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“Change management starts with the right mindset. You have to see change as an opportunity.”

Did you know that when Eric Idle sang “Always look on the bright side of life” in Monty Python’s legendary ‘Life of Brian,’ he was talking about how to be a successful engineering leader at a global digital experience agency?

No, seriously! As Jani Maljanen, the Head of Engineering at Vaimo Nordics, explains in this interview, there is a direct correlation between the thoughts that leaders carry around and the outcomes their teams can generate. When you combine that mindset with a tailored organizational structure and customer-oriented culture, synergy is inevitable. 

Read on to discover Jani’s unique approach to:

• implementing tribes in your organization to deal with rapid change in the constantly evolving world of IT,
• using processes to foster a culture of delivery excellence in a global organization,
• developing critical skills that will increase how much your clients trust you,
• sourcing product ideas from unusual places,
• deciding how many direct reports a tech leader should have.

About Jani & Vaimo

Vaimo’s vision

Piotr Urbas: Hello, Jani! I heard you’ve started working on an interesting project for Volvo Car Retail. Can you tell us more about it? 

Jani Maljanen: Hi Piotr. It’s a big partnership. We’re excited to work with such an iconic and trusted brand. We’ll work together to improve their product data capabilities and customer experience. 

How does it fit into all the other things you do at Vaimo?

At Vaimo, we do all things digital experience. Magento was the big thing for us early on. Even after Magento was acquired by Adobe and turned into Adobe Commerce, it’s still a big part of what we do. Our other focus areas are content management, especially Contentful, data management, including Product Information Management (PIM), and insights & activation.

PIM was one of the first new areas of expertise we added to our portfolio, alongside commerce. I’m proud to see all our hard work within this area is paying off, being trusted by these exciting brands, and able to support them in this area.

Vaimo supported Wimbledon through its transformation by helping it develop a new ecommerce store with more control over customer experience and the ability to track data and performance

Change management at Vaimo

Our main topic for today is change management. With socio-economic uncertainty and the rapid growth of AI, every tech leader is dealing with change daily. But how can you get better at it?

To adapt to ever-changing circumstances, you need to be able to change yourself, handle change with grace, and motivate others to help drive the change. It’s a highly valuable skill set.

Whether it’s an employee, stakeholder, investor, or client – being an expert at change management earns their trust. They know that they can build a long-term relationship with you. Whatever happens, whether it’s in the next six months or three years, you will be able to handle it.

Change management begins with the right mindset. Embrace change as an opportunity, and craft a positive narrative around it. By doing so, you can lead effectively and inspire others to see the upside of change.

I’m not advocating toxic positivity – don’t pretend like there are no challenges. Be honest about them, but also prove that overcoming them is worth it and that the result will benefit the whole company.

We have set “embracing change” as one of our main themes this year for engineering at Vaimo. I think you can directly influence how people react to change and provide confidence by preparing them for it. We can’t control the future, but we’re in charge of how we position ourselves and which opportunities we take.

So far, this approach has been working well. With senior leadership taking this stance, the rest of the organization adopts it as well.

How would embracing such a change look when it comes to implementing a new technology, like AI? For a long time, we’ve been discussing if it’s a good idea to implement Generative AI. There are plenty of examples of companies with AI-based chatbots for customer service, or AI-driven Business Intelligence. It also came up as a major trend in our State of Frontend 2024 report, alongside accessibility, security analysis, or component-driven development. 

Many people are ignoring Generative AI because they think it doesn’t quite work yet. However, when it’s finally good enough for them, it might be too late to get into it…

That’s one risk, but I think there’s a second, bigger danger lurking for the people who refuse to learn about AI: they don’t understand when to avoid it. If you’re up to date, you know which ideas are doomed to fail because the technology isn’t there yet.

AI is an unknown frontier. It’s exciting, but tools and approaches become obsolete in a matter of weeks. The speed of change can be very scary.

Efficiency is one of the hottest topics right now – look at all the layoffs in IT. AI is seen as the holy grail that will drive efficiency. It can definitely help with that, but it’s not always true.

Our main approach is to investigate, research, and implement AI proof of concepts. But we aim to be trailblazers, doing things our way and finding ways to differentiate ourselves to get ahead of the competition.

