Principal Program Manager, Change Management

Zillow

3d • $169,300 - $284,700 • Remote

About The Position

Zillow’s mission is to give people the power to unlock life’s next chapter. Product development is central to that mission—and the Transformation Team is how Zillow evolves how products are built. The Transformation team sits within Product Development Operations and focuses on Zillow’s product development operating model. We’re reimagining & remodeling the Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) into one that learns quickly, is AI-native, and connects innovation to day-to-day practice. The work will be challenging, occasionally uncomfortable, and highly visible—but foundational to how Zillow builds products in the future. Zillow Group is in a multi-year transformation—rethinking how teams discover, learn, iterate, build, and deliver customer value. This role will shape not just what changes at Zillow Group, but why people choose to change. By aligning incentives, behaviors, and ways of working, this role plays a foundational part in making AI-native product development real, durable, and trusted across the organization. This role changes systems, not just through slides and storytelling. This role is the first hire at Zillow Group dedicated specifically to enterprise change management, embedded within the Transformation team. You will help build Zillow’s foundational change capability while directly supporting teams through this evolution. This is not a communications-only change role, and it is not a traditional project manager position. You will design, lead, and execute change that materially alters how product, engineering, design, and other product development teams operate—by shaping incentives, behaviors, workflows, and decision-making systems. You will partner deeply with product and technology leaders, transformation partners, and frontline teams to ensure AI-native practices are not just introduced, but adopted, reinforced, and sustained over time, even as goals and methods continue to evolve. This role will influence how AI transformation is experienced across Zillow Group—shaping trust, momentum, and belief in how we build products going forward. The work is visible, complex, and occasionally uncomfortable—but foundational to Zillow’s future.

Requirements

• 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

Responsibilities

• Lead enterprise-scale change strategies grounded in behavioral mechanics and incentive design - how people make decisions, prioritize work, and respond to incentives
• Diagnose and redesign incentives (metrics, goals, rewards, governance) that reinforce legacy behaviors
• Partner with senior product, engineering, and design leaders to evolve operating models, workflows, and decision systems
• Translate AI-native transformation goals into durable behavioral and operating expectations
• Influence without authority at the executive and senior-leader level; push back when incentives or norms undermine outcomes
• Build scalable, lightweight frameworks that enable adoption—not bureaucracy
• Define and track meaningful indicators of behavior change, adoption, and impact, using them as feedback loops to continuously adjust change strategy
• Establish how enterprise change management operates at Zillow Group going forward
• Design and run change experiments (pilots, staged rollouts, controlled tests) to learn what interventions drive sustainable behavior change

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed