Leading Through Change: Lessons on People, Systems, and Growth

If there’s one constant in technology, it’s change.

New architectures, new priorities, new expectations — the landscape never stops evolving.

Over the years, I’ve learned that leading through change isn’t about control; it’s about clarity, accountability, and empathy. It’s about guiding people through change, staying anchored to purpose, and adapting while keeping a long-term vision in focus.

This post is a reflection on the principles that have shaped how I lead and think about change — in systems, in teams, and in myself.

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1. Start with the End in Mind

Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People begins with one of my favorite ideas:

“Begin with the end in mind.”

Every successful transformation I’ve been part of starts there — by defining what success actually looks like. What will be different when we’ve achieved it? That clarity keeps everyone aligned and helps avoid confusing activity with progress.

And once you have clarity on the end goal, the next step is to define where you are today and where you want to be.

A good and honest understanding of your current state is just as important as the vision of the future. Those two points — the from and the to — are the foundation for framing a meaningful journey.

It’s also important to identify the measurements that can help you define success and validate progress.

When it comes to planning that journey, analysis paralysis can become a real risk. Teams can get stuck debating options or perfecting plans instead of moving forward. That’s why I’ve learned to favor progress over perfection — move, measure, learn, and adjust. Each iteration provides insight, and momentum becomes the best teacher.

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2. Measure What Matters: Outcomes, Not Outputs

One of the most common traps in technology is confusing motion with impact.

Early in my career, I celebrated outputs — how much we shipped, automated, or configured. Today, I focus on outcomes — what truly changes for the customer, the business, or the experience.

For example, building an automatic rollback feature is an output.

The outcome is increased availability, faster recovery from incidents, and stronger customer trust — all of which directly improve customer experience and retention, and business continuity.

At my current company, when platform availability improved and incidents dropped, we saw a clear correlation with an increase in our clients’ Net Promoter Score (NPS). But the data told only part of the story.

Our account executives began sharing something even more powerful — their meetings with clients had shifted. They were spending less time apologizing for outages and more time talking about strategy, innovation, and new products.

It was a defining moment for our SRE and Platform teams. We spent time highlighting these connections — helping engineers see how their work directly contributed to client trust, stronger relationships, and business growth.

That visibility into impact created purpose. It connected to what Google’s Project Aristotle calls “meaning and impact” — the understanding that one’s work matters and makes a difference.

It reminded all of us that behind every availability graph is a story about trust, retention, and new revenue — and that it’s our job as leaders to always connect the work we do to tangible business value.

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3. Measuring Engineering Efficiency and Flow

Beyond outcomes, it’s equally important to measure how efficiently we deliver them.

The research behind Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim has been invaluable in shaping this perspective. Their work showed that elite engineering teams tend to deploy more frequently, recover faster, and shorten the time between idea and impact.

Metrics like Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Change, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) aren’t just internal KPIs — they directly correlate with speed of innovation, customer trust, and retention.

When teams can deliver value faster, recover from incidents quickly, and build systems that fail gracefully, the business can learn faster, serve customers better, and stay competitive.

Tracking these indicators isn’t about chasing numbers. It’s about ensuring that the way we build — and the pace at which we build — aligns with how quickly the organization needs to evolve.

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4. People, Process, and Tools: The Foundation of Change

Every transformation rests on three pillars: people, process, and tools . When change or transformation is required, success depends on understanding how these pillars evolve together.

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Empower People Through Inclusion 

When driving transformation, one of the most important thing leaders can do is build the right incentives — the ones that drive the behaviors and culture needed to achieve the end goal.

Leaders need to constantly ask: Are we rewarding the right things? Do our structures, recognition systems, and success metrics reinforce the culture we want?

Equally important is setting people up for success — giving them the clarity, context, the right training, and support they need to perform at their best. That means aligning expectations, providing growth opportunities, and creating an environment where people feel trusted to take ownership.

And one lesson that’s served me well: when change impacts others, don’t make it happen to them — make it happen with them. Real transformation sticks when people feel ownership, not imposition.

Transformation isn’t only about executing a plan — it’s about creating the conditions for people to thrive once the change is complete.

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Design Processes That Drive Consistency and Improvement

Process turns good intent into repeatable success.

For example, well-designed SRE processes help teams stay intentional about balancing proactive and reactive work, making sure energy isn’t spent only on firefighting but also on preventing future issues.

In SRE and platform engineering, that can mean discipline in things like incident management, postmortems, and service ownership — but the same principle applies across any function. Strong processes define how we respond, how we learn, and how we continuously improve.

High-performing teams balance firefighting and city planning — solving today’s problems while preventing tomorrow’s.

And often, the best firefighters become the best planners, because they understand where and why fires start.

