Change Management: Horror Stories and Hard Truths
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Back in 2013, a consultant I was working with dropped a line that rearranged something in my brain: if you don’t do change management properly, everyone will end up hating each other equally. I’ve been trying to get better at it ever since.
Paula gets it
When Bülent Duagi announced a session on change management strategy and vision with Paula Anastasiade, I signed up immediately. Paula brings over a decade of change management experience across multinationals in IT, tech, and FMCG — the kind of person who knows which transformations actually stick and which ones collapse under their own weight.
Paula covered the foundations: what change management actually is (not just adoption, but whether people can use the solution consistently as it was designed), the role of sponsors and leaders, and the critical difference between vision, strategy, and narrative. Vision is what future we’re building through change, strategy is how we get there, and narrative is how we communicate both. Simple framework, but the kind of simple that takes years of experience to distill.
The elephant in the room: upper management
The question nobody loves to ask out loud: what do we do with upper management who doesn’t see the value of change management?
In many organizations, especially in Romania, the people with decision-making power treat change management as an optional extra. Something you do if there’s budget left over, not something you plan for from day one. Paula and Bülent addressed this head-on: the community is fragmented, there’s no unified standard, and what change managers are typically taught has limited applicability in AI and digital transformation contexts.
What resonated most was the idea of magical thinking at the top: leaders who assume that because they understand the change, the understanding automatically downloads into everyone else’s mind. If you’ve ever worked in a company where the CEO announces a major transformation in an all-hands and then expects adoption by next quarter, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Making the cost of doing nothing visible
One approach that came up in the chat: frame change management as a financial risk, not a nice-to-have. If you think it’s expensive to sit down and talk about what might go wrong with this change, wait until you see the bill for not doing it.
The challenge is sustainability. Keep raising uncomfortable questions and you risk being tuned out, especially when your perspective differs from the room. Navigating that balance between honesty and political capital is its own skill.
The AI fear nobody wants to name
The conversation inevitably shifted to AI. Not “AI will change how we work” in some abstract sense, but the raw, visceral fear of obsolescence. That’s what keeps people up at night, and that’s the kind of change that needs the most careful management. You can have the best AI implementation strategy in the world, but if your people think the end goal is to replace them, good luck getting their buy-in.
Horror stories and group therapy
An idea that came up during the session: a future meetup built around horror stories from change management experiences gone wrong. Part comedy, part group therapy. The reception was immediate — Cristina said one session wouldn’t be enough, Bülent might create a dedicated series, and I volunteered to help make it happen. Preferably at Dealu Mare with some fetească neagră, because tongues loosen up after a couple of glasses :D
The best learning I’ve ever done came from hearing about things that went wrong. Every product owner, every change manager, every leader has at least one story where they thought they were doing everything right and it still blew up. Those stories, told honestly, are worth more than a hundred best-practice presentations.
The bits that stayed with me
A few things from the discussion that stood out:
Leaders hiding behind fear. Leaders afraid of their people’s reaction to change prefer to hide information, which only creates more rumors and gossip. The very thing they’re trying to avoid, they’re creating.
Starting from reality, not textbooks. Build on the organization’s actual level of maturity, resources, and context — not on what the framework says they should do.
Change management as a portfolio. When you have a system migration running simultaneously with a restructuring and an AI rollout, each change competes for the same people’s attention and emotional bandwidth. Managing them as a portfolio minimizes collisions.
What I take from all of this
As a product owner, the hardest part of my job is not the product decisions — it’s getting people aligned around change. Building the right product means nothing if the organization can’t absorb the change that product introduces. Paula’s session reinforced that conviction and gave me better language to talk about it.
Looking forward to the next session. And if the horror stories meetup happens, I’ll bring the wine.
Thanks to Bülent for moderating and to Paula Anastasiade for a session that was both practical and thought-provoking. If you want to join future Product Makers sessions, follow the community. And if you have a change management horror story, keep it warm. We might need it soon.