We Are Norstella

Christina Masturzo

VP, Product, Citeline

Christina Masturzo is vice president of product at Citeline, overseeing the product strategy, vision, and roadmap across the entire AC1 portfolio.

Tell us a little bit more about your role.

I work with a lot of cross-functional teams to share the Citeline strategy and vision, then drive it forward by collaborating and communicating with commercial colleagues. We spend a lot of time with our clients, conducting user interviews, user research sessions, and focus groups, then we distil that information into what we want to build and why we want to build it and share that with our technical teams.

The newest thing is working much more closely with our data science teams. It’s a different flavour of products that is built on top of some of our data science services. I developed the product marketing function last year. It was a really great value-add and a big success, with many product launches in 2024. At the end of the year it was centralized and extended to all of Norstella.

How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?

I started my career as a sales representative at a large pharmaceutical company, which I loved. I worked there for a few years and moved into sales and other things in the tech space specifically. I always felt that I was offering a solution, but it wasn’t always the exact solution that the customer needed. That’s what made me move into the product management space.

I really wanted to move beyond selling and into the build so that I could make an impact on building the right solution, one that addresses the core challenges I had heard about from so many customers. I’ve been in product for about 15 years in the ed tech and life sciences spaces. I joined Trialscope six and a half years ago when it was a thirty-person startup. It has been such a journey over the last few years and my role has really grown with the organization as it moved to Informa and now to Norstella.

What does your day-to-day usually look like?

There’s a lot of discussion around our overall vision, strategy, and roadmap for the entire portfolio, which comprises upwards of ten products. This takes place across many teams, from external teams in various customers to internal commercial, marketing, data science, technology and product marketing, to ensure that we all know the direction that we’re going in. Whether it’s an individual new product or updates to an existing product, if everyone really understands where we’re headed, that helps in their everyday decision-making process.

What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?

One of the larger things I’ve been working on recently is adding new proprietary data sources, the kind that a client can’t really purchase and acquire directly, to the huge mass of data we pulled from public sources, then mapping it to our data. This is critical to our growth strategy.

The public data is essentially details of trials that have been conducted, where investigators have conducted research, and what trials they’ve conducted research on. But it doesn’t tell you how they performed. What we’re doing now is augmenting and creating a much clearer picture beyond that. We’re able to show performance metrics for trials, countries, sites, and investigators so that they can make better decisions on that data.

What are some of the common challenges of your role?

With unlimited time and resources you could do anything. We are in a hyper-growth space, and it is more critical now than ever that we are really prioritizing. There’s no lack of opportunities, especially given how much advancement there is in technology and AI tools, but we have to place very thoughtful and strategic bets where we’re investing our time.

We want to make sure about what’s most critical for our business, our customers, and our long-term growth strategy, and that those decisions that we make are really the ones that can drive the most impact not only in our immediate needs but beyond. Prioritization really comes into that because everyone wants you to do what’s most important to them. Our ability to look across all of those stakeholders and say ‘This is what we can do now, later this year, and for the next three to five years’ is crucial.

What’s been your career highlight to date?

In my previous life in ed tech, I worked on a very early recommendation tool in the education space. I brought that concept to Citeline and said, ‘What if you didn’t have to do all of the hunting and research for data yourself? What if you could tell me what you were trying to plan for, and I could do a lot of that analysis for you and give you a recommendation of where you should start when you’re thinking about designing your protocol or this is where you should start when you’re looking at selecting your investigators?’

It was a very, very complicated project, heavily focused on data science, with a lot of starts and stops, iterations and reconsiderations, particularly when building out forecasting models and training those models to be very narrowly focused on this niche area. It was a wonderful experience. The market has really started to take to it and it’s really great to hear customer feedback on how much time it’s saving them and their decision-making processes.

What trends are you seeing across the industry right now that Norstella is in a unique position to help with?

It might be an obvious thing to say but Norstella is uniquely positioned there because we really know that these tools like this are only as good as the data that it’s built on. We have such a large, robust and curated data set that we can build and apply these tools on top of them.

Anyone can buy any out-of-the-box tool and apply it to their application. What we’re doing is taking our expertise in the clinical space, and training and curating these tools to be very specific to our space. I think that is where the value is and we’re really uniquely positioned there; we have the expertise to feed these tools, to really make them useful for our clients.

Which company principle resonates most with you?

I would say resilience, mettle and perseverance. Innovation is about trying new things, stepping outside of what you’ve always done before, knowing that you might fail, and not being afraid of that. That’s all part of how we progress.

I really try to live this myself and also bring it to the team and try to call out my own failures, just so that everyone can see that this is something to happens; it’s just one step on your way to success. I want to foster the kind of environment where resilience is not just a value but really celebrated. I’ve suggested making it part of the Norstella Product Town Halls, to show what we tried that didn’t work, what we learned from it, and what we did with it.

What would you tell someone just starting their career with Norstella?

I tell everyone that starts to really try. I had an old sales manager who said that you need to be like a five-foot ear. So really focus on listening. There are so many incredibly talented people, and they all have so much knowledge in their area of focus, so it’s really an opportunity to learn from our colleagues and also from our customers.

First of all, they will tell you exactly what they want but through really listening to them, you can start to understand day-to-day struggles and proactively solve for things that they’re not asking for. We can recognize the need before they do and that kind of listening really drives like a proactive mindset that can really lead to innovation.

Where do you see Norstella in the next year or two?

I think the only thing that we can continue to expect is change. Over the next few years, I see Norstella focusing on our real-world data (RWD) asset, expanding it but also expanding the capabilities for it to unlock even more value for our customers by pulling it into more and more of our product offerings. It is a very big piece of our overall product strategy to incorporate RWD for each individual use case of our products.

I also think that we are very likely to focus on interoperability across our products. Within Citeline, we are heavily focused on connecting all of our various product offerings across the wider Norstella portfolio. I think we will continue to drive AI tools throughout our development, including how we build our products to make things more intuitive.

What do you like most about working at Norstella?

My favourite part is really the people I get to work with. I’ve met so many amazing people from so many different backgrounds, really creative, thoughtful, intelligent people, who I get to collaborate with and learn something new from every day. Everyone’s really passionate about what they do and that can really be contagious, which is makes it a really great place to work.

What do you like to do outside work?

My husband and I have two children. They’re ten and eight, so not super-tiny anymore where we can’t bring them to different places. Going on adventures with them is really my favourite thing to do. This past year we went to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. We love just being outside and letting them explore and see the world in a different way.

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