What’s your biggest problem with Generative AI right now? For me, it’s that chatbots like ChatGPT are trained to always give you an answer, no matter if it’s true. 

You’re onto something there, but remember that AI follows your instructions, so you can control that. For example, in one of our internal projects, we’ve limited the amount of documentation provided to an LLM. If it can’t find an answer in that documentation, it will say that there’s insufficient information.

One of the biggest challenges is that AI is a huge area. It touches everything on so many levels, and there’s a cool new way to use it everyday. It’s difficult to keep up with all of the changes and figure out what will work for you.

What about data privacy? The CTO of New10 told us that he doesn’t see AI as a threat to privacy but that you need to “be aware of where you push your data.” Are you concerned about feeding sensitive information to an LLM?

We are. Our recent internal survey has shown that our developers and engineers were also concerned about it – so we implemented some changes.

Now, when we evaluate AI tools, we involve legal and security in the process. They verify whether we can actually generate code using AI by checking whether our client agreements allow for it.

We have also developed our own solution, Lokte AI, which serves as a versatile wrapper for various LLMs. One of its key advantages is flexibility: we are not dependent on a single LLM and can deploy them on our own servers when necessary, ensuring compliance with privacy and security requirements. Lokte AI is utilised both internally within our organisation and externally in collaboration with our clients.

Still, many people just trust AI to be correct and don’t verify the output.

It’s true, but it’s also nothing new. I copy-pasted lots of stuff from Stack Overflow in my early development days. It’s a trusted site used by everyone in the industry, and yet you still need to check if the code you pasted works as intended.

Or Wikipedia. While it can be a reliable source, many entries contain false information. You need to be able to verify the information somehow.

The same applies to AI but on a much broader scale. It’s not just software development; it’s pretty much any topic.

Change management – best practices

What do tech leaders do particularly poorly or especially well in terms of managing change?

The best change managers are proactive. They take initiative, do research, validate ideas through proof of concepts, and enable other people to do the same. You can only do so much by yourself. With the help of others in your organization, you cast a wider net to catch more opportunities.

One crucial ability is following through. We all love coming up with ideas, but what happens after that? Can you benefit even from the failed ideas? What have you learned, and what value did you generate when you built that PoC that ultimately went nowhere?

It’s about focusing on outcome rather than output. You don’t do things just for the sake of doing them – that way, you can build ten PoCs and learn nothing new at all. Every initiative should lead to a good outcome for the company.

So, essentially, you should always set goals and think of desired outcomes?

Yes – while also being flexible because you can’t control everything. For example, AI is evolving so quickly that the goalposts keep moving. Your approach should accommodate that.

Do what you can with the knowledge you have right now. In two weeks, reevaluate the new information you have acquired by then. Just keep moving forward.

The early stages are always fickle, though. Building an MVP of a solution isn’t always feasible. How do you decide which change is worth pursuing in the first place?

I don’t think there’s one correct approach to this. What helps us is to start small and thoroughly validate our assumptions, which we do with proof of concepts. If you think something might be beneficial, a quick test will usually show you if you’re right.

When it comes to change management, experts often talk about process and culture. How do you think these two relate to each other? Can you change your organization’s attitude towards change simply by introducing the right processes?

In my experience, a process can support the culture you want only if you implement it with the right mindset – you do it to help your team and move your business forward.

Culture is what happens when no one is looking. It’s what people do when they’re comfortable. You can lead, manage, and influence culture, and processes are only one tool for doing so.

For example, if you implement a process where people can vote on decisions within the company, your team will likely trust you more, and the culture will improve as a result.

Remember that you also need to represent the kind of culture you want. Be the person that others can learn from.

What about tools, then? In a data-driven world, should you rely solely on the output of large dataset crunching to tell you when change makes sense? What about the human factor?

Tools are only as good as the people using them. For example, when you use AI to generate code, you still need to be an expert to verify the correctness of that code.

Our approach at Vaimo is to raise awareness of this constantly. We have policies, clear rules, and never feed sensitive data or proprietary information into AI proof of concepts.

If a tool enters our evaluation process, it’s checked and approved by the legal and security departments. Even then, you still have to be careful not to expose an API key or other sensitive data.

On the other hand, you can’t blindly trust the data you’re receiving either. If a tool generates something obnoxious and you put it in a client presentation, you’re still the one responsible for it.

