Principal Program Manager, Change Management

📋 Description

• • Zillow Group is embarking on a significant, multi-year transformation aimed at fundamentally rethinking how its teams discover, learn, iterate, build, and deliver value to customers. This pivotal role is designed to influence not only the "what" of these changes but, crucially, the "why" behind them, fostering genuine adoption and buy-in from the organization's people.
• • As the inaugural hire dedicated exclusively to enterprise change management within the Transformation Team, you will be instrumental in establishing Zillow's core change management capabilities from the ground up, while simultaneously providing direct support to teams navigating this profound evolution.
• • This position transcends traditional communications or project management roles. Your mandate will be to design, lead, and execute change initiatives that tangibly alter the operational paradigms of Zillow's product, engineering, and design departments, as well as other product development functions. This will be achieved by strategically shaping incentives, influencing behaviors, optimizing workflows, and refining decision-making systems.
• • You will forge deep partnerships with senior leaders across product, technology, and design, as well as with transformation stakeholders and frontline teams. The objective is to ensure that AI-native product development practices are not merely introduced but are deeply embedded, consistently reinforced, and sustainably maintained, even as organizational goals and methodologies continue to evolve.
• • This role carries significant influence over how the AI transformation is experienced throughout Zillow Group. You will play a critical part in cultivating trust, building momentum, and instilling belief in the future of Zillow's product development processes. The work is highly visible, inherently complex, and may present challenging situations, but it is absolutely foundational to Zillow's future success.
• • You will lead enterprise-scale change strategies that are firmly rooted in behavioral mechanics and incentive design. This involves understanding and influencing how individuals make decisions, prioritize their tasks, and respond to various forms of incentives.
• • A key responsibility will be to diagnose and redesign existing incentive structures—including metrics, goals, reward systems, and governance frameworks—that may inadvertently reinforce legacy behaviors, thereby hindering progress.
• • You will collaborate closely with senior product, engineering, and design leaders to evolve operating models, streamline workflows, and enhance decision-making systems to better support the transformation goals.
• • You will be tasked with translating the overarching goals of the AI-native transformation into clear, actionable, and durable behavioral and operating expectations for teams across the organization.
• • A significant aspect of this role involves influencing without direct authority, particularly at the executive and senior leadership levels. You will be empowered to challenge and push back when existing incentives or organizational norms appear to undermine desired outcomes.
• • You will develop and implement scalable, lightweight frameworks designed to facilitate adoption and integration, consciously avoiding the creation of unnecessary bureaucracy.
• • You will define, monitor, and analyze meaningful indicators of behavior change, adoption rates, and overall impact. This data will serve as critical feedback loops to continuously refine and adapt the change strategy.
• • You will establish the foundational principles and operational model for how enterprise change management will function at Zillow Group moving forward, creating a sustainable capability.
• • You will design and execute change experiments, including pilots, staged rollouts, and controlled tests, to empirically learn which interventions are most effective in driving sustainable behavior change.
• • Success in the first 12-18 months will be measured by product development teams consistently demonstrating AI-native behaviors, evidenced by a reduced need for central oversight and increased autonomy.
• • Incentives and metrics will evolve to actively promote and reward experimentation, learning velocity, and speed of execution.
• • You will contribute to achieving faster cycles from initial idea generation through experimentation and insight generation, with learnings directly informing subsequent strategic decisions.
• • A clear reduction in misalignment between stated transformation objectives and actual day-to-day behaviors will be observed and measured through analysis of choices and outcomes.
• • Leaders will be observed making different decisions as a direct result of changes in incentive signals, developed capabilities, and established ways of working.
• • A repeatable, evidence-based approach to aligning strategy, incentives, and behavior will be established and demonstrated to be scalable across Zillow Group.