You have a grand vision for change; you watched a Ted Talk, attended a conference, or joined a new organization that you think you can improve.

Developing a vision is an important initial step, but operationalizing this vision is the hard part and what we are here to help with.

This is not going to be an exhaustive playbook or set of tactics you should use, but we will follow the general principles we have found useful when working with hundreds of customers to implement cultural changes in their organizations, using the goal of improving the product development cycle as the example we will come back to.

Build a foundation

Before you focus on the “what” that needs to be done, you first should focus on the “why” this needs to be done, and the “where” for where the team is starting from, and where you want the team to go.

This is all around setting a baseline, determining your goals, and being ready to articulate these goals and influence others to buy into them.

Know your baseline

Avoid trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole; to effectively build a plan for change, you need to know where you are starting from.

This will be a learning process for you and will involve internal exploration and curiosity. Learn and probe into what your team is currently doing and keep going deeper by asking “why.” This will help you not only understand just what is happening at the surface, but why people perceive that process as the standard, and deduce why it is really the standard.

Along the way, you will find helpful information for what has been tried in the past, what worked, and what did not, and why.

If you are a part of a team that is shipping new features without measuring the impact, there can be a ton of reasons why; time constraints, knowledge constraints, a lack of exposure to experimentation methodologies, a lack of effective tooling, a lack of motivation, a lack of prioritization, or something else entirely.

Find where your team is, why that is the case, and continue to understand the root causes so you know where you need to build from, and what obstacles you can avoid in your journey.

Know your North Star

Before enacting change, you need know what you want that change to look like.

Challenge yourself to reflect on the change you want to see and if it is best for your organization; tabling a really good idea because it is not a fit for your organization/product/current priorities should be seen as a positive outcome as you will protect your organization from spending time, energy, and resources in a sub-optimal direction

If your idea passes your initial test and your idea is best for your organization, lean on our old friend “why;” ask yourself why repeatedly until you have a compelling story for change.

This exercise will give you a Vision Pyramid that you can enroll your team into to articulate your motivations for change.

You will find that the more you ask yourself “why,” the closer you will get to your vision and mission, the top of your pyramid.

As you work your way back down the pyramid, you will find that your mission will inform your vision, your vision will guide your goals, and your goals will determine your tactical steps. Spend time iterating here, challenge yourself, refine the nodes in your pyramid.

When you eventually go to your organization to start to enact change, you will need to sell your idea and this vision pyramid can be the vehicle to do so; anyone in your organization should be able to resonate with at least one layer of your pyramid (Mission, Vision, Goals, Tactics).

At any point in your journey, individuals or the entire team can anchor on the node they resonate with, and climb the pyramid to be remotivated as to why this is important, or descend the pyramid to ground themselves in what needs to be done to achieve these lofty objectives.

Mission: Be the one-stop-shop for all product development needs

Vision: Outperform our competitors with a best-in-class product development cycle

Goals: Measure every feature launch and run 50 experiments over the next quarter

Achievable goal setting

The last thing we will cover here is setting realistic and achievable goals; this is an art and requires practice and feedback. There are plenty of books written to perfect this craft, but a sound framework to follow is:

1. Define clear objectives: Clearly define measurable objectives aligned with the organization's vision.

2. Build your team and gather feedback: Gain input and buy-in from stakeholders to ensure goals are realistic and achievable.

3. Set SMART goals: Ensure goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

4. Break down goals: Divide goals into manageable tasks for better tracking and accountability.

5. Prioritize goals: Focus on high-priority goals first to allocate resources effectively.

6. Consider risks and contingencies: Anticipate and mitigate potential risks with contingency plans.

7. Monitor progress and adjust: Regularly track progress and adapt goals as needed based on feedback.

8. Celebrate achievements: Recognize milestones to maintain motivation and commitment.

9. Evaluate and learn: Assess goal achievement and lessons learned for future improvements.

Use these initial goals as a starting point; adjust your goals with feedback along the way, and as your vision, constraints, and team change over time.

Some examples of goals we have seen with organizations tasked with improving the product development cycle:

• Run 10 experiments in the next quarter

• Make sure our core metrics are measured for each new feature released starting next month

• Improve retention rates in our conversion funnel/checkout flow by 5% this quarter

• Increase our weekly active user count by 100k / 10% this half

Setting goals with your team and enrolling them in striving to achieve them will only be half the battle. The other half will be measuring and monitoring those goals, course correcting or celebrating, and setting the next set of goals for your organization.

Building influence and a team of champions

Driving change within an organization requires more than compelling ideas and a loose strategy. You will need to enroll others in your objectives, and partner with them to reach a broader audience. Building influence is not about gaining control or authority, but it is how you can scale yourself and use existing relationships to reach a broader audience.

