The engagement is there, yet nothing changes. Why is it so hard to create real change in large product organizations?
You step in as an external consultant in a product team. Everyone is friendly. Everyone is stressed. Everyone says “good luck.” You quickly see what’s stuck, but no one seems quite able to tackle it. And somewhere in the space between the desire to contribute and the fear of being the annoying consultant, many lose both momentum and direction.
With this blog, I hope both that you as a consultant feel less alone and more motivated to continue driving change, and that you as a product owner, team lead or leader gain new perspectives on why change sometimes feels slow, despite good intentions.
The Most Common Frustration Among Consultants
I'm not a consultant myself. But I talk to many. And one of the most common frustrated observations I hear is: “It’s so hard to implement changes in larger product teams and organizations.”
At the same time, I also understand the other side. For many product owners, team leads and developers it feels something like: “We asked for help to deliver better, not for someone who tears up our whole everyday work.”
I decided to dig deeper into this and asked Martin Nilsson, senior consultant in quality and development processes at House of Tech, with long experience from large product companies and complex organizations.This is exactly the gap Martin Nilsson deals with daily. Martin finds that there is often a desire for change, but also resignation over the lack of real opportunities to change within the organization.
One of the clearest signs, Martin says, is when people have stopped trying. When questions that should be obvious have no answers. When standard processes are missing. When the reaction to improvement suggestions isn’t “That won’t work”, but rather: Try it… we’ve already tried. It’s not unwillingness, it’s resigned experience.
What Often Holds Teams Back
According to Martin, the problems rarely lie in competence but in structure:
- Teams lack ownership over their own delivery
- There’s no ability to set up testing environments
- Budgets are owned per team instead of jointly
- Everyone optimizes their own “velocity,” while the whole organization slows down
It’s like a relay team where everyone runs hard, but in different directions.
Consequences If Nothing Is Done
When processes don’t support teams, three things almost always happen:
- Quality drops. Bugs are found late, feedback loops become long, and small errors grow into major incidents.
- Motivation disappears. People who know they can deliver better but lack the right conditions lose their spark, and that’s costly.
- Business suffers. Lower quality leads to unhappy customers. Low motivation leads to higher turnover. Poor delivery capability leads to lost competitiveness.
As Martin puts it: "Everything is connected like on a string."
Teams without shared goals may create their own goals to optimize, even if it harms the organization. For example, a team might boost its delivery speed KPI by skipping testing, making their metrics look great, while the organization overall slows down because defects surface later and cost more to fix.
Perspectives & Solutions
So what do you really do as an external consultant if you want to create change, without becoming the person everyone avoids at the coffee machine, or focusing on the wrong things? Martin’s answer is surprisingly down-to-earth: start by understanding the business.
Ask: Where does the company make money? What risks losing money? What really matters for the product? From there, use quality attributes like functionality, performance, usability and maintainability to help the organization prioritize. Martin often asks product owners:
“If we only have time to ensure two quality attributes, which would you choose?”
Suddenly, quality isn’t an opinion; it’s a business decision. That makes it possible to show what we actually know about quality, what we don’t know (because environments, tools or structure are missing), and what it costs not to know.
Change then doesn’t start with “We should work differently,” but with: “Here we lose money, speed or trust. Here’s why it happens, and here’s how we can address it.”
And that is where something shifts because now it’s not about the consultant wanting change. It’s about the organization wanting to reach its goals.
How House of Test Works With This
This way of thinking closely reflects how House of Tech views the consultant role. They don’t believe in consultants who arrive with ready-made answers. They believe in consultants who build context before building a solution, who speak business as confidently as technology, who see tests, quality, and process as information systems, and who help organizations make better decisions, not just find more bugs.
As Martin aptly says: Testing is an information service. Right information, to the right person, at the right time, in the right format.
When that happens, things begin to move. Product owners can prioritize more wisely. Leadership can invest where it truly makes an impact. Teams can deliver with both pride and pace. And suddenly the consultant isn’t the one who “wants to change”, but the one who makes it possible.
