Principal, Change Management & Incentive Design

Zillow Zillow · Consumer · United States · Remote

This role focuses on enterprise change management within Zillow's Product Development Operations, aiming to transform how products are built by making the Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) AI-native. The position involves shaping incentives, behaviors, and workflows to drive adoption of AI-native practices, influencing the experience of AI transformation across the organization. It requires leading change strategies, redesigning incentives, partnering with leaders, and establishing change management frameworks.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead enterprise-scale change strategies grounded in behavioral mechanics and incentive design - how people make decisions, prioritize work, and respond to incentives
  2. Diagnose and redesign incentives (metrics, goals, rewards, governance) that reinforce legacy behaviors
  3. Partner with senior product, engineering, and design leaders to evolve operating models, workflows, and decision systems
  4. Translate AI-native transformation goals into durable behavioral and operating expectations
  5. Influence without authority at the executive and senior-leader level; push back when incentives or norms undermine outcomes

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years leading complex change initiatives in mid-to-large organizations
  • Proven experience aligning incentives, metrics, and operating mechanisms and behavior change at scale
  • Background in product, technology, or transformation environments
  • Comfort operating in ambiguity where goals and methods evolve, using experimentation and iterative learning to refine goals and methods over time
  • Strong grounding in organizational change and behavioral science, and systems thinking, with the ability to translate theory into testable, real-world interventions
  • Fluency in modern product development practices (Agile, discovery, experimentation), and the ability to apply these methods to organizational and behavioral change
  • Builder mindset; energized by creating new capability from the ground up through rapid prototyping, piloting, and iteration
  • Credibility with senior leaders; comfort challenging entrenched norms
  • Pragmatic, systems-oriented thinker who challenges entrenched norms when needed
  • Builder mindset with a track record of creating new capability from scratch
  • Believes change is best achieved through learning-by-doing, using experimentation, feedback loops, and incremental scaling rather than one-time transformations

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-native product development
  • AI transformation