About this blog (and about me)

In this blog I will share some of my experiences — both successes and failures — in driving product adoption. Most recently I’ve been a Customer Success leader, but I’ve also spent decades as a Marketing and Product leader in tech companies. No matter my role, the fundamental task I have always focused on is how to help people get value out of a software product. The mental model I use is imagining a person opening up their laptop, or picking up their phone. What will make them want to go to your application? What are they hoping to achieve?

I spent a lot of years working for companies focused on individual consumers, because to me that was the most fascinating and difficult challenge. How do you get that random person walking down the street to try your app? (Marketing) If it’s free and not something they have to use for work, how do you hook them on the value in the one minute of attention they’ll give you before they bail out? (Product) Companies selling B2B software have traditionally been able to be a bit more lazy about these things, because once they get that decision maker to buy the product then they have more of a captive audience of users. The SaaS business model has forced us all to up our game. Hence the rise of Customer Success. But I believe we still have a long way to go, and that companies still need to do a MUCH better job of understanding how to drive product adoption. That effort is still too siloed. In this blog I’ll get really specific about what I’ve seen work so it’s actionable for you. I hope it’s useful, and I’d love to have you share your experiences as well.