Change Management

You shipped it. The feature works. Nobody's using it. Or worse — they're actively working around it to keep doing things the old way.

Change management is a systematic approach to transitioning people from current ways of working to new ones. You address awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement — frameworks like Kotter's 8-Step Process and ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) give structured routes through the human side of change.

Technical success means nothing if people don't adopt it — that's the gap this discipline exists to close. Product teams chronically underestimate what's needed, building features while neglecting the organisational shift required to realise their value. Reach for it whenever a change requires people to work differently, not just use a different tool.

The unique strength is forcing you to treat resistance as signal rather than noise — resistance usually stems from legitimate concerns, not obstinacy. It fails without leadership commitment, because people watch what leaders do, not what they announce. And it's overkill for minor adjustments where a quick heads-up suffices.

Your next move: Whose legitimate concern about your change initiative are you currently dismissing as resistance — and what would it cost you to actually listen to it?

What it looked like for them

Mary Barra, General Motors, 2014. Barra became CEO as GM was engulfed in a faulty-ignition-switch scandal linked to over a hundred deaths. The defect had been known internally for a decade and systematically buried.

The culture had taught people that raising problems was career-ending. Barra stopped production on the affected vehicles. She commissioned an independent investigation and published the unedited findings. She named the cultural failure publicly: "I don't want you to forget this."

The recall rate spiked the following year — not because the cars got worse but because information stopped being suppressed. The change wasn't motivational. It was structural. Barra changed what happened to people who told the truth, and the truth started arriving.

Change management at this scale isn't about communication plans or stakeholder buy-in workshops. It's about altering the incentive architecture so that the behaviour you need becomes the behaviour that's rewarded — and the behaviour you're trying to end becomes the one that's costly.