Everyone's Onboard. So Why Isn't Change Happening?

The room says yes, the slide says value, the pilot says proof. Then Monday arrives, and nothing moves. In Everyone’s Onboard. So, Why Isn’t Change Happening? Rory Madden slices through the polite theatre of transformation to reveal the two levers that actually shift behaviour inside organisations: KPIs and ease. If the bonus says “on time and on budget” and the path to change is hard, motivation will lose every single time.

From Silos to Systems

Rory opens with a simple truth that many of us quietly accept and rarely confront. We go to conferences, soak up ideas across research, design and delivery, then return to teams that operate as if none of it matters. UX people learn in one room, product people in another, engineering in a third. Yet back home, we are expected to ship as one team. UXDX exists to close that contradiction by bringing product managers, researchers, designers and developers into the same conversation, with the same problems, at the same time. The talk that follows is an unvarnished account of why good ideas stall once they meet organisational reality.

The Airline Experiment

The story begins at an airline in Ireland. The architecture was classic enterprise: UI at the top, services beneath, an enterprise service bus at the centre, and multiple back ends at the base. Work was organised as overlapping projects that touched every layer. Delay one and you domino the rest. Planning never ended. Everything was slow, and it was expensive. Rory’s team made one pragmatic cut. They pulled out the mobile apps, not as a perfect vertical slice but as the best viable move within technology and politics. Within two months, customer satisfaction improved, and mobile release lead time dropped by 30%. The result was clear, measurable and fast.

Armed with evidence, they convened the functional managers and asked them to do the same for the web. Heads nodded. The value case landed. Everyone agreed in principle. Then came the soft no that derails the transformation. A few projects had to finish first. Funding cycles needed alignment. Finance was watching the quarter. A business case would be written, and of course, they would return to the idea. The pattern was familiar to anyone who has pitched a better way of working. It is not that people do not understand the value. They do. They simply have stronger incentives elsewhere.

Culture Is Just KPIs

Here, Rory makes the central argument. Culture is not a misty intangible. Culture is the sum of KPIs that determine who gets promoted and who gets paid. Change the KPIs and you change behaviour. Keep measuring predictability and utilisation, and you will get predictability and utilisation. That is why leaders nod at continuous discovery in public, then privately resist anything that threatens fixed scope, fixed cost and fixed dates. If your manager’s bonus is based on time and on budget against a defined scope, your request to keep talking to customers will be translated as scope creep. You might be right for the business. You are wrong about their KPI.

This is where many teams make a second mistake. They try to sell harder. They polish the deck on the value of UX, the value of design, the value of DevOps. Rory flashes years of thought pieces that retread the same ground. The result rarely changes because the underlying system has not changed. Motivation is not the blocker. Incentives are.

The Myth of Motivation

Even if you generate genuine enthusiasm, you still face the second lever that decides outcomes inside companies: ability. Borrowing from BJ Fogg’s behaviour model, Rory maps change on two axes: motivation and ability. Most of us overspend on motivation. We seek buy-in. We pitch. We educate. The win rate remains low because the change is hard to do within the current structures.

Processes, funding, governance, compliance and team topology all pull in the opposite direction. If adopting continuous research requires your boss to renegotiate with marketing, sales, finance, legal and operations, rewrite the business case template, rewire funding, update governance and redraw team boundaries, you have handed them a political odyssey disguised as a method. No matter how excited they are, they will park it.

The Two Levers of Real Change

So the work is to pull both levers. Start by aligning KPIs with the outcomes you actually want. Then make the path of adoption as easy as possible. On KPIs, Rory cautions against the reflex to choose revenue. It is too lagging and too distant from day-to-day decisions. He lays out a ladder of metrics. Track effort, and you will manage hours. Track outputs, and you will ship features. The reason we shift to outcomes is that outputs keep failing to deliver the business impact we promise. Outcomes focus on customer behaviour, adoption, conversion, retention, and churn. These move faster than revenue and are close enough to guide iteration. If you jump straight to revenue, you wait too long to learn if a change worked, and teams default back to shipping to hit dates.

On ability, Rory says something unfashionable in agile circles. Process is not the problem. Bad process is the problem. Telling teams “agile is a mindset” and asking them to figure it out is not making it easy. Mass manufacturing thrives with a siloed waterfall because it is repeatable. Novel product work thrives with cross-functional iteration because it is uncertain. Both are processes. The issue is that the market has offered partial answers. Scrum, Kanban and waterfall each optimise a slice. Design thinking and Lean UX operate in another slice. Scaling frameworks promise agility while encoding waterfall. They succeed politically because they are easy to adopt without changing how value is created. They fail operationally because they do not empower cross-functional teams to own outcomes.

Turning Insight into Infrastructure

Rory’s prescription is pragmatic. If you want leaders to back continuous discovery, do not hand them a philosophy; hand them a system. That means a coherent process that spans continuous research, continuous design and continuous delivery. It means a structure that embeds business functions into product teams, not a tech team here and a business team over there. It means alignment mechanisms that set vision, strategy, principles and objectives so empowered teams operate within enabling constraints rather than anarchy.

It means funding models that move away from fixed scope business cases to outcome-based investment. It means governance that measures progress through customer behaviour rather than feature counts. And it means a scaling approach that grows empowerment rather than recentralising decisions.

This is not an academic exercise. UXDX has hosted more than a thousand talks from practitioners wrestling with change in real organisations. Rory and the team have distilled these case studies into a free process framework intended to reduce the friction of adoption. The aim is not to make it trivial. The aim is to make it easy enough that motivated leaders can actually move. When the system makes the right thing the easy thing, transformation stops being a side project and becomes the default way of working.

Making Empowerment Work

The Q&A adds two practical anchors. First, aligning product outcomes with business KPIs benefits from cadence and visibility. Rory cites Amazon’s weekly business review. It is not a status theatre. It is a disciplined comparison of product outcomes and business outcomes side by side. If adoption moves but revenue does not, the team learns and adjusts. If churn reduces and cost to serve falls, the business sees it weekly, not in a quarterly retrospective. The feedback loop shortens, trust grows, and outcomes guide the roadmap.

Second, empowerment does not mean chaos, even in regulated or risk-averse contexts. The model distinguishes between product teams and stream teams. The product team sets the vision, strategy, values and principles, and defines the objectives that matter. Stream teams' own decisions about what to build and how to build within those enabling constraints. Leaders fear empowered teams because they imagine drift. The antidote is clarity. Specify the problem space, the KPIs and the guardrails. Remove the feature list. Measure behaviour. Inspect frequently. Empowerment with alignment gives speed without surrendering compliance.

The Real Work of Change

Rory closes where he began, with the gap between what we learn and what we live. If your organisation keeps saying yes and doing nothing, assume the KPIs are pointing elsewhere. If smart people keep stalling on good ideas, assume you have made adoption too hard. Shift incentives toward customer behaviour and make the path simple enough to walk. Then give teams a process that is worthy of the outcomes you expect.

The industry does not need another slogan about agility. It needs a practical way to fund, govern, align and scale cross-functional teams so that change finally happens on Monday.

Want to watch the full talk?

You can find it here on UXDX: https://uxdx.com/session/bridging-the-gap-how-product-ux-and-dev-can-build-ai-native-products-together/

Or explore all the insights in the UXDX USA 2025 Post Show Report: https://uxdx.com/post-show-report/