Product Management for Agile Businesses: Adoption

The final phase in the Product Management Cycle is the Adoption phase. Coming into this phase you should have a product or feature that has proven acceptability from its target customers or users and is ready to scale.

That doesn’t imply that the product or feature is perfect of course, but that you know:

• the solution is reliable and works as per the scope that was specified.
• sales are comfortable pitching and selling the product or the product with the solution.
• marketing is ready to take broad initiatives to communicate to customers and generate interest and demand.
• internal systems are ready to support the product or feature.

Once all of the above is in place and has been proven during the Go To Market phase, then the adoption phase is ready to proceed.

Objectives of Adoption

You have a moral duty to inform the market of a solution that can help them.

You’ve invested money, blood, sweat and tears in building a solution that will solve a problem and create value. You want to make an impact for your target market and help them improve their business. Now’s the moment where the rubber hits the road.

You have already defined a metric for the number of customers or users you want using your solution, now you go out and you achieve that metric.

Make Adoption work for You.

Fundamentally, you are either in a marketing driven business where marketing initiatives drive sales to new customers, or you are in a sales driven business where prospecting drives new customers.

In the marketing driven case, you’ll be spending a lot of time working with marketing and ensuring that their initiatives are producing the leads necessary and that the funnels in place are converting. You may have to continue tweaking messaging and positioning in order to achieve the results that you need.

Likewise, for sales-driven businesses, you will be continually getting feedback from the reps about what’s working and what’s not working; where they are getting push-back and where they are achieving success. Of course, sales will also be generating a lot of signals that are necessary to sell. Be very careful about monitoring the target lists and understanding how much progress is being made through these lists. If results are not what was expected, it’s likely that insufficient progress is being made in the lists.

Adoption Metrics

When defining the scope of the product, you should have defined adoption metrics. Now is the time to be compiling these on a regular basis and sharing them with your organization.

If adoption is not what you expected, you should be able to see this in your metrics. Don’t be afraid to ask your organization for help in understanding why thinks might not be going as well as you hoped. There could be good reasons that you can work together on to improve performance. It’s in everyone’s interest to monetize the investment that is made in new product and features!

Communicate to the Builders

Let your engineering and other teams involved in the development phase know how things are going and how what they have built is contributing to the success of your customers and the organization as a whole.

It’s essential for motivation that the fruits of one’s labour is viewed as valuable!