An Engineer's Path to Global Business Development: A Conversation with Jenny Gattari

In the latest episode of Elevate: Women Leading the Way in Pharma Outsourcing, Jenny Gattari, Global Business Development Lead at Pfizer CentreOne, talks about building a career across manufacturing, R&D and commercial, why selling a service means listening more than talking, and the small habits that quietly move a career forward.

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Jenny Gattari didn't set out to lead global business development for a contract manufacturer. She started in a manufacturing professional development programme, spent her early years in supply chain, then moved into research and development to understand how products actually reach the market. An MBA followed, and with it a switch into marketing. Around five years ago she moved into the CDMO space, and today she's Global Business Development Lead at Pfizer CentreOne. She describes the path as anything but linear, and not one she planned. What stays with her is how each role fed the next.

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Thinking like an engineer

Her first degree, from Purdue, was in industrial engineering, and it still shapes how she works. Engineering taught her to see systems: how the parts connect, where things slow down, how you make something better, faster, cheaper. She hasn't put that lens down. Early in her commercial career, walking into a hospital pharmacy felt like walking onto a factory floor, and her instinct was to redesign the layout and improve how the drugs moved through it. Pair that engineering foundation with an MBA, she says, and you get the combination that's carried her whole career.

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What changes when you sell a service

The pull toward marketing came down to proximity. The closer Jenny got to the customer, the more she enjoyed the work, because she could see its point: helping patients. The patient became her reference point, and once it sits at the front of your mind, she says, the decisions get easier.

Moving into the CDMO world changed the nature of the sell. A product comes with features and benefits you can talk through. A service is harder to pin down. What she's offering at Pfizer CentreOne is people, facilities and expertise, so the work runs on relationships and trust. The product she sells every day, she says, is Pfizer itself. That shift also changed how she communicates. Where she once spoke for roughly 80 per cent of a conversation, she now listens for roughly 80 per cent of it, working to understand what a client genuinely needs before matching it to the right capability and capacity.

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Influence over control

The move from a North America remit to a global one widened the work and, she admits, gave up some control. A regional role let her direct decisions and outcomes. A global one runs on influence, and on reading what lands differently with a client in Germany or Italy versus one in Boston. She prefers it that way. Her approach to working across cultures is practical: put things in writing, share them ahead of time, and don't press for a decision on the spot. Telling clients not to worry about taking notes, since she'll send everything afterwards, puts people at ease, especially when English isn't their first language. She'll often raise the obvious question herself, framing it as one clients usually ask, so nobody feels exposed for asking.

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The habits that move a career forward

Jenny has mentored through the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association for over a decade, and her view of it is modest. A mentor works like a mirror, reflecting back what someone can't see in themselves. Most mentees already hold the answer and just need a sounding board to find it. She reckons she's learned more from them than they have from her.

A couple of her habits are easy to borrow. When a job description catches your eye, save it in a folder, then go back and work out what it is about the role that appeals. Over time you build a library of what excites you, and that tells you where you might head next. Growth doesn't have to come from the day job either. When she missed the creative side of her work, she volunteered to run a community sports newspaper with student reporters, and found it advanced her in the role she was actually paid for.

Asked what she'd tell her younger self, Jenny keeps coming back to confidence. Early on she assumed the senior people had the better ideas and held her own voice back, taking the chair against the wall over the one at the table. Her advice now is to speak up from the first week, because having ideas worth hearing is part of why you got the role. Raise your hand, get involved, and don't be shy about asking someone to mentor you.

On networking, the word that puts so many people off, she keeps it simple.

"Networking is just a conversation, it's just talking to someone."

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Listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.