Mehdi Bouzouad Eng., PhD candidate
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Mehdi Bouzouad, Principal Product & Process Leader Shorten the distance between a question and its verification.

I de­sign prod­uct plat­forms and lead Lean trans­for­ma­tions in com­plex, reg­u­lated en­vi­ron­ments: cy­ber­se­cu­rity, bank­ing, in­dus­try, en­vi­ron­men­tal ser­vices.

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Portrait of Mehdi Bouzouad
  • Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt
  • PSPO III and SAFe PO/PM
  • Author of The Lean Odyssey
  • PhD candidate at the ICube laboratory
  • Visiting lecturer at the University of Strasbourg

They trusted me with their platforms and their transformations.

  • SUEZEnvironmental services
  • Société GénéraleBanking, cybersecurity
  • Banque Internationale à LuxembourgBanking
  • AlstomRail industry
  • SNCF RéseauRail infrastructure

Case studies

Com­plex, reg­u­lated en­vi­ron­ments, where com­pli­ance and speed have to co­ex­ist with­out ly­ing to each other.

SUEZ

Principal Transformation Leader, independent engagement for the CTO office

Since Oct. 2025

A man­date from the group CTO: a Lean trans­for­ma­tion car­ried out one de­part­ment at a time, work­ing di­rectly with the CTO, the CISO and the Network and Security di­rec­tors.

  • 3departments supported in turn
  • 80+structured improvement actions
What I did
  • Cy­ber­se­cu­rity (IAM/PAM) with the CISO, then the net­work de­part­ment, then se­cu­rity op­er­a­tions: the scope widened af­ter each de­liv­ered en­gage­ment.
  • A com­plete DMAIC ap­proach and a tool-sup­ported di­ag­no­sis.
  • Frag­mented op­er­a­tional di­ag­noses turned into ex­ec­u­tive de­ci­sions and costed trans­for­ma­tion roadmaps.

Société Générale

Principal Product Manager, cybersecurity

June 2022 to Sept. 2025

A di­rect man­date from the group CISO: end the frag­men­ta­tion of the cy­ber strat­egy across ev­ery en­tity, with hun­dreds of dash­boards and tools, no com­pa­ra­ble in­di­ca­tor, and there­fore no group-level steer­ing of risk or bud­get.

  • 150+entities migrated worldwide
  • 35%faster incident resolution
  • +20%detection accuracy
  • €1.2Min annual savings
What I did
  • Took over the prod­uct af­ter 5 months of wa­ter­fall with noth­ing de­liv­ered: re­built the ar­chi­tec­ture, the data model and the func­tional spec­i­fi­ca­tions, shipped an MVP, then it­er­ated.
  • An end-to-end chain: mul­ti­modal in­ges­tion, en­rich­ment, data lake, multi-source cor­re­la­tion, ex­ec­u­tive re­port­ing, re­ten­tion and ar­chiv­ing. One in­ter­face, with views, per­mis­sions and work­flows spe­cific to each pop­u­la­tion: SOC, CERT, Red, Blue and Purple Teams, Control and IAM/PAM.
  • A 34-per­son team led across France, India and Romania with­out hi­er­ar­chi­cal au­thor­ity: a proxy PO, ar­chi­tects, QA, DevOps, UX de­sign­ers, pen testers and 3 de­vel­op­ment squads, up from 1 off­shore squad. Moved from wa­ter­fall to SAFe DevSecOps and mea­sured the de­liv­ery flow.
  • De­com­mis­sioned the en­ti­ties’ lo­cal tools. Ran the mi­gra­tion un­der NIST CSF, within a DORA com­pli­ance pro­gram au­dited by the ECB. Grew the team in the mid­dle of a group cost-re­duc­tion pro­gram, on demon­strated value. The plat­form is still the group’s cen­tral cy­ber tool.

