Satellite Bio

Satellite Bio is a biotechnology company headquartered in Watertown, MA. With a focus on solid organ cells, Satellite is committed to improving lives by pioneering a new type of regenerative medicine.

Based on your experience with other providers and business partners, what sets Pliancy apart?

I come from a program manager background. Most of my career has been spent building teams of people from very different areas of expertise in order to drive us toward a common goal. I have a general philosophy that your outcomes will always be better when there’s collaboration between people with wide-ranging experiences and viewpoints.

Working with Jae [Lawrence, primary consultant] and Steve [Gavrilles, managing consultant] has been great from that perspective. In the IT world, you don’t always find this kind of baseline technical competence mixed with being a decent human being. It sounds simple, but it makes a big difference to work with someone whom you can trust both from a technical standpoint and as a person. With Steve and Jae, you feel like they’re listening to you. They come to the table with real solutions, not band-aids.

When I raise an issue with them, they don’t automatically say, “Do this, period.” Instead, it’s an open dialogue: “Tell us what you mean by that. How are you thinking about this? Here’s how we resolved a similar problem at another client, how might that work here?” That back-and-forth allows us to come up with the best solution for Satellite’s IT needs.

Overall, there’s a nice blend of tactical execution with the ability to step back and talk about what’s coming down the road. You sometimes find that people can only have one conversation or the other, but Pliancy consultants can engage at both levels.

We pride ourselves on partnering with clients whose culture and values align with our own. How do you think Satellite and Pliancy match up in terms of philosophy?

At Satellite, we enjoy tackling hard challenges and hard problems. There’s a feeling that no challenge is too big. Instead of backing down, our attitude is to come up with solutions and figure out how to get through it. That sometimes takes us down a different path than we expected. Pliancy has a similar approach of doing whatever it takes because the end result is worth it.

As an example, last fall we realized we had a problem with data accessibility. When scientists performed experiments in the lab, data was stored locally on their machines. For the larger team to view and analyze that data, it first had to be moved to shared folders—which required a manual process.

The manual intervention was disruptive. Imagine if someone forgot to transfer Friday’s data and we needed those files on a Saturday morning. That meant one of our team members had to pause their weekend, get in their car, drive to the lab, go on the local machine, and drag the files over. That’s crazy, right?

We knew we wanted to set up a daily automated sync, but with so many moving parts across our lab space, there were (of course) unexpected roadblocks. Jae didn’t give up. Thanks to his help, we got the inputs we needed to test, troubleshoot, and launch. The data is now pulled from a predefined folder on the local machine into a predetermined location on the cloud, no human intervention required. We no longer have to double-check that the latest results are there, and the process is much more efficient.

“There’s a nice blend of tactical execution with the ability to step back and talk about what’s coming down the road. You sometimes find that people can only have one conversation or the other, but Pliancy consultants can engage at both levels.”

How else has Pliancy been able to respond to Satellite’s specific needs as a business?

I once walked out of a board meeting with a directive to keep our total spend at a certain level across the organization. Looking at all our providers and average expenses, I had to find a way to make that possible.

I reached out to many vendors as part of this exercise, and I appreciated how accommodating Steve’s response was. Instead of saying, “Sure, let’s just see how billing goes over the next couple of months,” he offered to create a custom alert so we would know when we were approaching our limit. If and when the alert is triggered, we sync up to discuss which projects to prioritize (and what could be delayed to the following month) so that we stay within budget. His willingness to collaborate, to actively find ways to help us navigate spending, says a lot about the strength of our partnership.

What was your experience working with our infrastructure team on Satellite’s office buildout?

We moved from a shared laboratory space in Cambridge, MA, to a new corporate headquarters in Watertown, MA, last year. Pliancy helped us think through our IT needs for a new lab and office, keeping our cost constraints in mind. Nick [Thomas, Infrastructure Projects Manager] worked closely with us on that effort, partnering with our construction project manager to design a roadmap, build a timeline, manage installation, and deliver everything on time.

In my position [as VP, Portfolio Strategy & Operations], there was a lot I had to manage to make sure we had a successful move to Satellite’s new headquarters. We had a tight schedule of things that had to come together, coordinated across multiple groups—but because the IT infrastructure piece, the wifi, etc., came together so smoothly, I had more energy and attention to focus elsewhere. That had a big impact on my personal experience.

“With [our Pliancy consultants] Steve and Jae, you feel like they’re listening to you. They come to the table with real solutions, not band-aids.”