Why You Need An Adoption Strategy

Back in the early 2000’s, I was hired as a product manager for a well-funded startup to help design and build a hosted collaboration platform (sound familiar?) that was to be integrated into our larger supply chain automation solution. Without getting into all of the details of our new product introduction (NPI) strategy, there were two foundational aspects of our plans: first, to identify and deploy a handful of “beach head” customers, and second, to roll what we learned from those early customers into repeatable processes and best practices, or, as we often referred to it, to “productize” our services. A key measurement of the success of this program, and a KPI that we often discussed, was the level of adoption around our services. Were people actually using what we were building? If not, we wanted to understand why not. If they were using it, what did they like? It was never enough to build something, throw it over the wall, and walk away. We strove for customer success, and measurable ROI.