Banque Internationale à Luxembourg

Senior Product Manager, IT department

Sept. 2020 to May 2022

Pan-Eu­ro­pean B2B on­board­ing: a KYC/AML jour­ney that was frag­mented, slow and com­pli­ance-heavy across Europe.

  • −40%false positives
  • +47NPS points
  • €2.7Min annual savings
What I did
  • An API-first plat­form in­te­grated with the Temenos core bank­ing sys­tem, mod­u­lar com­pli­ance logic, au­to­mated ver­i­fi­ca­tion.
  • Fea­tures co-de­signed with users, spon­sors and reg­u­la­tors, align­ing Legal, Com­pli­ance and IT.

Alstom

Lean Product & Process Development Manager, supplier quality

Sept. 2018 to Aug. 2020

Sup­plier per­for­mance was tracked in frag­mented tools, with no abil­ity to an­tic­i­pate.

  • 20+countries covered
  • 100+users trained
  • €3.2Min annual savings
What I did
  • A global sup­plier per­for­mance plat­form (SAP and Power BI) that re­placed the frag­mented tools and opened the way to pre­dic­tive an­a­lyt­ics.
  • Trained and coached the en­gi­neer­ing and sup­plier qual­ity teams in LPPD, con­tin­u­ous im­prove­ment and prob­lem solv­ing.

SNCF Réseau

Innovation Project Manager (Redesign to Cost), apprenticeship

Sept. 2015 to Aug. 2018

HS2, England’s sec­ond high-speed line: SNCF Réseau’s re­sponse to HS2 Ltd’s in­ter­na­tional ten­der for the elec­tri­cal in­fra­struc­ture.

  • −25%total cost of ownership
  • 360 km/hdesign speed of the V360 catenary
What I did
  • In­no­va­tion project man­ager on SNCF Réseau’s re­sponse to the HS2 Ltd ten­der, un­der the project di­rec­tor, ap­ply­ing the Redesign to Cost method.
  • Per­son­ally trained in Redesign to Cost by its cre­ator, Alain Chauvet, who also took part in the bid’s strat­egy meet­ings.
  • Pro­posed a new cate­nary, the V360, com­bin­ing the lat­est cate­nary in­no­va­tions with the low­est pos­si­ble cost. It is de­signed for 360 km/h, be­yond the 320 km/h of French high-speed lines.
  • 25% lower to­tal cost of own­er­ship, which made the bid com­pet­i­tive. The bid was fi­nally sub­mit­ted as a con­sor­tium with in­dus­trial part­ners.
  • HS2 Ltd later adopted the V360 de­sign un­der li­cense from SNCF Réseau: the first cate­nary cer­ti­fied in Europe for 360 km/h.

Services

3 ar­eas of work, as an in­de­pen­dent con­sul­tant.

Lean Six Sigma transformation

Di­ag­nos­ing and trans­form­ing a de­part­ment through a com­plete DMAIC ap­proach: map­ping the real pro­cesses, mea­sur­ing, find­ing the root causes, steer­ing all the way to ver­i­fied gains.

For IT, cy­ber­se­cu­rity and op­er­a­tions de­part­ments.

Product leadership

Lead­ing data, cy­ber­se­cu­rity and com­pli­ance plat­forms: prod­uct vi­sion, data model, team or­ga­ni­za­tion, from res­cu­ing a stalled prod­uct to scal­ing it.

For lead­er­ship teams who have to steer what they can­not yet com­pare.

Training and certification

Short ses­sions in small groups, from Yellow to Green Belt, up to cer­ti­fy­ing in­ter­nal cham­pi­ons who carry on with­out me.

For teams who want to learn the method, not just re­ceive it.

How I work

A good advisor does not come to do your work. They come to stop you from lying to yourself.

  • No method in 18 stan­dard­ized work­streams: you would be buy­ing a roll­out, not a learn­ing process.
  • No ROI fig­ure be­fore I have spent a day on the ground with you.
  • I plan my exit from day one. The only cri­te­rion that mat­ters fits in one ques­tion: what will re­main once I am gone?

