I spent almost twenty years leading cross functional teams and driving digital change with an agile and a product mindset.I've done it as an entrepreneur with multiple, multiple hats as a director of product management, building innovative solutions, and in the in the past three years at Sanofi, shifting a digital area from a project into a product centric approach. Let me start with a simple truth. Change is the only constant we can count on. It's part of life. Sometimes, it's loud and fast. Other times, it's quiet and unexpected, but it's always there pushing us, challenging us, and some and sometimes also transforming us. In our personal life, change shapes who we are. In our organizations, change define how we grow. And in the digital world, change is not just a condition. It is the engine. Digital transformation, let's be clear, it's about people. It's about the resilience to adapt to new technologies and the vision to imagine what is possible.

We are not just changing tools. We are changing mindset. We are redesigning the way we collaborate, the way we work with others, and the way we bring ideas into life. This transformation ask us to lead differently, to learn continuously, and to connect more meaningfully. So today, I love to take you through a story I've been part of. And let me add that this is the first time this story is shared publicly, so no pressure on me. And let me walk through the journey of how at Sanofi we have approached the transformation as a product. Having said that, let's get started. Sanofi is a pharmaceutical company present in almost all over the world. So when we began this transformation journey back in 2020, we didn't start only with technology.

We started with a question. How the digital organization can become not just a support function, but a true strategic partner for the business. The reason is simple to share, but very bold. Sanofi aims to become the first biopharma powered by AI at scale, And we are not doing artificial intelligence stuff because it's it's just trendy. Our purpose is to improve people's life, and we are doing so launching medicines and vaccines. And we need to work all together to accelerate our launches pipeline. And technology helps, but it's not the only ingredient. That time in 2020, we were delivering valuable projects, in fact. We but we realized that if we truly wanted to shape the future of the organization, we needed to evolve.

We needed to evolve how we work, evolve how we think, and how we collaborate. It wasn't just about doing more. It was about doing it differently. And that's when we understood the need to shift our mindset from a project into product. Like in many other industries, we saw that the product based delivery offered something something very powerful, a way to stay closer to the users to deliver continuously and to own value creation end to end. But we didn't want to just apply product thinking into our tools. We wanted to leave it. So we made a bold choice to treat the transformation itself as a product. And that when putting our users, in this case, our people at the center, because the truth is technology is a catalyst.

But people are the engine, and it's not just about the systems or the platforms. It's about new mindsets and behaviors, new skills and jobs, and new ways of working altogether. And here is when Emmanuel Frenhart, SunOffice chief defeat digital officer, and Mayara Bakan, the global head of organizational development, started to work together leading this digital transformation and designing a new culture. And that was the spark that lead our transformation. Now that you know why we were transforming before moving on to how we did it, let me pause and focus on what is a product. In the product operating model, product is a solution designed to solve a specific user need, a specific user problem, delivering values through iterations.

And the concept of product is not just a way of working. It is, in fact, a mindset shift. The truth is that we've all been in this project delivery focus, delivering a project, meeting the deadlines, staying on the budget, and yet realizing months later that we didn't build quite what it was expected, and we didn't solve the real problem. A problem a product is not just a set of features or a delivery timeline. A product is something that solves a real problem. It's for real people, and it's way it's a way that is also valuable for for our business. It considers three three main, topics, the business viability, the people desirability, and the technical feasibility. It has a vision. It has a direction. And when you look at your work through that lens, everything changes. So having this vision in a product model, we start defining the desired outcomes, not the outputs.

We ask, what is the impact that we want to create, and for whom, and why? That's very important. And then we plan how to achieve these different outcomes in a road map. This shift also requires embracing agile delivery, working in a smaller increments, learning as we go, and being flexible. Because in reality, building a product is never linear. But none of this works without the team. Teams that don't work in silos. They stay connected and collaborative across business units, across function, and across geographies. And this connection is key to prioritize, to stay focused on the problems that matter the most to our users and to our business to make real progress. And it's important also to measure how we are progressing. So we adopted this approach in our digital organization and also for our digital transformation.