Finding the right champions

Before starting to bring change to your organization, find individuals who either share your vision and values, or who you know have similar pinpoints as you that could be solved by your initiative. Look for people who are enthusiastic, willing to challenge the status quo, and have influence in their circles, regardless of their title.

Consider your team structure as well; if your teams are split into different pods based on geography, product, customer segment, etc., it is worthwhile to have reach or representation in each pod.

The right partners might be from outside your organization as well. Consultants, experts, or technology vendors with proven track records, that you and your team have been able to vet, can be influential partners and authorities to guide you and your team along the way.

For product development, the right internal champions may be influential data scientists, product managers, or software developers, hopefully with experience building or working in a culture of continuous improvement and experimentation.

Having a champion on each product team can be helpful; if you have peers on each product team (fellow data scientists, product managers, devs), they can be great champions for your efforts in their circles.

Enrolling champions in your purpose

Once you have found potential champions, enroll them in your purpose. Clearly explain the mission, vision, and your initial draft of your goals, and the benefits of the change. Tailor your message to address their concerns, motivations, and aspirations. Use storytelling, data, and real-life examples to illustrate the need for change.

Gather their feedback on your thinking and plans as well; most people want to work with others who are open-minded and collaborative, and democratizing authorship of your effort will help them buy into the effort and want to see it succeed.

Gauge your champions’ willingness to help and how much time and energy they can give. Make sure you respect this level of effort and check in on this often to make best use of your teammates and readjust if you can lean on them more or need to lean on them less.

For improving your organization’s product development process, your champions will ideally have some exposure to continuous improvement and experimentation. Either way, reminding your champions of the benefits to them and the company of measuring and learning from your launches will help get their buy-in and help them encourage their spheres of influence to lean into the process.

Training champions as subject matter experts

Empower your champions to become subject matter experts by providing them with the necessary knowledge, skills, and resources. Equip them with your vision pyramid from above so they can help articulate your initiative to their spheres of influence.

Offer your team training sessions, workshops, and access to relevant documentation and tools. If you are working with a vendor, most have recorded training and docs they can share with you, or even live training and Q&A sessions they can host for your group of partners to build them into subject matter experts.

For product development, if you build tooling, part of the effort should be around a robust set of training material and docs for your internal team. If you are procuring a tool, the vendor should offer their own docs and training resources, but we still recommend creating a company-specific version for your team that helps your team focus and puts the content on your terms.

Test this content on your champions and solicit feedback on what can be added or improved. For building expertise in product testing, we recommend Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang, and Ya Xu’s “Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing.”

Empowering champions to be leaders

Encourage your champions to take on leadership roles within their circles of influence. Provide them with autonomy, trust, and support to make decisions and drive change. Give them an avenue and opportunity to provide feedback to you and action this feedback to support them and fill in any gaps in their toolkit.

Act as a coach and leader yourself, offering guidance, feedback, and encouragement. Create opportunities for them to showcase their leadership skills and share their successes and challenges.

By finding the right champions, enrolling them in your purpose, training them as subject matter experts, and empowering them to be leaders, you can build influence within an organization and drive meaningful change.

Define and execute your playbook

You now know what you want to do and why you want to do it, and you also have a team that is bought in to help you make it happen. Now, we get to the bottom of our vision pyramid: the tactical steps to make this all happen.

Similar to setting up our mission, vision, and goals, the right tactics for your initiative and team should not be determined in a vacuum: consider the skill set of the individuals you are trying to change and meet them where they are; learn what worked well and what didn’t from previous attempts at change and avoid the same mistakes but learn from the successes; gather feedback and input from the team you have assembled to understand perspectives you may have missed and to give them more ownership in the initiative.

Create your tactical plan, get feedback on it, and make sure to build a project plan to execute your tactics in the logical order; if you are procuring a technology, it does not make sense to start training your team until you have the tool identified, purchased, and implemented.

Again, what makes sense for your team, your initiative, and your organization will be different from what others have done in the past, but are some of the tactics we have found helpful in making change come to life:

Train the trainers

As discussed with empowering your influential champions to become subject matter experts, a large part of making change happen (and stick) is educating the masses. One individual or small group will be unable to train and maintain a level of knowledge across an organically growing and changing organization.

To ensure initial and continued success, make sure your champions are true subject matter experts on your initiative, make sure they are passing this expertise to their teams, and set up a cadence to refresh your champion’s skills, their team’s skills, and the skills of your growing and changing organization.

We also recommend starting with the basics; there is a reason we start learning math with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division before we learn algebra or derivatives. Train your champions and, by proxy, their organizations, based on their starting understanding of your initiative, and advance that knowledge over time.

