Change Management and Innovation: Lessons Learned

I walked into a $20M disaster—and realized our real problem wasn’t the product. It was how we made decisions. Our flagship SaaS tool had a 92% user rejection rate. Why? Because it was built on the instincts of the highest-paid person in the room—not user insight. • PMs were just order-takers • Feedback loops were broken • Ego > Evidence We didn’t just need better features. We needed a better system for thinking. So we borrowed a page from Ray Dalio. At Bridgewater, Dalio didn’t just build a company—he built a decision-making machine. We applied his core principles to rebuild our product org: 1. Truth > Comfort We made radical transparency our default: • Public mistake logs • Multi-directional feedback • Customers critiquing roadmaps live One feature pivot saved us 3 months of wasted dev time. 2. Merit > Hierarchy We used “believability-weighted decision-making”: • Domain experts (not titles) held more voting power • A junior PM’s dashboard idea beat the exec favorite • It boosted adoption by 89% in 90 days 3. Systems > Stars We built playbooks and decision journals to scale wisdom: • Pre-mortems to test assumptions • Post-mortems weighted by expertise • A living product ops manual in Notion The result? • 3–5x faster innovation velocity • 88% feature adoption (up from 29%) • Cross-sell rate grew from 12% → 53% • Exec override rate dropped from 67% → 9% Lesson: The smartest teams don’t rely on brilliant individuals. They build systems that surface the best ideas—consistently. If you want a product org that thinks better, not just works harder, start by fixing how you decide. Because as I tell my team: “Truth flows > Title wins.” Want to learn how we did it? Read the article linked below:

This stat really struck me: most breakthrough innovations come from executing existing ideas in new ways. Our first instinct when seeking change is often to look outward for something entirely new. New habits, new tech, complete overhauls, etc. But especially when we need to be cost-conscious, we need to embrace a different mindset. Look inward first. Scale what's working. Rigorously analyze what isn't – can you extract value or apply it differently? Innovation isn't always about the never-before-seen. It's often about leaning into what works, exploring all its uses, and sparking small wins into something transformational.   I saw this firsthand at HSN when we launched HSN Arcade. The idea was innovative, but simple: combine casual online gaming with ecommerce to create a fun “Watch, Shop, and Play” experience. It all started when I saw someone totally hooked on Candy Crush. That got me thinking, how can we integrate gamification into our platform using our brands and talent as personalities? In the process, we brought that same addictive, engaging experience into HSN’s digital platform. Not only was it highly engaging, but it also had a drastic impact on business performance. Players visited 3x more often, spent 3x more time on the platform, and spent 3x more money with us. And remember HSN Shop by Remote? It was groundbreaking, but at its core, it was about understanding our audience's growing desire for more convenient, accessible ways to shop. These weren’t just innovative projects, they were bold moves powered by a willingness to ask, “What if?” instead of panicking over “What now?”   So, let's not fall into the trap of believing that innovation demands a complete overhaul. Embrace the nuances within your existing frameworks. Cultivate a culture that thrives on smart experimentation. And most importantly, empower your teams to see the current ideas as the critical starting points for your next big breakthrough. They just might need to be explored and connected in a whole new way.

I almost lost a multi-million dollar contract with a Fortune 100 automotive company. Here's why it was one of the best things for my business: We had signed a deal to handle hiring for a huge national business, but months later, the processes we always used weren't working. The hiring managers were pissed. And there was talk that they were going to pull the plug on our partnership. Worst of all, we didn't know what the problem was. So, we spoke directly to the hiring managers and asked them to be as honest as possible with us. "How are we doing?" we asked. "You suck," some responded. It was harsh, but we discovered after interviewing 50 hiring managers, that there were 50 different hiring processes happening. Some prepared, some didn't. Some had 8 interviews, some had 2. So, we said that we had to build a standard of what great looks like. We trained all of their hiring managers. And 60 days later, everything changed for the better within the company. Asking what you're doing wrong is one of the most powerful questions for any business owner. We kept the client (thankfully), but in the end, we got something much more valuable: the idea to create software that could train hiring managers at scale and revolutionize the hiring process. Listen to the problem, create a solution > that's the story of how innovation works. 🙌

