# Strategic Organizational Change Without Authority

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-06-16

## Transcript

Hi, folks.
This is All Things Product with Petra Wille.
And Teresa Kors.
And we're so happy you're here.
Teresa, everything is changing all the time right now.
So even org charts, team topologies, we all have to rethink our organizations.
And it's so exhausting.
Are you having any ideas and tips how org change?
would be less exhausting.
Yeah, I want to go back to the talk I gave at the inaugural Product at Heart conference.
True.
The title of the talk was everybody can do continuous discovery, even you.
And the mantra of the talk was organizational change starts with you.
And my goal in the talk was to empower people to focus on adopting the discovery habits individually, right?
And like, that is what gets the snowball rolling and starts to lead to organizational change.
But I think some people misinterpret that.
Like they interpret it as they're individually responsible for changing their organization.
And I think this is where things get dicey.
So I'll share an email I got recently.
Somebody emailed me and said, I'm on a design team.
My product managers need training.
Can you help?
Okay.
I love it.
That's a great initiative.
Yeah, like other people in my organization that I'm not responsible for need training.
Okay.
We're starting in the wrong place.
Right.
When I say organizational change starts with you, I mean, literally, what are you individually changing?
Not what do you want to change about other people?
And then I got curious and I was like, OK, well, let's talk about what is being asked of your product managers.
Where are they falling short?
And like what came out of the conversation is they follow a 10 step.
I'm not exaggerating like a 10 step gated process.
where all of their work goes through 10 phases.
Each phase has like criteria for how you move from one phase to the next.
Yeah.
And my conclusion was like, I can't help you.
Like, first of all, you're not in the organization that you want to train.
That doesn't, that's weird.
Second of all, you're not an executive that's going to like lead this change.
So like you have no power to influence.
You have power to influence.
You have no power to change that 10-step process.
And I basically had to say, like, I can't help you.
And she was pretty frustrated by that.
She was like, why?
And I had to explain, like, you need an executive sponsor.
Like, you can't change.
This is a company-wide process that you're not going to change yourself by, like...
What are you going to do?
Go to your head of product and say, your team needs training?
Talk to Teresa?
Where is this going to go?
How is this going to turn out?
I usually, I have this kind of three quick things that I usually throw at people when I have conversations like that.
And I always make sure that they understand that organizational change is only happening if there is pain.
urgency and the awareness of help being available and what she already has yeah not your pain it needs to be organizational pain that an executive would experience for example and then still even if they experience the pain if urgency is not given nothing will change because people and organization in particular are so good at ignoring the pain Only when it comes with a cost and it becomes more urgent, then they're more likely to react.
And then still, they need to be aware of help being available, right?
Because then that is basically creating the fertile ground for the change actually to flourish.
And what she can influence is that the right people are aware of that Teresa would be able to basically teach or train or offer help.
But still, the other two are super hard to figure out.
Yeah.
So how can she help executives feel the same pain?
Like what I really like wanted to help her understand is that organizations don't want to change.
Like that's the first thing people have to recognize.
Like if you're an individual contributor.
Your organization doesn't want to change.
Like what your organization is doing today is exactly what got them where they are today.
And there's a significant percentage of people in the organization that thinks everything works great.
Yep.
So like, that's the first thing.
Like the reason why organizational change starts with you and not you changing your organization, but you changing you is because nobody else in the organization wants to change.
And so you're not going to be effective at trying to get them to change.
Like the point of my product at HeartTalk was we can't change people.
Full stop.
We can't change people.
The only thing we can change is ourselves.
Right.
And so I think this is really relevant right now because I hear from people all the time, not even with the discovery habits.
Now I'm hearing it with AI.
Like I want to be an internal AI champion.
How do I get more of my colleagues to adopt AI?
No, you just frame that as how do I change other people?
So I want to just like, we're going to title this episode, Organizational Change is Exhausting.
And I want you to see that title and I want you to believe it.
Like, don't do it.
It's exhausting.
Don't waste your time.
Don't waste your life.
The way we influence organizational change is by changing ourselves.
So if I'm that UXer and I want my product team to change, I have to look at what am I doing?
that's contributing to the way that my product team is working?
How do I change the way that I work to support the way I want us to work?
And then don't think about it at the organizational level.
Think about it at the individual level.
I'm a UX designer.
I probably have a product manager peer.
How do I start a conversation about how the two of us work together?
And would be more successful.
because of that.
I think that is the important part.
Well, that was the point of the Product at Heart talk is that like when we start with ourselves, when we start with the people around us, when we create these collaborative examples, other people in the organization get curious and this is how we influence.
It's not how we change, it's how we influence.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So an exception from what you're saying is if you're talking about people in leadership roles oftentimes, because they sometimes can aggregate the pain that they see in each and every team and make sure that senior executives see it or experience it as well.
And they oftentimes have the data at hand to be able to create a bit of urgency.
But that's for if you're in leadership position already, right?
That's not for the individual contributor working on a team.
Sometimes pain just needs to be surfaced.
I do think that both individuals and executives can surface that pain and can surface some of the urgency.
So I see a lot of teams, they see a need for a change.
