school and where you are now?
I loved my time as the BALSA Director of Finance and at that time I didn’t even realize that management consulting firms hired PhDs from BALSA. I decided to apply for a few of the top management consulting firms and it happened to work out with BCG (Boston Consulting Group). My time with BCG was awesome and it was a great job and one I’d recommend for anyone looking for a career in business with an advanced degree background and training, although it is not an easy career to get. At BCG, I was able to work on a wide range of projects, not just pharmaceutical projects. Some of my early projects were working at an international children’s non-profit organization and with state governments working through their IT development. BCG was amazing for my career development, and the skill sets I learned were so critical for a number of different fields. For instance, I learned negotiation and resolution skills – essentially how do I work with people who don’t want to work together. The work-life balance can be difficult at consulting firms though, and I knew BCG didn’t provide the work-life balance that I was looking for in the long term. BCG provided a lot of support for finding my next career though. Most people don’t stay at BCG for their entire careers, some people stay for 2 years, some for 17, but very few stay their whole careers. I knew someone who went from BCG to Abbvie and they were having a great time, so I applied and moved out to join Abbvie. I’ve been with Abbvie for a year and a half now and it’s been great. My team is almost entirely ex-consultants due to the skill set you get as a consultant. 
 
What advice would you have for current BALSA members interested in similar careers to yours?
BALSA is a great way to start developing skills outside of the lab. I remember starting to work on story lining in my early projects in BALSA and then building that skill as I became a project manager and advisor. BALSA is also great training for breaking a problem down to its essential parts. You’re going to have to do this wherever you go in business-related fields. You have to break things down into three parts: what’s going on, why is it happening, and what you are going to do about it. Also, don’t let your PI talk you into any career – that’s your decision to make and BALSA has a lot of opportunities for helping you make that call.