Leading Change with Confidence: Strategies for Optimizing Your Process
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
Doubling a team’s size can drastically reduce process maturity and create new challenges in scaling tools and workflows.
-
•
Failing to thoroughly vet feedback before acting can lead to choosing suboptimal solutions that cause more disruption.
-
•
Piloting changes on a smaller scale helps uncover issues early and builds stakeholder buy-in before full implementation.
-
•
Assessing the urgency of feedback involves understanding who it impacts, if it blocks critical work, and possible temporary workarounds.
-
•
Feedback should be viewed as data, recognizing whether it reflects the majority or a small subset to avoid biased decisions.
-
•
Locking processes from change for 1-2 months creates stability and sustainability, especially when managing multiple teams.
-
•
Documentation of changes, including rationale, approvals, alternative options, and pilot outcomes, prevents repeating past mistakes.
-
•
Engaging trusted colleagues can help mitigate personal bias when assessing feedback.
-
•
Using anecdotal team feedback helps leaders appreciate the human impact of change and the importance of pacing.
-
•
Managing change frequency is a balance that requires gauging team health through surveys and direct human connection.
Notable Quotes
"If you dug deeper into feedback, you'd find ways to address issues without a big change."
"Leading change is like shopping—take time to find the right store before you buy."
"Piloting your ideas before committing helps prevent disruption and saves energy in the long run."
"Processes are never perfect, but thoughtful testing limits disruption for your team."
"We forget a lot of details over time; documentation saves us from repeating mistakes."
"Assessing feedback urgency means understanding if the issue blocks critical work or if there are workarounds."
"Using pilots can get buy-in from stakeholders who might resist broad change initially."
"Anecdotal feedback from team members helps leaders understand the real impact of change."
"More frequent change isn't always better; good communication and team pulse are key."
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"We try to figure out who needs to be in the room to hear it — research is how we build team cohesion."
Rich MironovHow Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
December 6, 2022
"It’s about us, the design ops practitioners, and what we need today to be better at our jobs."
Bria AlexanderTheme Two Intro
October 3, 2023
"Frameworks are a team sport; each player brings unique strengths that help create innovative solutions."
Ruzanna RozmanGetting in Flow with Your Team
January 8, 2024
"We had 80 designers attending UX Weekly and trying to get through 64 slides in one hour. It wasn’t sustainable."
Briana Thomas Christina RodriguezWhen Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
September 30, 2021
"By getting all the people in one room — doctors and claims processors — we had them demonstrate their processes to each other. Minds blown."
Marina MartinLives on the Line: The Stakes of UX at the Scale of Government
June 14, 2018
"You’re never going to have one research tool to rule them all."
Jake BurghardtStop wasting research: Create new value with insight summaries
July 9, 2025
"I transitioned out of academia because I wanted to work faster and create immediate impact rather than slow, layered processes."
Clemens Janssen Jane DavisEfficiently Scaling Research as a Team of One
March 28, 2023
"Our role often feels like being information therapists – understanding pain and helping clients align their information."
Bram WesselEnterprise Information Architecture
January 10, 2020
"Frames are not static; they are tools for continuous discovery, reflection, and change."
Kaitlin TaskerFast and Fearless Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