An advisor who settles in is an advisor who has failed.

Experience

  1. Since 2025Principal Transformation LeaderSUEZ, CTO office (independent engagement)
  2. 2022 to 2025Principal Product ManagerSociété Générale, cybersecurity
  3. 2020 to 2022Senior Product ManagerBanque Internationale à Luxembourg
  4. 2018 to 2020Lean Product & Process Development ManagerAlstom, supplier quality
  5. 2015 to 2018Innovation Project Manager (Redesign to Cost), apprenticeshipSNCF Réseau, HS2 bid (UK)

Certifications

  • Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt Council for Six Sigma Certification, 2020
  • Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Ovale Performance, IASSC-accredited program, 2019
  • Lean Six Sigma Green Belt University of Strasbourg, 2018
  • SAFe PO/PM Scaled Agile, 2025
  • PSPO III Scrum.org, 2023
  • DevOps Product Owner International DevOps Certification Academy, 2024

Education

  • PhD in Industrial Engineering ICube laboratory, University of Strasbourg, defense planned for 2028
  • MSc in Industrial Engineering Faculty of Physics and Engineering, Strasbourg, 2018
  • BSc in Industrial Engineering Faculty of Physics and Engineering, Strasbourg, 2016

Languages

  • French native
  • English professional, C1

Skills

Strategy and leadership
Product lifecycle vision, Lean Portfolio Management, roadmap and governance, OKRs and KPIs, executive relationships, change management at scale.
Lean, agility and innovation
Lean Six Sigma, SAFe, PI Planning, Scrum, LeSS, Kanban, DevSecOps, Lean Startup and MVP, Design Thinking, TRIZ.
Product and data
Functional specifications, data modeling, product architecture, discovery, multi-squad backlog, data lake, BI and SQL, AWS, Azure, GDPR.
AI and automation
Advanced prompt engineering, LLM integration, agent orchestration, workflow automation (n8n), React application development, APIs.

Writing, researching, teaching

Re­search to un­der­stand. Teach so that it serves.

The book

The Lean Odyssey

From Its Origins to Lean 5.0

The his­tory of Lean through its tri­als and rev­o­lu­tions, from me­dieval work­shops to fac­to­ries run by al­go­rithms. A story, not a man­ual.

In English since October 2026 (hard­cover, 394 pages). In French, 2nd edi­tion, July 2026 (hard­cover, 402 pages).

Browse excerptsEnglish edition on AmazonFrench edition

Research

PhD at the ICube lab­o­ra­tory (UMR 7357, CSIP team) on the suc­cess and fail­ure fac­tors of or­ga­ni­za­tional agility in the Industry 5.0 era. De­fense planned for 2028.

The PhD in detail

Teaching

Vis­it­ing lec­turer at the Uni­ver­sity of Stras­bourg, in mas­ter’s and bach­e­lor’s pro­grams: Lean Six Sigma and project man­age­ment.

Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt in the In­dus­trial En­gi­neer­ing mas­ter’s pro­gram since 2021: sev­eral hun­dred stu­dents cer­ti­fied.

Teaching in detail

Before Lean, the dojo

Karate black belt in 2010, 2nd dan and fed­eral in­struc­tor in 2012: years of re­peat­ing the same moves to per­form them bet­ter, not to learn new ones. Then 2 years teach­ing in a dojo, where I un­der­stood that what drives me is not know­ing, but pass­ing it on.

I found the same dis­ci­pline in Lean: yel­low belt in 2016, green in 2018, black in 2019, Master Black Belt in 2020. You do not skip a level, and you are not ex­cused from one be­cause you have al­ready climbed oth­ers else­where.

Read on: the thread, my convictions, my definition of Lean

Contact

I re­ply within 2 busi­ness days, and I will tell you frankly if I am not the right per­son.

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Or directly: contact@mehdibouzouad.fr, or on LinkedIn.