And they advocate for the change instead of exposing the pain that requires the change.
And this is a little bit of, I gave a talk called Show Your Work at, I think, one of the Mind the Products.
And it was this idea of like, product teams make the mistake of advocating for their conclusions.
Instead of showing how they reached those conclusions.
The conclusions.
And I think this is the same thing for organizational change.
Whether we're talking about adopting the discovery habits or whether we're talking about new AI workflows, whatever, any change, right?
You're always going to be more effective if you share the knowledge that you have that helped you like draw that conclusion.
Reach out to Teresa.
The pain that made you reach out to Teresa in this email.
Then by sharing the conclusion itself.
Right.
And this is the classic show.
Don't tell.
Right.
Show what you're doing.
Show the pain that was exposed.
Show a way to solve it.
Don't tell people this is the right way.
Like you don't don't fall into the ideological war trap.
That's just.
Yeah.
Everybody leaves.
Maybe there's one anecdote that I could add on the help available front because we often underestimate how powerful it can be to bring in that information of, hey, others are struggling in the same ways than we do and there are already books written about the topic or there's a blog post, there are videos, there are thought leaders, there are coaches, there are trainers, there is training, there are YouTube videos available.
because I had quite a few clients that were having large product organizations, but they built them from within.
So without a lot of hiring from the outside, rather traditional organizations, not in the software development business in the past, and exposing them, for example, to a conference like Product at Heart or Mind the Product back in the days.
really opened up their eyes to, oh my God, there's so much more people out there that first of all, do this as a professional job.
So it's a thing.
It's a profession.
You can level yourself up skill-wise and knowledge-wise and competency-wise in that field.
And there are already a lot of frameworks out there and a lot of tools that we could just like bring in practice and use.
And more often than not, organizations haven't even thought about that, which is crazy to me still.
But I saw it happening.
So I still say kudos to the person reaching out to you because that's what she was trying to bring in to say like, hey, Therese, I could help.
And that is, I think, beneficial, but we need the other two still.
Yeah, and I think...
I want to be careful here.
So I do think I always want to encourage anybody to share our work and introduce these new ideas and help people get exposed to like product management is a thing.
There's some process around it and there's some skills and habits you can learn.
But I also want to make sure we're not encouraging people to fall into the trap of like, if you only knew what I knew, you would agree with me.
Right.
And so.
I think there's also this other piece to it.
So I want to go back to the person who emailed me.
Let's say I'm a designer.
I'm working at a company.
I see that all my product managers are, they basically were being asked at the beginning of each quarter to provide a whole quarter plan.
And the designer's concern was like, how do we do continuous discovery in this model?
And she framed it as my product managers need training.
Okay, well, actually, it seems like the leaders need training because the leaders are asking for a whole quarter plan.
And that's not, you can't really do a whole quarter plan and do continuous discovery.
Those aren't very compatible ideas.
If the plan is, here's the 17 features we're going to build this quarter, which is what they are being asked for.
And so, like, let's just be real pragmatic about this situation.
Like, what can that designer actually do?
She's probably not going to change quarterly planning.
She's probably not going to convince her product manager not to provide a list of features.
That's what the product manager is being asked to do by his or her boss, right?
Like we're probably not going to change those things.
What we could do is we could say, okay, how do we in quarterly planning not just present the solution, but also talk about the need we're trying to address with this solution?
or the outcome we're trying to drive over the course of the quarter with these 17 solutions.
Or we could work with our product manager, start doing some customer interviews, take the 17 solutions we're being asked to deliver by the organization, and start to frame them from the point of view of what we're learning from our customers.
Notice how I didn't focus on changing the company process.
I'm not...
changing quarterly planning.
I'm not changing the list of 17 features.
All of those things feel really incompatible with continuous discovery.
They seem wrong.
They seem broken, but I'm recognizing what I can control and what I can't.
I'm not likely to be successful changing those things.
What I am likely to be successful doing is adding to those things, adding more context, adding more customer knowledge, adding more framing.
making those things better than they ever could have been without that customer knowledge.
So I can still work all of the discovery habits without changing my organization.
And positive things that may happen is, for example, people in the organization attending, let's say, a review meeting or something like that, that they've run at the end of an iteration or quarter, whatever their time frame is.
And then you talking about all these things that you were just mentioning and stakeholders sitting there and colleagues and think like, oh, this is actually the first time that it all adds up and it all makes sense and that I can see the same bright future than this team actually sees for the user and the product.
And that is really way more fun.
And next time more people come attend your review meeting because of that, because they heard it's actually very.
interesting, informative, inspiring, maybe even.
And from there, things can have a ripple effect.
And then you may be influencing other teams.
And maybe then leaders start to realize, things could be different here if we just wanted it to be different.
I like that.
Yeah, I also see, I mean, I've seen this multiple times in many companies.
And the teams that do that are the ones that become the like, rocket ship rising stars child like this is good for your career um and i think the challenge is we frame it wrong the problem is always with other people right and so i think the key the mantra in my product at heart talk was organizational change starts with you but it starts with you changing you not you changing your organization and i think that's like maybe was missed by some people.
Great that we got it out there again, Teresa.
Thank you.
Thanks, Petra.