Today, our teams just don't ask what should we build. They ask, what's the pain we are solving? How do we know these matters? And what would success would look like for the end user? And that's the real transformation. It's not in what we do, but in how we think, how we work, and how we grow. Now that we are on the same page regarding what product is, before moving on how we have orchestrated this in in our digital transformation, I want to share with you why we've orchestrated our digital transformation as a product. And here, I want to share literally my vision. My error says, by treating this transformation as a product, we are obliged to define this product and features to define also the vision and the future state.

So it give us purpose and a structure to something that otherwise, it can be really, really soft. And this is the key point. I really agree on this idea. Transformation is not a tangible problem. Transformation is especially about people and people being the engine of what we are we want to change. And many times, transformation get lost into some soft evolutions of mindsets or ways of working. And as a consequence, measuring it measuring how we are progressing, it's very hard. So treating the transformation as a product forces us to define a vision, which is to become a true strategic partner for the business. We also have these anchors that support the vision. As I mentioned before, they are culture and behavior, skills and jobs needed, and the ways of working. Then it's important to translate all these into outcomes that we want to achieve, defining also how success looks like and also its risks.

And the next steps is putting this down into a road map with clear milestones at short mill term. So now that we have what we want to achieve in our digital transformation with this vision, road map, and and so on, it's easier to define how to achieve it. We start by breaking our milestones into manageable PCs and deliver them incrementally with an agile mindset. And, of course, we built an empowered and connected team that gathers information and feedback needed to progress and also to prioritize and adapt the roadmap and everything that we are building. This team also defines how to measure our progress and also our success. Let's zoom in into some of these points. The road map is created at the beginning of the year and updated based on progress and feedback.

In the slide, you can see how we built our road maps in the past years with this top down and bottom up approach. We work in sprints, and each team member of the pod chooses the user stories that they are gonna work during this period. This is a way to break down intangible topics into manageable pieces. There is also a dedicated team to orchestrate the transformation, and that's Mayara Mayara's backend team. This team has three main legs, organization capabilities and transformation with all the product owners and the delivery team, the Agile Center of Excellence with the Agile coaches that support the product oriented and Agile Minds transformation across all digital organizations, and also the digital learning institute that focus on that focuses on advancing the employees' careers and their skills that they need.

But this team is not working alone. To ensure the people centric vision, three other actors are totally involved and merged with the transformation team. First, the executive leadership who totally support and are fully engaged in the transformation topics, acting in fact as role models. Also, with gigs that are development opportunities for employees on top of their existing responsibilities, and it's a way to involve colleagues from different organizations to be part of this transformation and also to become a sponsors of it. And finally, the digital catalyst network, which I'm part of. This is a volunteer role that empowers us as change agents within the organization, driving the digital transformation process and being responsible for capturing bottom up feedback from our colleagues and also influencing and supporting our colleagues through the change process.

As digital catalysts, we gather qualitative feedback from colleagues informally, for example, in a coffee machine, or more formally in in focus groups that follow the the ADKAR framework. And in all the time, we are totally close and working together with the transformation team that provides us any tools and anything that we need. Being connected to the executive leadership and to all the colleagues from the different parts of the organization creates a net of continuous feedback that fits the transformation product owners and ensures a people centric approach in our transformation. With all the information the product owners receive, they can effectively prioritize. One point to highlight is that our transformation product owners prioritize based in the organization readiness. So we can see that the prioritization is also people driven. It's not budget or effort driven only. Finally, progress isn't real if it's not measurable, and we measure it in two ways, with a people centric quantitative feedback via surveys and with business centric quantitative metrics tied to the business KPIs that is that are visible for the whole organization.

And we are improving. During the last quarter of the year, we launched a survey, and you can see in the slide some of the results. And the scores in digital last year, last at the end of the year, were above the company average and with a part super high participation, 99% of the organization. As we come to an end of this story that, as I said before, I'm sharing publicly for for the first time, I wanted to pause a moment here and and reflect. Consider transformation as a product is helping us making the transformation more tangible. We have defined vision and the outcomes expected. We have translated all these outcomes into manageable milestones that we have been mapped in a road map, and we are progressing in iterations, working in an agile mindset. Having an empowered team is key to success and creating a net that connects all the digital organizations and enables the transformation product owners to be people centric and to prioritize based on the feedback received.

Finally, as just mentioned, as important as the delivery is to measure the progress.