Organizational change is exhausting—so I stopped trying to force it. After years of leading product teams, I’ve learned that trying to fix the people and processes around me is almost always wasted energy. If you’re eager to champion a better way of working inside a resistant organization, there’s a more sustainable path that actually drives results.
Here’s my starting point: individuals can’t change their organizations. I’m often asked to “train the PMs” or “install discovery practices,” but without executive sponsorship, organizational pain, and urgency, nothing moves. I now decline those well-intentioned requests and focus instead on creating the conditions for change.
My readiness check is simple and ruthless. Pain — organizational pain felt by leadership, not just you. Urgency — there has to be a cost to inaction. Awareness — people need to know solutions exist. If I can’t articulate these three clearly, I narrow the scope to what my team and I can control and demonstrate.
Practically, I elevate organizational pain by making it visible and quantifiable: missed outcomes vs output OKRs, customer churn tied to unmet needs, increased operational load from legacy workflows, or cycle time and deployment friction that slow learning. I create urgency by modeling cost-of-delay and showing the trade-offs we’re already making. And I build awareness by running small, transparent experiments that show there’s a credible alternative—continuous discovery, empowered product teams, and product trios solving for outcomes, not output.
“Organizational change starts with you — but it starts with you changing you, not your organization.” I take that literally. I refine my own discovery habits, make my assumptions explicit, and raise the quality bar on evidence. Whether it’s adopting AI responsibly in our workflow or redesigning how we do customer interviews, I change me first and let the results speak.
Show your work, don’t advocate your conclusions. Instead of arguing for “the right way,” I surface the pain, share how I reached my conclusion, and let others draw their own insights. I circulate decision logs that link customer evidence to product decisions, include short snippets from interviews, and map outcomes to proposals. That transparency lowers defenses, builds stakeholder buy-in, and shifts the conversation from opinion to observable facts.
Working within constraints, not against them. Stuck in a rigid, feature-factory process? You don’t have to change quarterly planning to do great discovery. Add customer context. Frame features around outcomes. Layer in the habits without touching the formal process. I’ve embedded discovery into existing rituals: adding customer insights to PRDs, tying features to measurable outcomes, and using thin-slice experiments that fit inside current delivery cadences. Over time, those habits compound.
The ripple effect is real. Teams that do great work and show it publicly become the ones everyone wants to emulate. That’s how influence actually spreads. I make results visible—brief Looms walking through our reasoning, dashboards that track outcome movement, and internal write-ups that highlight how the work changed a customer behavior. Visibility turns quiet wins into organization-wide momentum.
If you want a place to start this week, try this: define a sharp outcome, run three quick customer interviews, share your notes and decision rationale openly, and ship one small experiment tied to that outcome. Use the data to refine your next step and repeat. In a month, you’ll have a trail of evidence, not a pitch deck—and that’s what shifts minds.
In the end, sustainable change comes from consistent practice, not fiery advocacy. Focus on outcomes, make the pain and cost-of-inaction undeniable, and keep showing your work. The organization will move when it’s ready—your job is to make “ready” happen sooner by modeling what good looks like and making it impossible to ignore.
Inspired by this post on Product Talk.
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