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Choose Tools That Solve Real Problems

Tools are powerful enablers of change. I’ve learned to start with the problem, not the technology. The right tool serves a clearly defined goal — it’s chosen to solve a problem, not to justify its existence.

When people, process, and tools move in harmony, transformation becomes not just possible but sustainable. Each reinforces the other.

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5. Applying an Engineering Mindset to Operations

One of the most influential ideas in modern distributed systems comes from Google’s definition of Site Reliability Engineering: 

“SRE is what happens when software engineers run operations.”

That idea reframed how to approach reliability and scale.

Operations shouldn’t be reactive — it should be treated as an engineering discipline that applies the same rigor and creativity as product development.

In practice, that means practices such as:

• Conduct technical design and code reviews before major operational changes.

• Break work into small, testable pieces to deliver iteratively.

• Follow a software development lifecycle (SDLC) — plan, code, test, validate.

• Design for maintainability, scalability, and observability from the start.

When we apply an engineering mindset to operations, we move from firefighting to engineering systems that minimizes fires altogether.

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6. Humanizing Reliability

At PayPal, we learned to look at reliability through a human lens.

We stopped treating “errors” as system events and started viewing them as failed customer interactions.

That perspective made the work personal — each failure represented a real person who couldn’t complete a transaction, a merchant who lost a sale, or a moment of trust that was broken.

At MX, we’ve carried that mindset forward.

When a system loses connectivity to a data provider, we don’t just report it as a technical issue. We call out what it actually means: customers using our instant account verification feature couldn’t verify their accounts — disrupting their ability to open new bank accounts, a critical workflow that can cause financial institutions to lose new customers.

When you humanize incidents in that way, everything changes.

Reliability stops being about uptime — it becomes about protecting trust, opportunity, and growth for the people and businesses we serve.

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7. Empowerment Over Authority

Leadership isn’t about control — it’s about creating conditions for people to thrive.

I believe in servant leadership, where a leader’s role is to elevate others by removing friction, providing clarity, and ensuring they have what they need to succeed.

My goal is for people to be successful not because of me, but despite me — because the systems, clarity, and culture are strong enough to sustain excellence.

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8. Core Leadership Values

As I’ve grown as a leader, a few values have stayed constant:

Transparency and Predictability

Transparency builds trust. Predictability builds stability.

My decisions are anchored in what’s best for the customer, the company, and the team — not in convenience or relationships.

Tying Outputs to Outcomes

Especially in SRE and Platform Engineering, the why behind the work matters.

Every automation, migration, or optimization should trace directly to a customer or business outcome.

Assume Best Intent and Seek to Understand

When something feels off, I pause and remind myself that I might be missing context. Curiosity before judgment. Listening before reacting. It changes everything.

Communicate Clearly and Document Decisions

Writing things down — strategies, decisions, lessons — isn’t bureaucracy; it’s how alignment scales.

Documentation answers not just what was decided, but why.

It also forces clarity: if you can’t explain something simply, you probably don’t understand it deeply enough.

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9. Sharpening the Saw: Self-Awareness and Growth

Covey’s final habit — “Sharpen the Saw” — is about continuous renewal: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

That idea resonates deeply with me.

Leadership requires reflection and balance. You can’t lead others effectively if you’re not also investing in your own growth.

For me, “sharpening the saw” means carving out time for the work that’s important but not urgent — the things that strengthen long-term vision and perspective but can easily get pushed aside.

That includes:

• Learning — understanding new technology trends in fintech and AI.

• Connecting — building relationships with peers across the organization.

• Listening — understanding how the company’s long-term strategy is evolving.

• Thinking — exploring how our teams can adapt and align to future goals.

The Eisenhower Matrix helps me stay intentional about that balance — ensuring I dedicate time to strategic growth, not just tactical execution.

Leadership is about balancing tactical work (the urgent and immediate) with strategic work (the foundational and enduring).

It’s about recognizing that reflection, connection, and curiosity are not luxuries — they are what keep leaders sharp.

Sharpening the saw isn’t about slowing down — it’s how we stay ready for what’s next.

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10. Leading Through Values

At its core, these are some of the core principles guide me:

• Start with the end in mind.
• Favor progress over perfection.
• Measure outcomes, not just outputs.
• Improve flow with measurable engineering efficiency.
• Empower and serve your people.
• Treat reliability as a product feature.
• Drive change with teams, not to them.
• Balance firefighting and city planning.
• Apply an engineering mindset to operations.
• Humanize errors — every failure is a customer’s pain.
• Be transparent, predictable, and purpose-driven.
• Assume best intent and seek to understand.
• Communicate and write things down.
• Sharpen the saw — invest in learning, relationships, and strategic perspective.

Change is one of the few constants in technology. These principles help me stay grounded through it — leading with intention, empathy, and discipline.

Because in this field, we don’t get to choose whether change happens.

We only get to choose how we lead through it.