I can't begin to tell you how often I get a call during which the person I'm speaking with says something to the extent of, "I've been running our Voice of the Customer surveys for years and nothing's getting better in those customer relationships." This, of course always results in me asking how they've worked toward changing their people, process and technologies to meet their customers at or above their expectations based on what they learned in that feedback? Surprisingly, the answer is almost always the same, "what do you mean?" Too many CX teams have been lead down the primrose path of overcommitting technology solutions as the magic silver bullet cure-all for all issues with their customers and do not put anywhere enough emphasis on the need to adapt and change, and to meet their customers, where they are, in their respective journeys at those defining moments of service. Indeed, I tell them that an overreliance on tech as that silver bullet is very much the same as an overweight person blaming their bathroom scale for their unhealthy condition. It's not the scale's fault they may overeat and perhaps get too little exercise, and until this changes, the scale won't report anything more optimistic. The moral of this short story is obvious. CX improvement may be powered by the customer's voice, but it is always a change management function. If we do not prepare to change our ways and continue to evolve our organization and how we do what it is we do, we risk not meeting our customers when and where they are looking for us and will indeed continue to disappoint. Ignoring the most basic need for adaptive change is akin to the famous Albert Einstein quote about his definition of insanity: doing the same things the same ways you always have but looking for a different (and presumably better) outcome. The odds, my friends, are against. We need to be willing to change, and in many ways, burn the boats from our past and free ourselves to find new and innovative ways to serve our customers when, where and how it matters to them. Until we do this and fully commit to transformative changes to practically every aspect of our business, we are truly only paying lip service to our customer focus and the experiences we create. It's a gigantic, missed opportunity for so many. Knowing how to change and using state of the art technology as a change enabler will prove to be key in this process. Having the right priorities, focus areas, and direction will have a positive, orchestrative effect and conversely the lack of the right analytics to guide this decision process will leave you sub-optimized or worse, functionally crippled. If I leave you with nothing more here, please consider customer experience as a change management job more so than simply a measurement one. We all need data to make our decisions, true point, but don't assume that just because you have invested in a state of the art NPS program, that this alone will be enough to make an impact.

The ”best practices” of corporate innovation were written by observers not survivors. People who sell expertise without experience and advice without accountability. They were people who watched from the sidelines of pristine academic halls, and prestigious consultancies, but never got kicked in the teeth building new growth in a company that’s old. The truth is that new growth gets generated in old companies when someone is able to unf*ck a culture of self preservation and obstructionism. This truth was made clear to me when I led product strategy for a joint venture between Google and PWC after I left Bloomberg. In one boring, same-$h*t-different-day meeting with a senior partner at PWC, the CEO of the joint venture held up his hand to halt the monologue, took a long pull from his vape, and dropped a truth bomb: “If you’re going to unf*ck this situation you’ll need to eliminate fake work. No more PowerPoints. No more customer surveys. No more focus groups. You will build, launch, and iterate until it is making real money. If you can’t agree to that I won’t work with you. Can you agree to that?” That was the moment when my entire understanding of how innovation actually works inside of a huge company shifted. It has nothing to do with labs, or agile, or innovators dilemmas, or seeing around corners, or some easy-bake canvas created during an innovation offsite. Not really. It requires 5 really hard things: 1) A huge sense of urgency in the C-suite to fix a massive problem. It’s so urgent that people are willing to dismantle the fiefdoms of powerful political operatives who sustain bloat and stagnation to preserve their own power. 2) A leader who’s in the second mountain of their career. Meaning they have massive political capital, but they don’t care about another bonus or promotion. They’re motivated to solve hard problems and make an impact - even if it gets them fired. They value impact over status. 3) The infrastructure to pitch outcomes over ideas. You only have the right to ask for more money and resources because you built something that’s already working and needs to scale. A deck is an instant “no.” Begging for permission to start is an instant no. You’ve earned the right to ask for more because you built something small that works. 4) Inverted hierarchy. The people with direct daily contact with customers and stakeholders are fully authorized to tell the c suite they’re full of $hit. 5) It passes the F U Pay Me test- There’s total economic clarity about how the innovation will increase sales, lower costs, and/or mitigate risk. Very few people have pulled this off. But a disproportionate number of them are members of Punks & Pinstripes.