This job offer is accessible to all, regardless of gender.
Job title: Agile Coach - Performance & Flow Coach
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Location: Lyon
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Hybrid: 3 days per week onsite, 2 days work from home
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Permanent: Fulltime
At Sanofi, we’re committed to transform the practice of medicine through break-through science. Within Sanofi, Manufacturing & Supply (M&S) is the bridge between Science and Patients, ensuring all patients get their dose reliably, that new medicines are launched faster to cover unmet needs and that they can be delivered affordably across the globe. At Sanofi we are convinced that Manufacturing is, and must in the future increasingly be, a competitive advantage and that digital unlocks every next step in that journey.
Join Sanofi Manufacturing & Supply (M&S): Where Innovation Meets Life-Saving Impact in the Heart of Lyon!
Imagine working in a vibrant startup environment, right in Lyon’s bustling city center!
We are an innovative global healthcare company with one purpose: to chase the miracles of science to improve people’s lives. Digital & Data is at the heart of Sanofi: our ambition is to be the leading digital healthcare platform to develop & deliver medicine faster, enable healthcare professionals to improve treatments and help patients improve their health. Ready to get started?
The mission — what this role is really here to do
This role exists to help a manufacturing accelerator become a learning system — one that improves faster than its constraints. That means building Lean and Kata habits into how teams, product owners, and leaders actually work. Not running workshops at them.
You’ll be operating inside a GxP-regulated, compliance-heavy environment. Governance is real here. The job isn’t to work around it — it’s to help the system flow better within it. That requires patience, credibility at the Gemba, and a coach who understands that training is not change.
Delivery discipline and product thinking — both matter. Most of our products are already in production. More Products are going live. Some teams are still building delivery muscle. Others are ready to move toward outcome thinking and genuine product ownership. The coach works at both levels simultaneously, calibrated to where each team actually is.
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?
- Can you hold a credible conversation with a plant director, a data scientist, and a PO — in the same afternoon?
- Would you rather build someone else’s capability than demonstrate your own?
- Do you see a compliance constraint as a system condition to understand, not an obstacle to fight?
- Have you ever coached in an environment where a 6-month change cycle is considered fast?
Main responsibilities
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Flow first. Make the delivery system visible — flow boards, WIP policies, aging WIP reviews. You cannot improve what you cannot see.
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Delivery discipline. Reduce batch size and increase delivery frequency. Small, releasable increments over large, risky releases.
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Lean as thinking. Bring Lean thinking to the work: value stream mapping, constraint identification, waste removal — as habit, not training event.
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Kata cycles. Run Kata coaching cycles with teams and leaders: current condition target condition experiment learn. Repeat until it is instinct.
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Gemba-first. Go to the Gemba. Observe real work. Build your interventions from what you see — not from what people report in standups.
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Leadership coaching. Help leadership adopt a go-see, ask-why, show-respect posture .
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GxP navigation. Navigate the GxP compliance environment intelligently. Change control is the operating context — design within it, not around it.
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Product thinking. Coach product owners along the ownership arc: from backlog manager to problem owner. Outcome framing, evidence-based bets, assumption testing. For teams already in production, this work starts now. For teams still building delivery muscle, you plant the seeds.
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System of coaches. Build coaching capability in others. Your job is to make yourself Progressively less necessary.
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7+ years coaching delivery teams — in the work, not above it.
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Demonstrated flow metrics practice: cycle time, throughput, WIP as daily steering tools — not reporting.
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Continuous delivery coaching: batch size reduction, faster feedback loops, quality built in.
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Lean and Kata as lived practice: VSM, A3, PDCA in real engagements. You know the difference between a root cause and a symptom.
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Product ownership coaching experience: helping POs move from output delivery to outcome framing. Discovery practices are a plus — coaching toward evidence-based decisions is a requirement.
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Regulated or compliance-heavy industry experience preferred. Not a hard filter — but no regulated experience means a steeper ramp.
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Ability to guide teams on tool selection and integration without being tool-driven.
What we’re really looking for
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Framework Agnostic.. Uses what works. Can explain why. No loyalty to a certification stack or a vendor coach.
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Sports coach. Sports coaching posture: skin in the game, deliberate practice, willing to get operational if the team needs it.
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Flow depth. Flow literacy deep enough to transfer to others — not just use personally. Story points are not a health metric.
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Evidence-based. Evidence-based practitioner: current condition always anchored in data. Training is not change.
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Product lens. Product thinking as a coaching lens. Can hold the outcome question alongside the flow question. Knows that features shipped without evidence of value is just waste with a velocity number on it.
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Range. Communicates credibly across all levels — engineers, data scientists, POs, plant directors, senior leadership.
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Learning posture. Curious and continuously learning. Active in communities, reads widely, experiments openly.
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Language. Fluent English required. French is a genuine advantage for crucial conversations at the Gemba.
Hard filters — please don’t apply if…
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You think running a workshop is the same as changing a system.
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You measure progress in certifications rather than outcomes.
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You’ve spent the last 5 years in a CoE with no sustained team contact.
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Your CV is a list of activities — 'accompanied,' 'facilitated,' 'implemented' — with no before/after and no measurable system change. Activity is not evidence.
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You can coach flow or product — but not both, and not simultaneously.
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Your instinct when a system is struggling is to add a ceremony, not remove a constraint.
Lyon — worth knowing
Lyon is a genuinely good place to live. TGV access to Paris (2h) and Marseille. Two rivers. An old city and a new one. Fabulous food at prices that don’t require a second mortgage. 90 minutes from Grenoble and the Alps. Beaujolais next door. Milan and Barcelona are each a five-hour train ride away.
The office is at Part-Dieu — Lyon’s main transport hub. You’ll be in the city centre three days a week (Mon–Wed), remote Thursday–Friday.
Why choose us?
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We provide a highly collaborative environment, with an opportunity to work with a world class team.
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Contribute to a company that is not only a leader in healthcare but also a pioneer in digital transformation, shaping the future of global health.
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Bring the miracles of science to life alongside a supportive, future-focused team.
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Discover endless opportunities to grow your talent and drive your career, whether it’s through a promotion or lateral move, at home or internationally.
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Enjoy a thoughtful, well-crafted rewards package that recognizes your contribution and amplifies your impact.
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Take good care of yourself and your family, with a wide range of health and wellbeing benefits including high-quality healthcare, prevention and wellness programs and at least 14 weeks’ gender-neutral parental leave.
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Play an instrumental part in creating best practice within our manufacturing facility.
Pursue Progress. Discover Extraordinary.
Progress doesn’t happen without people – people from different backgrounds, in different locations, doing different roles, all united by one thing: a desire to make miracles happen. You can be one of those people. Chasing change, embracing new ideas and exploring all the opportunities we have to offer. Let’s pursue progress. And let’s discover Extraordinary together.
At Sanofi, we provide equal opportunities to all regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or gender identity.
Watch our ALL IN video and check out our Diversity Equity and Inclusion actions at sanofi.com!
