Rick Denton (00:20)
Hey there, CX Passport listeners. Today we are heading to Basel, Switzerland to meet Trina Di Giusto, CX Transformation, business and operational excellence leader at Roche Global. Trina's career journey is one of those that kind of makes you pause. She started out as a research scientist in immunology, before realizing that lab life wasn't quite her thing.

That shift led her into advertising and digital marketing, blending analytical thinking with creative storytelling. It's a mix that really shapes how she drives transformation inside one of the world's most complex industries, pharma. Originally from Australia, now from Basel, Trina brings a scientist curiosity along with a marketer's logic. She challenges the reflex to throw tech at every problem. Hallelujah. Focuses on fixing the process first.

and keeps people at the center of transformation. She's learned how to stay comfortable in the gray where data isn't perfect and progress takes persistence. Trina, welcome to CX Passport.

Trina Di Giusto (01:25)
Thanks for having me.

Rick Denton (01:27)
I want to start right off there with, I've had some folks that come out of the science backgrounds, I mean, research scientist in immunology. Then you made this massive pivot into advertising and digital marketing. Talk to me about how that blend of science and storytelling really shape how you handle your work today.

Trina Di Giusto (01:46)
Yeah, definitely. ⁓ I think that my, love science straight off the bat. I love science, still love science, ⁓ but I think that the day to day grind of basic scientific research, I've worked that out pretty quickly. That wasn't for me, but I still love the science and I really appreciate that scientific training and what it brought for me because I think that my,

Rick Denton (02:04)
Mm-hmm

Trina Di Giusto (02:12)
scientific training and then the experiences that I've had from the marketer, the marketer's perspective with that lens across agency, publisher, client side, different industries, digital, on TV. That's really given me a perspective of what are those customer needs.

and also trying to align those customer needs with how to engage them and then also the organization's goals. So really taking that scientist curiosity with the marketer's lens as well. So now I approach problems very methodically, ⁓ very process driven from the scientific training, but then I bring in that scientist curiosity ⁓ along with an appreciation of where we're trying to get to to align

Rick Denton (02:48)
Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (03:01)
as I said, those customers and the organization.

Rick Denton (03:03)
Yeah.

You, okay. So I'm imagining, I love that you're pointing out, Hey, look, I still love science. wasn't the science part of it was the, the grind of the lab. And that makes a lot of sense to a lot of folks. And heck, there's folks are like, man, give me the grind of the lab rather than the ambiguity of the other world. When you were first entering a world that is certainly skews more creative.

less logic and I'm not saying it's an absence of logic at all, but there's, you know, the creative spectrum is certainly the stronger influence in the advertising and marketing world. Did you find that there was some resistance to some of your logic approach? Did you have to help people understand, no, Hey, by thinking through this in a logical way, we're getting ourselves to a better outcome.

Trina Di Giusto (03:47)
I don't think so. don't think so. Actually, I had a lot of queries, lot of curiosity from ⁓ the advertising peers that I had when I came into the industry first time. Because they were, and many people were saying, why? Why have you gone from science into advertising? It's gone from, you know, almost like the light side to the dark side. And I appreciate that it can really feel like that as well. But I think that ⁓

Rick Denton (03:58)
Okay.

Trina Di Giusto (04:16)
we don't appreciate how transferable scientific skills are. It's just a methodical process. There's a stepwise approach to everything that you encounter, any problem, you realize there is a problem, what are you trying to solve and have a stepwise approach to it. And it serves you just as well in the commercial world as it does in the scientific world. And so there wasn't really any resistance towards it, but rather, oh, okay.

Rick Denton (04:27)
Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (04:46)
There's not a seamless transition.

Rick Denton (05:15)
Okay, I like that. I shouldn't have led with the negative assumption there. I like your approach to it. No, no, there was actually this welcoming and this curiosity of it. Well, let's take that. So you've now in science, there is frequently a clear cause and effect line. That's the, at least the hope of your initial hypothesis. There's that old joke in marketing though that says, hey, we know that half of our marketing works. We just don't know which half. How have you been able to navigate that ambiguity between data?

outcomes and trusting your instincts, especially with that very logical background that you've had.

Trina Di Giusto (05:50)
Yeah, I think that might've been more apparent when I started out like 15 years ago in more of the marketing space. But I think that divide between the clarity of science and that ambiguity of marketing, that's really blurred these days. ⁓ Marketing now is a very data-driven practice that requires constant experimentation, iteration, as you know, constant inputs of both customer and market data. And in that regard,

Rick Denton (05:58)
Mm.

