Product Success through adoption
Adoption is a leading indicator for measuring success of any product, free or paid. But how do you derive adoption ? Is having a good product enough to ensure adoption ? While the ideas I discuss here are mostly applicable to any kind of product, but focus is more on software products and platforms.
Open & Transparent
Before we discuss what Open & Transparent means, lets first understand what it does not mean. Open and transparent does not necessarily mean:
- Sharing of source code
- Sharing your daily/weekly scrum meeting notes.
What it means is sharing the reason:
- Why you are investing in developing this product/platform ? How it is different from anything similar in the market.
- Why users/developers of this platform should invest in buying or learning about this product. What will be return on investment for them ?
It also means being very transparent about your short and long term roadmap so that customers can depend on platform.
Feedback & Feedforward
The two tools which will help product and platform owners stay open and transparent are feedback and feedforward.
It is very important that product owners remain committed to receiving feedback from users and partners. Both positive and negative feedback should be critically analyzed and outcomes should be shared with larger community.
Feedforward helps product owners with community driven roadmap. By building product as per community requirements almost ensures that new features are adopted. Any new useful feature not adopted by users is a waste of effort and a loss for everyone.
Community & Community Champions
As user base increase for product or platform, it becomes almost ineffective for core product members to engage with users directly. That’s where building an advocate community and community champions helps. They help to scale the engagement with larger user base. The best way to create community champions is to make select users your trusted advisors. Help them develop better understanding of cause, the product and its benefits. Request for their help to scale out this information to larger user base. Most Valuable Professional (MVP) is one of the approach to this.
