Changing Before You Have To
By Stephan Engelen ยท 2026-07-14
Successful technology companies rarely change because they have to. By the time slowing growth, competitive pressure or disappointing results force a rethink, the real change has already happened in the market.
Why the numbers always arrive too late
Customers have evolved, buying behaviour has shifted, new technologies have emerged and competitors have quietly redefined the market. The numbers simply arrive later than reality.
The remarkable companies recognise this before the evidence becomes overwhelming. They question their own assumptions while they are still successful. They are prepared to rethink products, positioning, organisation and even their business model before anyone inside or outside the company believes change is necessary.
That is not because they enjoy change for its own sake. It is because they understand that success is often built on assumptions that were right yesterday but may no longer describe tomorrow.
What Rogers and Moore still teach us about adoption
This is one of the reasons I keep returning to the work of Everett Rogers and Geoffrey Moore. Rogers explained why innovations spread through different groups of customers over time. Moore showed how every transition in that adoption process requires technology companies to rethink their product, positioning, sales approach and go-to-market strategy.
Their work remains remarkably relevant because markets never stand still. What has intrigued me over the years is not their theory, but what happens afterwards.
If leaders understand the theory, why do organisations still adapt too late?
I no longer believe the answer is simply poor execution.
The organisations I have seen struggle were often executing extremely well. Sales became more professional. Marketing became more sophisticated. Product Management became more disciplined. Governance improved. More information became available than ever before.
Yet something else was quietly changing: the assumptions behind those decisions were becoming less accurate.
Change leadership means recognising a different game
Looking back, I increasingly believe that one of the least discussed responsibilities of leadership is recognising when the company has entered a different game. That game may have changed because:
- the market has matured
- the buying process has evolved
- a new technology has altered customer expectations
- the company itself has become something very different from the organisation that originally found product-market fit
Recognising that moment is not easy, because every organisation interprets the market through the lens of its own business model.
Why best practices so often disappoint
A consulting company learns differently from a product company. A product company learns differently from a platform business. A company creating a new market learns differently again. None of these approaches is better than another, but they require fundamentally different ways of thinking and making decisions.
We tend to borrow ideas from companies playing a different game without first asking whether our own game has changed.
The real question for leadership
The question is not whether organisations should change. Every organisation eventually must.
The real question is whether leadership has the judgement to recognise that tomorrow's success requires a different way of thinking while today's success is still convincing everyone that nothing needs to change.