Trina Di Giusto (06:20)
it really isn't that different to science. You're getting in a lot of input, you're really seeing what are the facts at hand and then you're trying to experiment based on that and learn, right? You're getting those continuous feedback loops. So it's science in a different way. But you're right, where it deviates though is where you have to be comfortable in that ambiguity. And I think...

Rick Denton (06:30)
Yeah.

Trina Di Giusto (06:44)
pharma marketers probably find that a little bit more challenging than say marketers in other industries where we're far more data led. There is a lot more reticence to trust your gut and just take the leap. And that's also because the industry itself is very regulated and for good reason. You can't just trust your gut and go for it. There are consequences. So both from an industry.

Rick Denton (07:04)
Yes

We think this pill will work. Sure. Let's just throw it out

there. See what happens. Yeah. Bad idea.

Trina Di Giusto (07:12)
Exactly, exactly. mean,

one of the examples we used to refer to back in the day, this was when I very ⁓ early on when we came out of science, there were all these cosmetics ads, and we would look at them as scientists and think, why are they allowed to say this? How are you allowed to say you've clearly Photoshop this and you can sell this benefit? That's clearly not the case.

Rick Denton (07:35)
Right.

Trina Di Giusto (07:39)
in pharma. can't do those things. are consequences in people's lives at stake even. ⁓

Rick Denton (07:44)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we're sitting here and certainly all laughing aside. I think that's what, when you really come down to it, you are talking about actual life and then certainly quality of life and other categories. When you're talking about who the customer is in the pharma world. And that's one of the things that when I think about it from the outside, I've never really worked in pharma. I've just been a consumer of it. The whole concept of customer experience can mean something incredibly different.

depending on who the customer is. We've got patients, we've got healthcare professionals, we've got payers, regulators. How are you going about defining customer experience in that environment? And really, what does good experience look like across those different audiences?

Trina Di Giusto (08:29)
That's a really great question and one that we are constantly trying to solve for. And it's a constantly evolving one, to be honest as well. When you've got ⁓ external factors today like AI coming into play, and that not just changes our goalposts, but also the expectations of each one of these customer groups and what they're able to do. So that customer experiences that just changes as we go.

So it's really easy for us to ⁓ delegate that customer experience to specific groups in our organization that know that customer best. So for the payers, for those patients, for those healthcare professionals, different groups will know that customer better so they can deal with that group and best serve them. But the problem is there, if you're not careful with that approach,

Rick Denton (09:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (09:25)
then you let that evolve over time and then at some point you take a step back and you realize we've taken a very fragmented approach to that and it's very siloed and when you take that step back and look at it from a high level helicopter view it's not a very consistent ⁓ holistic customer experience as it were so then that becomes a lot of work undoing some of those pieces and ensuring that customer experience for each one of those those different customer

Rick Denton (09:32)
Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (09:55)
groups actually is in harmony that they have a consistent experience whether they're looking at one country's offering to another country's offering in our in our group or whether it's from ⁓ a reach out from one particular organization to another it should be consistent but that's a challenge and especially when you have an organization as large as ours have all of those pieces playing together.

Rick Denton (10:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, because you're talking about an organization that's not only the complexity of the actual, and forgive me for simplifying this, but the product, the complexity of the global experience that you're a part of, all of that. There was something that you said when you were addressing that idea of the diversity of the customer experience, and you used the term delegate. I'd like to go and talk a little bit more about that in the sense of

How does that get delegated? Whether specifically in Roche or in your desired approach, is there this centralized customer experience entity that is saying, now this is your responsibility, your responsibility. How has that gone? And then like you said, once it's splintered, how was the realization of, wait, we've got to make sure that we de-splinter, if I can make up a word, de-splinter the experience?

Trina Di Giusto (11:18)
Yeah, we call it centralization and decentralization and they're both. Yeah.

Rick Denton (11:22)
⁓ that's a lot better sounding than splintering, huh? ⁓

Trina Di Giusto (11:26)
And both are sort of dirty words in our lexicon as well. So we're proudly decentralized as an organization. We have a global group and we have a ⁓ country's organization that looks after each one of our country organization units. ⁓ And each has their own approach in approaching their market because they know their customers best. And within those groups, will have ⁓ groups that look after your

Rick Denton (11:34)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (11:55)
is groups that look after your healthcare professionals and maybe groups that reach out to patients and then there are also corresponding global groups as well that look after them and give guidance on what that should look like.

