Shrink the Change to Build Trust
De-risk a scary idea into a two-week experiment with a fixed check-in date.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
A trust-building technique for getting buy-in on ambitious or uncertain work: make the first commitment so small that the risk the exec fears mostly disappears, and replace the promise of a good outcome with the certainty of a next check-in. Especially useful for AI-native products where the result is genuinely unknown.
Origin
Fain credits the book Switch (by Chip and Dan Heath) and its idea of 'shrinking the change.' She pairs it with a trick learned from certainty-seeking engineers: you can't guarantee success, but you can guarantee the date of the next conversation.
Core principles
- 01People (especially engineers) crave certainty that no longer exists; give them certainty about the next check-in instead of the outcome.
- 02Killing or deprioritizing your own idea is a very senior move that proves your incentives match the exec's.
- 03Different execs fear different risks: wasted time, time-to-market, or customers not wanting it, so find which one and target it.
How to run it
- 1
Ask what failure they most fear
Explicitly ask 'what are the outcomes you're most afraid of' or 'what would a failure state be for you in this experiment' to learn which risk (time, market, customer fit) actually worries them.
Pro tip Borrow red-teaming: take an outsider's perspective on your own idea instead of getting 'wrapped around the axle' defending it.
Watch out Prototypes make this worse; a beautiful prototype seduces you into being unwilling to accept the idea could fail.
- 2
Shrink the commitment
Reframe a six-month bet as a one-week proof of concept or small experiment so it clears the hump of 'I won't invest months if I don't know it'll work.'
Pro tip Define milestones and the chunks at which you'll show outcomes and fit, so momentum compounds.
- 3
State how you'll know it's failing and when you'll return
Say 'here's how I'm going to know it's not working, and here's when I'll come back to you with a decision on X date,' converting outcome-uncertainty into schedule-certainty.
Pro tip Offering to kill things and deprioritize, not just acquire more resources, is what marks you as thinking like a CPO.
In the wild
Working with engineers who had a very high desire for certainty, Fain would say 'I don't know if this is going to be successful. I'm going to check in with you on X date,' giving a fixed next conversation point.
→ The guaranteed check-in defused fears and risks around the initiative even without a guaranteed result.
Common mistakes
Asking for a big upfront commitment
Requesting six months of investment for an unproven idea triggers the exec's fear of wasted time and stalls the whole thing.
Getting obsessed with your own prototype
Falling in love with a slick prototype and refusing to accept it might fail, instead of red-teaming it from the outside.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone pitching an ambitious or uncertain initiative, particularly AI-native products, to a risk-averse leader.
Not ideal for
Work that genuinely requires an all-or-nothing large investment and can't be meaningfully chunked.
From the transcript
“they talk a lot about shrinking the change um which is this brilliant idea. If something seems scary and overwhelming, how do you make it…”
“I'm going to check in with you on X date. That's when we're going to come back and have another conversation”
“one of the biggest things you can do to build trust is kill things, deprioritize things”
From the episode
The art of influence: The single most important skill that AI can’t replace
Jessica Fain (Webflow, ex-Slack)