Theraputic Area Lead, Critical Care
Behaviour Change — Critical Care and Rare Bleeding Disorders
Reports to: General Manager, Octapharma Canada
Direct reports: Marketing Coordinator, Digital Marketing & Communications
Location: Downtown Toronto, Ontario (office based)
Type: Full-time, permanent
Portfolio: Four active brands in critical care and rare inherited bleeding disorders
The Opportunity
Octapharma Canada has trail-blazing products in critical care and rare inherited bleeding disorders, each supported by an abundance of clinical evidence. The commercial challenge is not awareness, it is adoption. Our evidence is strong and our market access is established, but there is a persistent gap between what the evidence supports and what clinicians actually do at the point of care.
This role exists to close that gap. The Theraputic Area Lead, Critical Care owns the commercial strategy and business outcomes for four brands in a concentrated hospital market. This is not a marketing manager position with an elevated title. It is a theraputic area leadership mandate in which you own the business plan, the brand strategy, the KOL advocacy, and the clinical narrative for your therapy area and you are measured against commercial outcomes, not campaign activity.
You will lead a small, high-calibre team within a lean organization that has deliberately chosen precision over scale. We operate on the principle that there are no passengers. Every person carries genuine strategic weight, works with significant autonomy, and has direct access to the General Manager. If you have spent your career in organizations where decisions travel through layers of approval before anything happens, this will feel very different.
What You Will Do
Own the franchise
- Refine and execute the business plan for four Critical Care brands. Translate brand strategy into defined annual commercial priorities, allocate resources, and deliver against company OKRs. You will present well-researched options and recommendations to the General Manager and execute with authority once alignment is reached. You will not wait for direction, you will set it.
Drive behaviour change at the point of care
- Design and execute marketing that produces measurable shifts in clinical behaviour, not merely awareness or recall. This requires deep understanding of patient care flows and clinical decision points - where clinicians hesitate, resist, or default to existing habits - and the ability to design precision interventions that target those specific inflection points. You will develop point-of-care clinical decision tools, peer-to-peer education programmes, and care flow-anchored content that challenges the status quo with evidence and conviction. Every campaign, tool, and communication you produce must be designed to persuade, not merely to inform.
Shape an AI-ready digital marketing capability
- Direct the Digital Marketing & Communications function which reports to you. Set digital strategy and priorities, ensuring that all digital activity traces back to franchise objectives. You will shape the transition from traditional digital marketing to a future-ready model that includes generative engine optimization for brand and therapy area content, behaviour-based audience segmentation through HubSpot, account-based marketing for priority hospital sites, and AI-augmented content production workflows.
- Clinicians are increasingly using AI platforms as primary tools for clinical research and decision support. You will ensure that our clinical content is structured so that when a hospital physician asks an AI platform about treatment protocols in our therapy areas, our science is what the AI cites. This is a strategic content architecture challenge that requires clinical literacy, commercial instinct, and digital fluency working together.
Build and develop KOL relationships
- Own the KOL development strategy for your franchise. Build relationships with the key opinion leaders who shape prescribing behaviour in Canadian hospitals. You are expected to understand the clinical evidence as deeply as any medical affairs professional and to translate that depth into commercial plans that deliver results. You will actively ask for the business of the clients you engage with - this is a commercial role with scientific depth, not an academic one.
Lead across functions
- Work with the Field Coaching & Operations Lead to set brand priorities, account targeting, and clinical messaging for the Key Account Management team through structured quarterly commercial planning. Collaborate with the Medical Affairs Expert to align the commercial narrative with the evidence strategy, ensuring that real-world evidence generation, hospital protocols, and consensus papers are connected to your commercial objectives. Participate in a monthly peer case conference with other key functions where you will pressure-test each other’s thinking before it reaches the General Manager.
Coach and develop your team
- Develop the Marketing Coordinator and Digital Marketing & Communications professional who report to you. This company uses a structured coaching model built on fortnightly sessions with written briefs, feedforward-based development, and genuine investment in building independent critical thinkers. You will be assessed not only on your own performance but on whether the people beneath you are growing.
Who You Are
- You think like a strategist, create like a craftsperson, and measure like a scientist. You are drawn to this role because of the problem it solves, not because of the title it carries. You have grown dissatisfied with the conventional pharmaceutical marketing machine and its dependence on scale, spend, and sameness. You want to do fewer things exceptionally well rather than many things adequately.
