Principal, Change Management & Incentive Design

Zillow is on a mission to empower individuals to unlock life's next chapter through innovative product development. The Principal of Change Management & Incentive Design will lead transformative initiatives to enhance how teams operate and adopt AI-native practices, shaping the future of product development at Zillow.

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

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