To implement or improve the product development cycle at your organization, training to develop a baseline culture for experimentation can be a great place to start with your champions to then pass along to the rest of the organization. From there, we can have a more solid foundation to educate about your tooling and the tactical process for measuring product releases.

Find a compatible consultant, expert, vendor, or tool

In your continuous reflection on your mission, vision, and goals, you might find a knowledge or technical gap between your organization and making a lasting change stick, or you might need added bandwidth or expertise to guide you through this change-making process. That is where outside parties who have expertise in change management and/or your specific initiative can help.

No decision in this process should be made in a vacuum, including sourcing, vetting, and deciding on the right external partner. Enlist the team you have built around this initiative, your leaders, and your peers and mentors at other organizations for references and recommendations. Combine that feedback with your growing knowledge of your team’s needs, budget, skill level, past successes/failures, and test the tooling/expert you are thinking of bringing in to make sure the service lives up to the marketing.

Technology is often a key component to helping a team mature, grow, simplify, increase efficiency/effectiveness, reduce costs, etc. The best tool on the market might not be the best tool for your team and your needs, but there are more factors to consider when choosing a technology vendor:

• Should we try to build this ourselves? (Here is an example of how this can be evaluated in the product development world)

• Are we able to test the product before we buy it? How did those tests go?

• What support will we have for onboarding/performance issues/training/expertise?

• Will this vendor listen to our feedback? Did the vendor listen and act on your feedback in your evaluation/testing of their services?

• Will this solution scale effectively with our evolving needs or roadmap in the next 1-5 years? Will the cost scale within reason as well?

• Am I buying a software license, or am I adding a partner or advisor to my team?

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Set a working foundation for your tooling

Whether you bring in a technology vendor or need your team to adopt or change their use of an existing service, make sure the tools are working for your organization to use and get value out of.

Try to have this ready by the time your team begins training on the tool and initiative so they can poke around and familiarize themselves with the tooling (if you are using a vendor that charges based on consumption, see if they allow for an extra allowance in usage to let your team test freely without fear of penalty). Like your training plan, start with the basics and get your solution to a simple, workable state. You can build in, procure, activate, and train to the more advanced capabilities when you have the budget/time/success with the simple stuff first.

Work on setting up your technology and tooling often needs to begin before training can begin.

Allow self-exploration

After your team is trained and your tooling is set up, give the individuals in your organization a chance to roll up their sleeves and start working on your initiative. Give your teammates opportunities to unblock themselves if they get stuck with standing forums like office hours or a slack channel to ask questions in, and just-in-time content that accommodates several learning styles: written documentation, recorded training videos, click-through guides.

Your training and tooling configuration will be pivotal in the success of your team’s first experience with your initiative, and your first taste of a new thing can leave a lasting impression that has an outsized impact on your team’s willingness to follow your plan. Because of this, test your tooling and training on the team you assembled to influence the rest of your organization. Let them poke holes in your training and solution, put themselves in their teammates’ shoes, and gather feedback on what tooling and training adaptations and additions need to be made.

Consider this a phased rollout and your group of champions is your test group that provides feedback that you action upon to make the launch to your whole organization more effective.

Progress reviews

As your team pokes around in your new initiative, we do not want them to wander too far at first, especially if they are wandering in the wrong direction. Have your champions set up time with their spheres of influence on a weekly basis to start to gather feedback. Have them share success stories and find out what training, tooling adaptations, or course corrections need to be made.

Also set up time with your champions so you can hear and act on this feedback, but also to allow your champions to share and learn from each other’s challenges, successes, and learnings.

Feel free to invite your consultant, expert, or vendor to these sessions with you and your champions to help you with guidance and or tips and tricks to correct any misalignment. In the product development space, running regular experiment reviews with your champions and your vendor or expert at first can be critical to helping your team accurately improve the way you work, and spread knowledge to the rest of your organization.

Your experts or vendors can fall off these sessions after a while after they help you run these sessions on your own in your champions’ spheres of influence but can also check back in a couple of times a year to make sure you are still heading in the right direction or incorporating the latest and greatest methodologies.

These cadences can decrease in frequency to every other week, and monthly or quarterly as comfort and success become more regular, but a standing cadence at least quarterly is still highly recommended.

During this recurring session, help the team freshen up on new training material, or retrain on areas of your initiative that need improvement. Make sure to encourage sharing from several teams each session where best practices and successes can be celebrated and learned from.

Wrapping up

Making change happen in your organization is a tall task that will require reflection, defining your direction and goals, building a team to help you bring this change to light, and defining your tactical plan to make it all happen. By no means an exhaustive list of steps or tactics you can use, we hope that this has been a helpful step to defining your path for change.

Related articles:

• How to create an experiment review culture (with templates!)

• Build vs. buy: Making the right decision for your feature flagging and experimentation platform

• “Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing” by Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang, and Ya Xu

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