Le contenu du poste est libellé en anglais car il nécessite de nombreuses interactions avec nos filiales à l’international, l'anglais étant la langue de travail.

Job title: Agility & Performance Coach – R&D Accelerator

• Location - Paris (Hybrid - 3 days per week onsite)

About the job

Our team

Our coaches sit at the heart of the Digital Accelerator's mission — enabling teams and leaders to learn faster, adapt faster, and deliver value sooner. They are catalysts of change in how we work, learn, and innovate across Sanofi, including in complex scientific and digital R&D environments.

Why this role exists

At the R&D Digital Accelerator, you will contribute to coaching efforts that reduce time to learn, accelerate product and system improvements, and enable better decision-making across teams and leadership — all in service of strengthening our R&D learning ecosystem and accelerating scientific innovation to patient impact.

The R&D coaching team is growing. As the Lead Coach takes on broader responsibility, the accelerator needs coaches who can provide sustained, embedded coaching presence inside individual product teams — close to the work, close to the science, close to the people doing it. This role exists to ensure that as our digital products mature, the teams building them develop the habits that make their work faster, clearer, and more impactful — and that those habits outlast any single coaching intervention.

Your Strategic Accountability

This role exists to help the R&D Digital Accelerator become a learning system — one that improves faster than its constraints. That means building Lean, flow, and continuous improvement habits into how product teams, product owners, and leaders actually work. Not running workshops at them.

You'll be operating in an environment where the stakes are high and the users are some of the most analytically rigorous people in the organization — scientists, clinical operations teams, regulatory experts. Credibility here is earned through intellectual curiosity and coaching rigor, not framework fluency.

The biggest coaching challenge is not inside the teams. It is at the boundary between the business and the accelerator — where priorities are shaped, where requirements land, and where product ownership is either strengthened or undermined. The coach who joins will need to work at this interface as much as inside the teams.

Product ownership and delivery discipline — equally critical. All R&D digital products are in production. The teams have delivery cadence. What they need now is the thinking muscle alongside the shipping muscle — outcome framing, evidence-based bets, and the discipline to stop building things that don't create value.

You will work with our coaching Crew at the Digital Commercial Accelerator in an effort to :

• Strengthen our coaching excellence and ensure consistency in our principles and meta skills across teams.
• Provide the needed leadership bandwidth to balance people development, delivery, and transformation.
• Allow for closer support to coaches, fostering growth, alignment, and shared purpose.
• Amplify our ability to drive change across the accelerator, sustaining momentum and impact.

Before You Apply– Honest Questions

If most of these don't resonate, this probably isn't the right role:

• Do you prefer principles over practices — even cool ones?
• Do you go to the Gemba first, and draw conclusions second?
• Are you genuinely curious about the domain you coach in — even when it's complex science?
• Can you hold a credible conversation with a clinical lead, a data engineer, and a product owner — in the same afternoon?
• Would you rather build someone else's capability than demonstrate your own?
• Can you coach a team that thinks in scientific hypotheses to also think in product hypotheses?
• Have you ever coached a business stakeholder who didn't think they needed coaching — and changed how they engage with a product team?

Main responsibilities:

• Coach one or more R&D product teams, modeling strong Agile, Lean, and discovery practices.
• Contribute to shared coaching standards, practices, and ways of working within the Accelerator.
• Business interface. Coach at the business/accelerator interface — help business stakeholders and product teams build a genuine partnership based on evidence, shared goals, and mutual accountability. This is where the biggest coaching challenge sits.
• Product ownership. Coach product owners toward genuine ownership — outcome framing, evidence-based bets, assumption testing. Help POs develop the courage to say no without evidence and the discipline to validate before they build. This is a day-one priority.
• Flow first. Make the delivery system visible — flow boards, WIP policies, aging WIP reviews. Use flow and DORA metrics as coaching instruments, not reporting tools.
• Delivery discipline. Reduce batch size and increase delivery frequency. Small, releasable increments over large, risky releases.
• Lean as thinking. Bring Lean thinking to the work: value stream mapping, constraint identification, waste removal — as habit, not training event.
• Gemba-first. Go to the Gemba. Observe real work. Build your interventions from what you see — not from what people report in standups.
• Leadership coaching. Help leaders adopt a go-see, ask-why, show-respect posture. Coach leadership toward evidence-based engagement with teams — not status reporting.
• Regulatory awareness. Navigate the regulatory and data integrity environment intelligently. Compliance requirements are the operating context — design within them, not around them.
• System of coaches. Build coaching capability in others. Your job is to make yourself Progressively less necessary.

