The structured approach to transitioning people, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state, particularly during technology implementations, process redesigns, or organizational restructuring.
Technology implementations get project plans. People don’t. That gap explains most of the martech failures that get blamed on the platform.
Change management is the discipline of preparing people for new ways of working, supporting them through the transition, and reinforcing the change until it becomes the default. In a martech context, that means everything from explaining why the organization is switching platforms to rewriting the SOPs that govern daily workflows to making sure the team that used to run campaigns in the old system can run them in the new one without a 3-month productivity crater.
The adoption cliff
Most implementations follow a predictable curve. Configuration and testing go well because they involve a small technical team working in a controlled environment. Go-live is the cliff. Hundreds of users encounter the new system for the first time, discover it doesn’t work exactly like the old one, and start building workarounds that undermine the entire migration.
The organizations that avoid the cliff invest in change management before go-live, not after. They run pilot groups, build role-specific training (not generic feature walkthroughs), identify power users who can support their peers, and create feedback loops that surface problems before they calcify into shadow processes.
Change management isn’t a phase. It’s the ongoing work of closing the gap between how a system was designed to be used and how people actually use it.