But then you can imagine in those many complex conversations, you might have guidances coming from one global organization that goes down to ⁓ country organizations to say, this is the way you should speak to payers, or this is maybe an approach you could take for patients. But then not necessarily with that level of transparency and detail across each one of those, either global or country.

organizations. And then there's a lot more complexity in that space where you realize there actually are some common and core ⁓ efficiencies that could gain if we just shared that information and orchestrated that. But that typically isn't part of our legacy so that because that's a little resistant as well.

Rick Denton (12:50)
Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (13:01)
So there is that part where, at least in our organization, we all want to have an excellent customer, our customers to have an excellent customer experience, but getting to that space and having us all change our ways of working, we all appreciate that's where we need to go, but getting there is another thing.

Rick Denton (13:08)
Mm-hmm.

Katrina, getting there, that's exactly what comes to mind when I think about travel. You talked about the global organization that is Roche and getting there, I imagine is kind of tricky when you're talking about all the different entities that exist out there. And so it can be nice to stop down in a first-class lounge when you're taking that kind of travel. And that's what I want to offer you today is let's stop down here in the first-class lounge. We'll move quickly here and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Trina Di Giusto (13:57)
Well, I love mushroom foraging. I'm a massive forager, yes. So the, yes, the, think the best experience, mushroom foraging experience is in the Romanian forests near Cluj. It is a mushroom forager's paradise, absolute paradise.

Rick Denton (14:02)
Huh, interesting.

Oh my gosh, I mean, those that are watching can see my eyebrows lifting and my eyes brightening. I've never heard anyone talk about mushroom forage on CX Passport. That's so much fun. And the Romanian forest, I've got these visions as you're describing that, that may or may not match reality, but I can totally see the forest. I love it. I love it. What's a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Trina Di Giusto (14:32)
Probably exactly as you're imagining.

Hmm. Well, it could vary but basically what's on my bucket list and it might have to happen in the next year if the reports are to be believed, but it's going to see the aurora borealis or astralis. So that could mean anywhere in the Nordics or anywhere in the south part of Australia.

Rick Denton (14:54)
Nice.

that, you know, and it's probably just because I live in a Northern hemisphere. I only hear about the Northern lights. And of course there would be Southern lights. I just don't think of them. And so that one must be kind of neat to be able to see where would one typically see that in the Southern hemisphere? Okay.

Trina Di Giusto (15:16)
Tasmania, I think would be an

obvious spot. Like the further south that you can get to would be, yeah, Tasmania.

Rick Denton (15:20)
that's

awesome. Okay, now you've given, I've got plenty of reasons to go to Australia, but now you've given me even one more.

Trina Di Giusto (15:28)
and one that probably no one else is thinking about when they're going through southern life.

Rick Denton (15:30)
No, we're all thinking about going to Finland

or Iceland to look at things. I didn't think about going south. love the idea. Trina, what's a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Trina Di Giusto (15:40)
easily Asian. I can't go without Asian food, fair, but I think if we have to narrow it down to one thing it probably is a sushi omakase, so like a degustation, sushi degustation would be my thing.

Rick Denton (15:42)
Okay. Yeah.

Hmm.

Ooh, that sounds really, really good. Yeah. And it's only eight 30 here where I'm recording you in, in, in North Texas. So for you to describe that and still make sushi sound good at this time of day. Yeah, it must be a good one. Well, what about the other way? What is something you were forced to eat growing up, but you hate it as a kid?

Trina Di Giusto (16:05)
think it's only time.

So this doesn't quite work with what I just said, but...

Rick Denton (16:14)
haha

no. Rice. That is not one.

I love it when it's something new. What was it about rice?

Trina Di Giusto (16:23)
Yes.

I'm southern Chinese and rice is a staple, but it is a staple that is like I had to have it three times a day. So you get pretty bored of it after that.

Rick Denton (16:34)
Okay.

I understand. Yeah. So that, that makes sense that it was the, the overwhelming repetition of it that got to you. Well, it's time for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item, not including your phone, not including your passport that you will not leave home without.

Trina Di Giusto (16:44)
Yes. Yes.

My travel pillow, for sure. I do not travel anywhere, even if it's on just carry on only, my travel pillow comes with me.

Rick Denton (17:11)
Trina, there is nothing as important to travel as good rest. And so I can imagine that travel pillow is such a vital part of your trip. And that makes a ton of sense why that would be the case. You know, before we entered the first-class lounge, you were talking about, well, as you said, it's centralization and decentralization, much better than my splintering one. Well, a lot of times as companies are going through those sorts of observations, they say, hey, we just...

We've got this great new technology to handle either the D or the centralizing. In this age of AI though, how do you help teams kind of step back? That it's not just the technology, the magic wand, but really step back, fix the process, and then choose the tech, if any, actually belongs in the solution.

Trina Di Giusto (18:01)
that you really you've touched on a real big pain point that we're trying to tackle with and have been again and again to be honest and I think it's to be fair it's probably a pretty normal human trait ⁓ and really easy to point at other things that are causing the problems that are impacting our lives rather than really turning the camera inwards and having a look at yourself and thinking about what else could we do ⁓

Rick Denton (18:06)
okay. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (18:31)
to solve for those problems and where is our own responsibility and accountability in that space. So I think that when we say look at a lot of the ⁓ recent transformation experiences that we've had, we find ⁓ it's really simple and actually almost predictable that people say, I know, let's build this and it will fix our problems. And now it is let's use AI and it will fix our problems.

And it's sort of you needing to take a step back and go, I think we've been here before.

Rick Denton (19:07)
Yeah

Trina Di Giusto (19:07)
And I don't

think we solved it last time with technology. So when we look at AI, think it's such a seductive and it's really easy tool that we can rely on and obviously reduces our personal and our professional life burdens, definitely. So it's really easy for people to imagine that AI will solve everything for them. But in that same breath, not realizing that AI often relies on the data that we feed it or

If we don't have the business processes in place to allow that AI to take root and make that impact that it's designed to do, then nothing comes of it.

And these are some of the things that we're looking at in just every many, different pathways of CX that we're realizing we actually need to make sure those business processes are in place first, that we know that we're doing the due diligence to allow the technology that we already have at hand to do its best, make the most impact before we go, in fact, we've made the most of this technology.

Rick Denton (19:47)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (20:14)
It isn't doing what it's to do and then we should look at, what else can we do? And in that same vein, we also see, and we've seen lots of reports that are saying that ⁓ with AI, unlike many other products or technology that comes into our organization or others, we often skip that step where we say, is this aligned with our strategy? Is this something that we're unable to do with the current

Rick Denton (20:18)
Mm-hmm.

Hehe.

Trina Di Giusto (20:43)
technology and we go straight to experimentation. And that we are guilty of that as well.

Rick Denton (20:48)
Yeah.

Why? So let me ask you, why do you think that is? What is it that's so different this time around, if you will, from any other transformations of technology transformations that we've experienced over the last several decades? Why now are we finding ourselves skipping that step of process assessment and the disciplines that you're describing there?

Trina Di Giusto (21:12)
Yeah, think, well, I think there's been a lot of reports around speculations as to why, but in many of the cases, the technology that came into our organizations, and I'm speaking just from an organization perspective, they went through our technology owners and our product owners as gatekeepers. And in this particular instance, the technology has actually gone to the masses at the same time that it's gone to the technology owners and gatekeepers. So,

Rick Denton (21:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Trina Di Giusto (21:41)
The supply and demand, the demand has been really big from the people, the users, the colleagues in the team, and not just going through the due diligence of those trained ⁓ process and technology owners. So I think that's sort of driving a lot of, yes, let's do this, let's experiment, and a lot of leaders getting on board with that as well.

Rick Denton (22:07)
You know, sometimes the simplest things are the most insightful and that makes a ton of sense to me that is it is being sort of pulled like that. The organization is pulling it in rather than it being pushed upon them. We hear that kind of phrasing a lot of the times when we're talking about change management. And I know that's a big, it's just always been a big word that means a lot of things to different people. It is a category where a lot of transformations stall.

So when you think of the transformations that you've been a part of, what have you learned about setting up people for success so that they can actually not just experience the change, sustain that change, not just survive it, but actually thrive in it going forward?

Trina Di Giusto (22:51)
we've had ⁓ some really tough but very rewarding and insightful learnings from our transformation work and the importance of change management. So we know that you need a a great vision and a strategy, but that on paper without due appreciation of change management and even more fundamentally, like understanding human behavior.

Rick Denton (22:59)
Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (23:14)
⁓ What people actually need and ensuring that's addressed a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs that's understanding that part is also part of understanding where and how Transformation's can succeed or where they'll fail. So for instance in some of the early days of our experiments we misunderstood Empowerment and we thought that empowerment

Rick Denton (23:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (23:38)
was like space was a proxy for empowerment. So in those sort of situations, we had ourselves and our leaders actually say, we shouldn't get in the way of experts. We shouldn't let bureaucracy get in their way. And so we should just give them the space to do what they do best and get out of the way. But then we sort of forgot in that, in our enthusiasm, forgot that teams really need direction.

