Mike's Notes
More thoughtful words of wisdom from IT Revolution.
Resources
References
- Progressive Delivery: Build The Right Thing For The Right People At The Right Time by James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, and Adam Zimman (IT Revolution Press, November 2025).
Repository
-
Home > Ajabbi Research > Library > Subscriptions > IT
Revolution
-
Home > Handbook >
Last Updated
12/10/2025
Your Users Aren’t Lazy—They’re Managing Change Overload
By: Leah Brown
IT Revolution: 02/10/2025
Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance
papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of
the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered
content with the assistance of AI tools.
Picture this: A seasoned medical coder sits down at her workstation every
morning and flies through insurance claims at lightning speed. Her fingers
dance across function keys and the ten-key pad without her eyes ever leaving
the screen. She processes more claims in an hour than most people could
handle in a day.
Then your team delivers a “user-friendly” modernization of her software.
Suddenly, she needs a mouse. The keyboard shortcuts she’s memorized over
decades no longer work. Tasks that took seconds now require multiple clicks
through dropdown menus. Her productivity plummets.
Is she being resistant to change? Lazy? Unwilling to learn?
None of the above. She’s managing change overload in the only way that
makes sense: by protecting the workflows that keep her livelihood
intact.
This scenario, shared by coauthor Heidi Waterhouse in the upcoming book
Progressive Delivery, illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding that’s
costing organizations millions in failed software rollouts, user
frustration, and abandoned features.
The Change Paradox
Here’s what seems contradictory but is actually perfectly logical: the same
person who eagerly upgrades their iPhone every year might resist a minor
update to their work software. The same developer who constantly experiments
with new programming languages might refuse to adopt your team’s new
deployment tool.
This isn’t hypocrisy—it’s smart change management.
People have a finite capacity for absorbing change. We instinctively
protect our most critical workflows while remaining open to improvement in
areas where failure isn’t catastrophic. Your iPhone upgrade can be undone or
worked around. Your work software, which determines whether you can pay your
mortgage, demands much more careful consideration.
Beyond Stakeholders: Understanding Your Full Constituency
Most organizations think about their users as “stakeholders”—people who
have a financial or organizational interest in the product’s success. But
Progressive Delivery requires thinking about “constituents”—everyone who is
actually affected by your software, whether they appear on your org chart or
not.
Consider medical records software. The obvious stakeholders are:
-
Doctors who input patient data.
-
Hospital administrators who purchase the software.
-
IT teams who maintain the systems.
-
Your development team who builds features.
But the full constituency includes:
-
Nurses who need to access information during emergencies.
-
Patients who use portals to view their own data.
-
Family members helping elderly relatives navigate health
information.
-
Regulatory bodies ensuring privacy compliance.
-
Insurance companies processing claims.
-
Medical billers like our friend above.
Each constituent has different change tolerance levels, different technical
sophistication, and different stakes in maintaining stability versus
embracing innovation.
The Three Types of Change Capacity
Not all users approach change the same way. Understanding these differences
is crucial for delivering software that actually gets adopted:
-
The Builder Mindset Some users see software as LEGO blocks—they
want to understand how things work and customize their experience. These
are your early adopters who read release notes, experiment with beta
features, and provide detailed feedback. They have high change tolerance
because they enjoy the process of discovery and optimization. They’re
willing to invest time learning new workflows because they see it as
creative problem-solving.
-
The Tool Mindset Most users see software as a hammer—they want it
to reliably perform specific tasks without requiring constant attention.
They’ve developed efficient workflows around current functionality and
view changes through the lens of “will this help me get my job done
better?” They have moderate change tolerance when improvements clearly
align with their goals, but they resist changes that disrupt established
patterns without obvious benefit.
-
The Survival Mindset Some users interact with software in
high-stakes environments where mistakes have serious consequences. Medical
professionals, financial traders, air traffic controllers—these users have
optimized their workflows for safety and reliability above all else. They
have very low change tolerance because their primary concern isn’t
efficiency improvement—it’s avoiding catastrophic failure.
The Cost of Misreading Your Constituency
When you misunderstand your users’ change capacity, you create what
Progressive Delivery calls “technological jerk“—the jarring experience of
change happening too fast for people to absorb.