What about cooperating with a third-party vendor during a period of change, like Vaimo working with Volvo Car Retail? This specific project is quite transformative, basically changing how they manage data across the organization, so I’m wondering what convinced Volvo that you’re the right team to do it?

I think it’s because we know our stuff. We have the right tools, experience, and proven ability to generate value for our clients. We have dozens of projects similar to the Volvo one in our portfolio and dedicated specialists who focus on them.

Another thing is our culture – all the things I’ve told you about how we approach change, AI, etc. We don’t just sell technology but rather our understanding of how to use it to add value.

For us at Vaimo, it’s all a balance of client satisfaction and employee satisfaction. We can’t have happy clients with unhappy employees or the other way around. I believe it’s because of that balance that so many companies have chosen Vaimo as their partner.

We’re very people-driven. With a flat organizational structure and open-door policies, any engineer can just come to talk to me or even the global CEO. That’s complemented by clear policies for managers, like one that prevents leaders from having more than eight direct reports. All of these things result in a healthy culture.

Change management – the process

At the end of the day, there’s always some kind of process that helps leaders manage change. Let’s put aside routine changes like updating software and focus on major ones – those that require proper assessment, be it strategic projects or responses to emergencies. How do you align everyone for a project like this?

On a global scale, we’ve designed our structure for better change management. We have key leaders and specialists located in each of the markets we operate in.

We’re a global company with a local presence. People from different markets come together into working groups. They bring new ideas from their engineers, PMs, and their unique market. We discuss them, refine them, vote on prioritization, and assign accountability.

For example, Adobe Commerce is switching to a composable architecture. It’s a big change management task for us, and it will take years until we’re fully following the new approach. The working groups help us pull the right people, do the right research, build proof of concepts, and understand the whole context of the change.

We have a similar process on a micro-scale. My direct reports come up with ideas, we test a small version of the process, evaluate, and only move forward if we can check all the boxes on our checklist.

We also have a tribe structure, but it would take another interview to get into the details of it. The original idea was the Spotify tribe structure, but we had to adapt it to our context.

Wrapping up

What’s your ultimate advice for tech leaders who will be reading this, especially those involved in transformative projects?

You can’t control how or when change happens, it just does. Just move forward, and focus on what you can control – which is how you actually respond to that change.

Have a positive outlook, see change as an opportunity instead of an obstacle. You miss a lot of things when you don’t have this attitude. 

Lead by example – do the things you want others to do, be the person you want others to be.

You might not agree on everything with your team, but you should still have high-level alignment about seeing change as something that’s necessary and inevitable. Don’t try to face change alone, make it a team effort.

Resources

Finally, resources: what would you recommend to people who want to learn more about managing change?

Life experience is the best thing – just do it, dive into it and not be too afraid of it. 

Doing it usually is the thing that gives you confidence. You have the experience to think, “Okay, I survived that one change back in the day. Now I’m facing something similar – I will survive this one as well.”

Two books that have profoundly shaped my fundamental stance towards change are Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the legendary Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter.

Antifragile is one of those rare books where you might find yourself disagreeing with much of its content — and that’s precisely its brilliance. It challenges your thinking, encouraging you to critically examine the concept of change and develop your own perspectives.

On the other hand, Our Iceberg is Melting delivers timeless lessons on navigating and embracing change in an engaging and accessible way, making it a must-read for anyone leading or adapting to transformation.

Some other resources and people I follow include Leadership in Tech, Addy Osmani, Lena Reinhard’s blog, and LeadDev’s articles about leadership and technical direction.

What’s next? 5 actions for CTOs to take

Change management process for software development is a skill. If change stresses you out, you don’t have to be stuck living that way. To become a change management process expert, you should:

• switch your software change management mindset to see changes as opportunities, not challenges,
• be proactive and follow ideas through to the end when it comes to software development projects,
• focus on outcome over output in the software development process,
• lead by example to effectively manage change, represent the kind of culture you want to see at your company,
• to align your whole company on strategic changes, your organizational structure has to allow for a free exchange of ideas at both the global and micro level.

There’s a lot at stake – your clients’ trust, your employees’ satisfaction, and your company’s bottom line. Becoming better at change management will help you improve all three.