Rick Denton (24:07)
Hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (24:07)
and they

need guardrails and they need information and they need the resources and they need capabilities and the skills and all of that to allow them to succeed and just space alone that actually just ensures that teams often lose direction really quickly and spin in circles rather than get the transformation outcome that we desired. And equally, we also learned that

Rick Denton (24:31)
Yeah.

Trina Di Giusto (24:34)
we can get really stuck into the data and we can get to decision paralysis. So we also thought that maybe setting deadlines would foster quick innovations and quick creativity, but not set up the right way that can have some unintended consequences. ⁓ people seeing a deadline is in place. They might make safe bets.

Rick Denton (24:45)
⁓ right.

Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (24:59)
rather than bold bets that might result in no result to show for. So things like that, we're having to realize, ⁓ the incentive was missing there, or the safety was missing in that space to actually allow the whole piece to come together. So we took some hard lessons in that first iteration, and then we really had to think about how we would design the next cycle to take that into account.

Rick Denton (25:01)
⁓

Yeah, there's a lot of good insights in there and it, it, shows me you've done. And I know this, we talked before, but you clearly have done a lot of transformations. In fact, I think you said you're now in your sixth cycle of transformation at Roche. So taking all that wisdom of the past, I'm sure you brought that into this cycle. So what's making this cycle land differently? What have you stopped doing along the way and what lessons are you choosing to carry forward into the next?

Trina Di Giusto (25:56)
Yeah, ⁓ think that the lessons that we've learned aren't, annoyingly, can't be neatly boxed into each cycle, but rather they blend fluidly across each of them. But I'd say like the realizations and the learnings that we've had ⁓ can, they go across things like what is a realistic scope? So having the right scope and ambition versus boiling the ocean, which...

Rick Denton (26:06)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Trina Di Giusto (26:25)
may have tried, ⁓ understanding our own system.

Rick Denton (26:28)
guilty of it, it's okay.

We're good. I like that. That's good way of saying it.

Trina Di Giusto (26:32)
We just were ambitious, that's all. Yes.

That's right. Got to take it with the right sort of optimistic attitude there. Yeah, but really understanding our own systems better, understanding the needs of our people. We talked about that change management piece, understanding what leadership requirements are in place to really foster and set up people for success. And really, they sound really basic, but baselining

Rick Denton (26:42)
Yes.

Trina Di Giusto (27:00)
where we are in terms of our skills and capabilities and what we're trying to get to and having that action path to get there. So it's not so surprising, but in retrospect, we see that it only sticks that change that we're looking for only really sticks when you have a clear and consistent vision, when you have the skills, the incentives, the resources and the action plan in place does and all of them at the same time, that's when you

actually get to see some of the changes that you're looking for stick and take place and take root. Any one of those things missing and you're finding, aha, something is going to break here. So for instance, if you don't have the vision, you've got confusion. If you don't have the skills, you have anxiety in that group and so on and so forth. So like each one of those parts of that formula are really required.

Rick Denton (27:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Trina Di Giusto (27:58)
But we've had to sort of get to that understanding of right we Everything must be in place for it to even have a chance

Rick Denton (28:06)
that's it. You have dropped such a wisdom nugget right there at the end that it is time for us to put our pencils down and the test is over because that is exactly what I want to carry away here at the end of this. Trina, this has been an interesting, well, kind of like your career. It's been an interesting sort of path as we've gone through it. I really appreciated you bringing in that logic into the stereotypically creative world and how that actually was welcomed.

in there, the wide definition of what customer experience is in the pharma space, how the centralization and the decentralization, all that woven together. And I love how we got to it at the end of, this is how change is always going to be happening as business and life evolves and grows. How can we do it successfully with the change management and all of the elements that need to go into that? Trina, folks wanted to get to know you, learn a little bit more about your approach to transformation, customer experience, or even just

Yeah, talk lab work back from the old days. How would they get in touch?

Trina Di Giusto (29:08)
⁓ I can definitely hand my ⁓ email address to you so people can definitely get in touch and find me on my LinkedIn as well.

Rick Denton (29:17)
Awesome. I will certainly get the LinkedIn URL down there in the show. And it's Trina. It has been an absolute delight for me today. I've learned, I've laughed, I've enjoyed. Those are all great things for an episode of CX Passport. Thank you for being on CX Passport.

Trina Di Giusto (29:30)
Thanks so much for having me. It's been a blast.