What we offer you:

A fixed salary over 12 months, supplemented by a short-term incentive, as well as a collective variable compensation based on Sanofi Group results.

Because taking care of our employees is also our mission:

• Benefits & Well-being: Quality health insurance, extended maternity/parental leave (18/14 weeks), enhanced support in case of illness, teleconsultation and second medical opinion covered by Sanofi, as well as many other wellness programs to discover here.

• Work-Life Balance: 31 days of paid leave + RTT depending on your status, remote work up to 2 days/week

• Transportation: Public transport coverage up to 80%

• Savings & Retirement: Group Savings Plan and PERCOL with employer matching, and PERO

• Professional Development: Internal and international mobility opportunities, learning & development opportunities

• And more: platforms dedicated to peer-to-peer recognition & service exchanges between Sanofi employees (carpooling, home exchanges, etc.), numerous CSE benefits...

About you

“You are a strategic coaching leader who thrives on growing people, shaping systems, setting clear direction, and helping teams learn in complex environments at scale.You balance empathy and clarity, think beyond the team level, and model continuous learning.”

Core experience

• 7+ years in Agile, Lean, and/or product environments — coaching teams in the work, not above it.
• Demonstrated flow metrics and DORA metrics practice as daily steering tools — not reporting.
• Continuous delivery coaching: batch size reduction, faster feedback loops, quality built in.
• Lean as lived practice: VSM, A3, PDCA in real engagements. You know the difference between a root cause and a symptom.
• Product ownership coaching as a core competency — not a nice-to-have for this role.
• Proven experience coaching at the business/stakeholder interface — not just team-level.
• Strong facilitation and mentoring capability.

Desirable

• Experience coaching in R&D, scientific, data, or regulated environments.
• Experience coaching in digital product contexts — product trios, UX collaboration, technical teams.
• Exposure to visual management practices: Obeya boards, performance panels, or similar.
• Emerging understanding of systems thinking — curiosity for how culture, structure, and flow interact.

Mindset & attributes

• Leads with curiosity, humility, and accountability.
• Embodies 'go see' (Gemba) — learning by observing real work, not reports.
• Values evidence over opinions; experiments over assumptions.
• Comfortable coaching upward and outward — business stakeholders and leaders are part of the system, not outside it.
• Patient enough to build change that lasts — not change that looks good in a slide.
• Acts with integrity, compassion, and clarity.

What we're really looking for

• Agnostic. Framework-agnostic. Uses what works. Can explain why. No loyalty to a certification stack or a vendor.
• Sports coach. Sports coaching posture: skin in the game, deliberate practice, willing to get operational — but also willing to step back strategically to test self-organization.
• Flow depth. Flow and DORA literacy deep enough to transfer to others. Story points are not a health metric.
• Evidence-based. Evidence-based practitioner: current condition always anchored in data. Training is not change.
• Product lens. Product thinking as a core coaching lens — not a horizon. Features shipped without evidence of value is waste with a velocity number on it.
• Boundary courage. Credible and courageous at the business interface. Can coach a stakeholder who doesn't think they need coaching — with respect, evidence, and persistence.
• Range. Communicates credibly across all levels — engineers, data scientists, clinical leads, senior leadership.
• Learning posture. Genuinely curious about the domain. A coach in R&D who stops learning stops being useful.
• Language. Fluent English required. French is a genuine advantage.

HARD FILTERS — PLEASE DON'T APPLY IF…

• You think running a workshop is the same as changing a system.
• You measure progress in certifications rather than outcomes.
• Your CV is a list of activities with no before/after and no measurable system change. Activity is not evidence.
• You can coach flow or product — but not both, and not simultaneously.
• Your instinct when a system is struggling is to add a ceremony, not remove a constraint.
• You only coach teams — you've never coached upward into the business or stakeholder layer.

#LI-FRA #Accelerator #LI-Hybrid