Nobody tells you that transformation is mostly grief.
You grieve the old system,the old process... The team that made perfect sense years ago and now does not fit the new shape of the company. I have now lived through three distinct waves of transformation over 21 years. And the strangest thing? Each time felt exactly like the first time.
The biggest barrier to transformation was never the technology. It was always the mindset in the room.
Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success spent decades studying why some people grow through hard things and others get buried by them. Her answer, in its simplest form: people with a fixed mindset believe their abilities are carved in stone. People with a growth mindset believe they are clay shapeable, always.
I have seen both in every transformation I have led. And I can tell you which one survives.
Wave 1. Legacy is not the enemy.
Early in my career, we were modernizing e-Commerce, Loyalty, and Analytics platforms. Many engineers, Mountains of technical debt. Codebases that had outlived multiple rounds of leadership.Everyone wanted to rip it out and start fresh.The rewrite was sold as the silver bullet to all our problems.
I learned something uncomfortable, the people defending the legacy system were not wrong. They had built it. They understood why every ugly workaround existed. The real problem was not the system but it was mindset. Theirs, and ours.They had a fixed mindset about their code and it was their identity, not just their work.We had a fixed mindset about them and we saw resistance instead of expertise.
Digital transformation taught me that resistance isn’t stubbornness. It’s people protecting something they believe defines them.
You don’t bulldoze that. You reshape it.
The moment we stopped selling the new system and started involving those engineers in designing it, everything changed. A growth mindset is contagious — but someone has to model it first.
Wave 2. Zero is the loneliest number.
A few years later, I joined a fintech startup to build an engineering team from scratch. The headcount on day one: zero. The timing: a global pandemic.
No office. No whiteboard. No hallway conversations.
Just a Zoom call, a job description, and a mandate that would power the financial backbone of an SaaS ERP.Starting from zero strips away every comfort blanket. There’s no legacy to blame. No existing culture to inherit. Every decision, every hire, every process, every value is a choice you make consciously or one that gets made for you by default.
That’s where the growth mindset isn’t optional. It’s oxygen.
I made every mistake in the book. I hired fast and onboarded slow. I assumed technical skill meant domain understanding. But slowly, I found the only framework that actually worked not because I invented it, but because failure kept pointing me back to it:
People > Process > Product
In that order. Always.
Wave 3. We’re all beginners again.
Here’s the honest truth about AI transformation that nobody in a conference keynote will say out loud: It feels exactly like 2010 felt when we first said “digital transformation.”
The same boardroom excitement! Leaders with a growth mindset who see it as simply the next wave to learn how to ride.So here’s how I believe it should be done, drawn from every scar the first two waves left behind…
Start with People and their mindset first. Run workshops. Celebrate small wins. Find your internal champions and amplify them. The team that approaches AI with curiosity will pull the transformation forward. The team that approaches it with anxiety will quietly kill it.
Then fix your Process. AI injected into a broken process doesn’t fix the process. It accelerates the chaos. The leaders who will win aren’t deploying AI on top of what they have. They’re asking, what would this workflow look like if we designed it today, knowing what AI can do? That question alone will save you millions.
Let the Product evolve last and naturally. The best AI-powered products won’t feel like AI was bolted on. They’ll feel inevitable. That only happens when your people are ready and your processes are clean. Rush the product and you’ll ship a demo. Do the work in order and you’ll ship something that lasts.
Three waves. Twenty-one years. And the lesson is always the same.The technology changes. The business changes. The market changes.
But the person who thrives in every version of change is the one who decided, somewhere, quietly, often after a painful failure, that they were not done growing and that’s a choice !
Before you roll out your AI strategy, ask yourself… have you made that choice? Has your team? Or are you, like most of us at some point, trying to skip to the Product because it’s the exciting part?
The shortcut always costs more than the long way…
> pip install ankurverma 