- You are intellectually curious, analytically rigorous, and creatively resourceful. You do not need a large agency or a large budget to produce exceptional work, you need a clear insight, a sharp strategy, and the freedom to execute. You design from the care flow outward, not the product inward.
- You understand that the way clinicians find and consume clinical information is changing fundamentally. You are not intimidated by generative engine optimization, behavioural segmentation, or AI-augmented content workflows; you see these as the next evolution of the craft. You have already experimented with AI tools in your current role, not because you were told to, but because you were curious.
- You are a natural coach. You develop people by challenging their thinking, not by directing their work. You can run a development conversation that leaves your direct report sharper and more independent, not more dependent on you.
- You own your failures as openly as your successes. When something does not work, you say so, learn from it, and adapt. You are accountable to outcomes, not activity.
What You Are Not
- You are not a brand manager who will arrive with a playbook from a large pharma company and attempt to replicate it here. You are not someone who outsources creative thinking to agencies and manages timelines. You are not motivated primarily by title progression or the politics of a large organization. You are not a digital-for-digital’s-sake marketer who chases channels without strategic clarity. You are not someone who confuses busyness with impact. And you are not someone who hoards decisions upward. You make the calls within your scope and bring only the genuinely strategic questions to your General Manager, backed by research, options, and a clear recommendation.
Qualifications and Experience
- A strong academic foundation from a respected institution. Degree in marketing, life sciences, health sciences, or a related discipline. An advanced degree (MBA, MSc, or equivalent) is valued as evidence of intellectual depth and commitment to learning.
- Minimum seven years of progressive experience in healthcare or pharmaceutical marketing, with at least three years in a role carrying strategic ownership of a therapy area, product line, or franchise. Direct experience in specialty or rare disease markets is strongly preferred.
- A record of designing and executing marketing that produced measurable behaviour change in HCP audiences, not merely awareness, preference, or recall.
- Experience directing or closely shaping a digital marketing function, including CRM strategy, behavioural segmentation, account-based marketing, or digital analytics that informed commercial decisions. Familiarity with generative engine optimization, AI-driven content strategy, or HCP engagement through AI platforms is a strong differentiator.
- Experience coaching or developing junior marketing professionals. This is a role with direct reports, and the development mandate is integral to the position.
- Demonstrated understanding of the Canadian regulatory landscape governing pharmaceutical communications. Experience with peer-to-peer education programmes, medical affairs collaboration, KOL development, and point-of-care tool development is strongly preferred.
Why Octapharma Canada
We are a rare disease operation. Our patient populations are small, our clinical footprints are concentrated, and our commercial success depends on scientific credibility and clinical evidence rather than promotional volume. We keep the team small and nimble by design - not because we lack the resources to grow, but because a lean team of exceptional people operating with autonomy and accountability produces better outcomes than a large team operating by consensus.
You will have direct access to the General Manager, genuine decision-making authority within your franchise, and the freedom to build something distinctive. You will work alongside a Medical Affairs Expert who shapes the evidence strategy, a Field Coaching & Operations Lead who develops the hospital sales team, and a peer Franchise Lead in Hematology - a small group of senior people who challenge each other’s thinking and hold each other to a high standard.
If you are looking for a role where the quality of your thinking matters more than the size of your budget, where behaviour change is the mandate and not a footnote, and where you will be coached to grow rather than managed to comply, we would like to hear from you.
To Apply
Please submit your CV and a brief note describing a piece of marketing work you have done that you believe produced genuine behaviour change in a clinical audience - what you did, what changed, and what you learned. We value substance over polish. Use of AI tools to generate or structure your response will result in immediate disqualification. We will be looking for your voice, your judgement, and your instincts throughout, and they cannot be borrowed.
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We invite applications from all qualified candidates. For applicants with disabilities requiring accommodation at any point in the recruitment process, please contact [email protected]. TROIS Collective is supporting this search on behalf of our client, Octapharma. We are partnering closely with the hiring team to manage the recruitment process, including application review, interviews, and candidate communication.
Application question(s):
- What city are you currently located in?
Education:
- Secondary School (preferred)
Work Location: In person
