Senior Director – Business Development Forecasting, White Space

At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us.
Position Summary
Business development and external innovation are a priority for Lilly, and the volume of opportunities under evaluation continues to grow: Corporate Business Development brought approximately 120 forecasting projects to the organization in 2026, spanning well over 100 assets and unique indications across five therapeutic sections. Within Lilly's Global Forecasting organization, the Business Development Forecasting team provides the objective forecasts and market assessments that inform whether, and on what terms, Lilly pursues these opportunities. This role owns business development forecasting for white-space opportunities—therapeutic areas and modalities outside Lilly's established business units, such as rare disease, women's health, respiratory, ophthalmology, infectious disease, and platform, technology, or novel-modality deals where the eventual indication set is still open.
This is an introductory leadership role and a senior individual contributor without direct reports. The role is accountable for creating forecasts and opportunity assessments across a high volume of concurrent projects—roughly one new project per week at current demand—and for influencing Corporate Business Development, business-unit leadership, and governance forums toward a clear understanding of the risks and opportunities of external investment. Meeting that demand is not possible by building bespoke models one at a time; the role is expected to operate at scale through tiered depth, reusable model archetypes, a governed assumption library, and heavy, auditable use of AI and other technology, so that the forecaster's time is spent on judgment rather than assembly.
The role reports into the Global Forecasting organization's business development forecasting leadership, draws on therapeutic-area forecasting experts across the organization when an opportunity touches an established area, and is expected to build a defensible view rapidly in areas where no internal expert exists.
Strong Candidate Profile
Strong candidates identify market opportunities on the basis of future scientific innovation and are comfortable doing so in therapeutic areas they have never modeled before. This role favors exceptional curiosity, learning agility, and analog-based reasoning over depth in any single disease area; prior forecasting, valuation, consulting, or finance experience within pharma is a distinct advantage, and strong data-science or AI tooling skills help but are not required.
Key Objectives & Deliverables
Opportunity Forecasts & Valuations
Tiered forecast delivery: Deliver revenue and volume forecasts and market analyses for external opportunities at the depth each decision requires—from a two-to-three-day top-down screen for early or option-style deals, through a standard patient-based forecast with risk-adjusted P&L for assets in active diligence, to a fully built committed forecast with launch curve, LOE, ex-US, competitive scenarios, and red-team review for anything headed to a term sheet or governance.
Stage-gate discipline: Carry each project through the Business Development Forecasting stage gates (framing, approach and analogs, assumptions locked, output review, delivery and archive), with the model, assumption log, and thesis memo filed so that the work is auditable and reusable.
Assumption integrity: Ensure every input carries a source and an owner; models are rigorous, objective, transparent, and consistent with how the same indications are modeled for Lilly's internal pipeline.
Internal asset support: Support commercial decision forecasts for internal assets when needed, applying the same standards and templates.
Operating at Scale
Manage a portfolio of concurrent projects with differing tiers, timelines, and decision dates; triage incoming work at intake and communicate turnaround expectations clearly to partners.
Build from and contribute to the team's library of model archetypes so that the same indication is modeled once and consistently across every asset that targets it, and a screen-level model becomes the skeleton for deeper work rather than being discarded.
Maintain and extend the governed assumption library (epidemiology, treatment architecture, price and gross-to-net bands, analog launch curves, probability of technical success) as the shared source of truth for business development forecasting.
Run brief retrospectives after standard and committed projects and feed learnings back into templates, standards, and the assumption library.
AI & Technology Leverage
Apply large language models, agentic tools, and automation across the forecasting workflow—intake briefs and landscape research, assumption drafting from the library, model assembly from templates, numeric reconciliation, and documentation—with human review and acceptance at every step.
Hold a clear line on judgment: probability of technical success, price, and share assumptions are never set by AI alone; the forecaster owns and can defend every material input.
Identify, pilot, and scale new tools and approaches (including novel machine-learning and disruptive methods) that raise throughput or predictive quality, and share them across the Global Forecasting organization.
Cross-Functional Alignment
Work at pace with the functions that shape each opportunity, respecting explicit decision rights:
Corporate Business Development — align on deal structure, what is being valued (asset, platform, royalty), scope, and timeline to decision.
New Product Planning and Commercial — align on positioning, placement, and the investment thesis; challenge and pressure-test share assumptions.
Pricing, Reimbursement & Access (PRA) — obtain and apply price, gross-to-net, and access assumptions.
Clinical development, medical, and LRL — align on probability of technical success, label, and development timelines; connect clinical scenarios to commercial outcomes.
Corporate Finance and Investment Banking (CFIB) — hand off forecasts into valuation and deal models and ensure the numbers reconcile.
Market Expertise
Rapidly build working market understanding in unfamiliar therapeutic areas—epidemiology, treatment paradigms, competitive landscape, and access dynamics—using secondary data, syndicated sources, external experts, and AI-assisted landscape research, and document the basis of that understanding so it can be challenged and reused.
Develop and maintain a library of analogs, benchmarks, and top-down methods suited to early, platform, and option-style deals where a bottom-up patient funnel is not yet appropriate.
Value platforms and technologies (not just single assets): frame indication-portfolio scenarios, apply probability-weighted option logic, and make the drivers of value explicit for leadership.
Communication & Influence
Synthesize findings into clear, decision-ready outputs—a one-page thesis memo, the scenario range, and the two or three assumptions that matter most—tailored to Corporate Business Development, business-unit leadership, and governance audiences.
Represent an objective, data-driven view of each opportunity, surfacing where the thesis breaks and where the upside lies, even when that challenges the deal team's prevailing view.
Present and influence with senior leaders in a fast-paced environment where decisions are made quickly and revisited as diligence evolves.
Key Competencies
Forecast generation and valuation — build rigorous patient-based and top-down opportunity forecasts and risk-adjusted P&Ls appropriate to the stage of the asset and the decision at hand.
Cross-therapeutic learning agility — the ability to become credibly conversant in a new disease area in days, identify the right analogs, and know when a first-principles view is needed instead.
Throughput and prioritization — manage many concurrent projects, triage by decision value, and know how much depth a decision actually needs.
Technology fluency — use AI/ML and modern analytical tooling as a daily multiplier while keeping every material assumption owned and defensible.
Cross-functional influence — align Business Development, Commercial, PRA, clinical, and Finance partners to a shared view without positional authority.
Synthesis & communication — distill complex analysis into clear, decision-ready messages for senior leaders under time pressure.
Objectivity and critical thinking — evaluate sources critically, reason independently, and represent the opportunity as it is.
Attention