Slack’s 2019 redesign perfectly illustrates this mismatch. Slack’s
design team saw an opportunity to create a more modern, streamlined
interface. They were thinking like builders—excited about cleaner visual
hierarchy and improved information architecture. But most Slack users
weren’t builders—they were people managing dozens of conversations across
multiple workspaces while trying to get their actual jobs done. The redesign
disrupted muscle memory, changed keyboard shortcuts, and reorganized
familiar layouts. What felt like an improvement to the design team felt like
chaos to users trying to maintain productivity.
Sonos’s 2024 app disaster represents an even more dramatic failure.
The company released an app update that broke core functionality like sleep
timers and queue management. Users weren’t just annoyed—they were unable to
perform basic tasks with expensive hardware they’d already purchased. CEO
Patrick Spence was forced to resign in January 2025.
In both cases, the companies built better software from a technical
perspective but failed to consider how changes would land with people who
depended on existing workflows.
The Adobe Alternative: Progressive Control
Adobe provides a masterclass in respecting user change capacity while still
driving innovation. When they integrated AI into their Creative Cloud suite,
they could have simply pushed the latest models to everyone simultaneously.
Instead, they implemented what Progressive Delivery calls “radical
delegation.”
Users can choose which AI model version to use for different projects.
Someone working on a long-term brand campaign can maintain consistency with
Firefly v1, while someone experimenting with new creative techniques can opt
into Firefly v3. The same user might make different choices for different
contexts.
This isn’t just about offering a “classic mode” checkbox. Adobe created
granular controls that let users manage their own change absorption rate
based on their specific needs and risk tolerance.
Three Strategies for Respecting Change Capacity
-
Delegate Control to the Point of Impact: Instead of deciding when
users should adopt new features, give them the tools to make that decision
themselves. Microsoft’s “Try the new Outlook” toggle lets users test the
redesigned experience and revert if needed. Google Workspace offers
separate release tracks for organizations with different change tolerance
levels. The key is making this choice meaningful—not just a temporary beta
flag that eventually disappears, but ongoing control over their
experience.
-
Design for Multiple Speeds Simultaneously: Your power users and
cautious users don’t need to move at the same pace. GitHub ships hundreds
of small changes that are mostly invisible to casual users but provide
meaningful improvements for developers who spend all day in the platform.
Meanwhile, major feature releases are carefully communicated and gradually
rolled out. This allows your constituency to self-select into the change
pace that matches their capacity and context.
-
Build Reversible Experiences: Make it safe to experiment by making
it easy to step back. This isn’t just about technical rollback
capabilities—it’s about user confidence. When people trust they can
explore new functionality without getting trapped in unfamiliar territory,
they’re more willing to try changes. Netflix’s interface experiments are a
good example. They test thousands of variations, but users never feel
stuck with a version they dislike because the changes are either subtle or
easily reversible.
The Empathy Advantage
Organizations that successfully implement Progressive Delivery share a
crucial insight: user “resistance” is usually valuable information about
change capacity, not character flaws to overcome.
When users complain about the pace of updates, they’re telling you about
their bandwidth for absorption. When they create workarounds to avoid new
features, they’re showing you that your timing doesn’t match their
readiness. When they stick with “legacy” workflows, they’re protecting
something valuable that you might not understand.
Instead of viewing this feedback as obstacles to overcome, Progressive
Delivery treats it as essential input for delivering software that actually
creates value.
The Path to Sustainable Innovation
Here’s the paradox: When you respect users’ change capacity, you can
actually innovate faster. Users who trust that you won’t disrupt their
critical workflows are more willing to experiment with new capabilities.
Users who feel heard and respected become advocates rather than
resistors.
Progressive Delivery isn’t about slowing down innovation—it’s about
ensuring innovation actually reaches the people who need it, when they’re
ready to receive it.
Your users aren’t lazy. They’re not change-averse. They’re not
technologically backward.
They’re intelligent people managing complex workflows in environments where
stability matters. They’re making rational decisions about where to invest
their limited change capacity. They’re protecting their ability to be
productive while remaining open to genuine improvements.
The question isn’t how to overcome user resistance. The question is how to
build delivery systems that work with human change capacity rather than
against it.
When you get that right, everyone wins: users get software that actually
makes their lives better, and you get the sustainable adoption that drives
real business value.
This post explores concepts from the upcoming book Progressive Delivery: Build The Right Thing For The Right People At The
Right Time by James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, and Adam Zimman
(IT Revolution Press, November 2025).
