The 10 Principles of Product & Feature Adoption
The psychology behind how people deal with change will help you drive adoption of product and features.
Product Adoption is a Change Management Challenge
You’re building something incredible. But it’s so hard to get people to use it. You know they’d find it valuable once they understood how it worked, but your users don’t get over the learning curve.
The process our brains go through while adjusting to any kind of change is the same process behind product adoption.
Humans are programmed to stick to their comfort zone, and anything new requires an increased cognitive load. We have the same energy pool for trying new things, as we do for going to the gym, eating healthily, or feeling happy.
So it’s no mean feat to get people to adopt your product into their lifestyle. Sometimes you get lucky and someone is perfectly ready and primed for your solution, it fits and you takeoff. Most other times, you have to chip away at it.
New product and new features introduce change for a user and so here we can draw on the best practices for helping people deal with it.
Let’s review how large organizations are taught to manage changes and consider how this can help drive better product adoption. But first, a definition of product adoption and why it’s important to consider.
What is Product Adoption?
Product adoption sounds like a vague concept, but it’s actually a very specific stage of the sales and marketing process.
Roughly, that process can be summarized in 5 stages:
- Awareness. A lead knows your product exists.
- Interest. The lead goes in search of more information.
- Evaluation. The lead mentally trials your product and weighs it against the alternatives.
- Trial. The lead uses your product for a short amount of time or in a limited capacity.
- Adoption or rejection. The user faces a decision of whether or not to make a mental or financial investment.
Adoption isn’t a guaranteed outcome of your sales and marketing processes, no matter how optimal they are. Look at it as just one branch of the last stage of the funnel:
All of the money you put into raising awareness, ranking content in search, and hand-holding leads through the trial process can easily go to waste if the user doesn’t end up managing the mental shift required to adopt a new product.
To look at it in a way that puts you in control, you need to manage that change for them.
How Change Management Best Practices Apply to Product Adoption
Change management is a significant topic for large organizations that are attempting to transform themselves to better adapt to their current environment. And therefore it’s been a significant field of study for strategy and organizational consultants.
Creating user habits is a change management problem, and so we can draw some great insights and parallels from these.
The 10 Key Principles of Product and Feature Adoption
1. Lead with culture
💡Key insight: skilled change managers always make the most of their company’s existing culture. Instead of trying to change the culture itself, they tap into the way people already think, behave, work, and feel to provide a boost to the change initiative.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: evaluate the culture of your product and users — do they expect and appreciate changes to your product? Are they early-adopters? What mediums do they prefer to communicate through?
Instead of trying to force your messages in a cadence that you consider best, leverage the systems they are already familiar and comfortable with.
2. Start at the top
💡 Key insight: All successful change management initiatives start with a committed and well-aligned group of executives strongly supported by the CEO. Work must be done in advance to ensure that everyone agrees about the case for the change and the particulars for implementing it.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: There are two interpretations here:
- Ensure that when you’re releasing a product or feature update, you are fully aligned across your executive, product, marketing and customer success teams so that you agree it’s a change worth making.
- If you are a B2B solution and have significant changes then ensure your executive sponsors are aware and invested in helping the new product be adopted across your customer team.
3. Involve every layer
💡 Key insight: Strategic planners often fail to take into account the extent to which midlevel and frontline people can make or break a change initiative. The path of rolling out change is immeasurably smoother if these people are tapped early for input on issues that will affect their jobs.
Frontline people tend to be rich repositories of knowledge about where potential glitches may occur, what technical and logistical issues need to be addressed, and how customers may react to changes. Although it may take longer in the beginning, ensuring broad involvement saves untold headaches later on.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: Run a beta! Provide an opportunity for your regular and power users to preview changes and provide feedback. Solicit input, make updates (and demonstrate you listened) before a broader rollout.
4. Make the rational and emotional case together.
💡 Key insight: Leaders will often make the case for major change on the sole basis of strategic business objectives, but they rarely reach people emotionally in a way that ensures genuine commitment to the cause.
Human beings respond to calls to action that engage their hearts as well as their minds, making them feel as if they’re part of something consequential.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: Ensure your messaging is not just about the features or the “HOW”. You have to prioritize the value and the “WHY”. Utilize language that helps users visualize how these changes will make them the person they want to be.
A reminder about what you’re selling. Source: UserOnboard
5. Act your way into new thinking.
💡 Key insight: Far more critical to the success of any change initiative is ensuring that people’s daily behaviors reflect the imperative of change. Start by defining a critical few behaviors that will be essential to the success of the initiative. Then conduct everyday business with those behaviors front and center.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: Introduce new concepts with simple user interactions. If you’re launching new functionality then try to bring it into the current workflow.
For example, when Buffer (a social media management tool) introduced scheduling posts in advance, they simple switched the CTA button from “Post” to “Add to Queue”.
Screenshot from Buffer’s smart CTA change. For more examples of great UX that drives product and feature adoption, check out our Inspiration Gallery
6. Engage, engage, engage.
💡 Key insight: Leaders often make the mistake of imagining that if they convey a strong message of change at the start of an initiative, people will understand what to do. Nothing could be further from the truth. Powerful and sustained change requires constant communication, not only throughout the rollout but after the major elements of the plan are in place. The more kinds of communication employed, the more effective they are.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: Product adoption messaging and product launch announcements should (1) be a continuous process, not just a one-time thing, and (2) use multiple channels.
This is a hard one — maintaining the framework for ongoing announcements and education of users is not simple. You’re probably already using emails and blog posts, but try to add these additional channels: social posts, in-product announcements (do this with Chameleon 👋), webinars, email signatures and ads.
7. Lead outside the lines.
💡 Key insight: Change has the best chance of cascading through an organization when everyone with authority and influence is involved. In addition to those who hold formal positions of power — the company’s recognized leaders — this group includes people whose power is more informal and is related to their expertise.
Companies that succeed at implementing major change identify these people early and find ways to involve them as participants and guides.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: Use influencers! These can be super-users, other product advocates or well-known product leaders. Incorporate testimonials from these people in your messaging or feature them on your landing page. This will help improve your credibility and drive product adoption.
This landing page from productboard has a happy customer as the focus.
8. Leverage formal solutions.
💡 Key insight: Persuading people to change their behavior won’t suffice for transformation unless formal elements — such as structure, reward systems, ways of operating, training, and development — are redesigned to support them
👉 How it applies to product adoption: The “formal elements” of your product or company include the interface, official positioning and messaging (like the website) and the normal channels of communication.
Consider letting users opt-out of changes rather than asking them to opt-in, but treat that decision with care (to avoid upsetting users).
9. Leverage informal solutions.
💡 Key insight: Even when the formal elements needed for change are present, the established culture can undermine them if people revert to long-held but unconscious ways of behaving.
In a technology company example, one of the most powerful solutions was purely cultural and informal — changing the informal slogan, “Ship by any means,” was replaced by a new aphorism: “If it’s not right, don’t ship it.”
👉 How it applies to product adoption: Think about the “informal elements” of your product and company — how your customer support managers reference changes or the specific taxonomy you use to describe the product. If you can better shape the conversation between your team and your customer or between your users, then you stand a better chance of product adoption.
10. Assess and adapt
💡 Key insight: Many organizations involved in transformation efforts fail to measure their success before moving on. Leaders are so eager to claim victory that they don’t take the time to find out what’s working and what’s not, and to adjust their next steps accordingly.
👉 How it applies to product adoption: Measure, analyze and optimize! Set your goals for success beforehand and ensure that key events are instrumented to help you assess whether users are engaging with the new features. Use this information to shape further releases and messaging.
Your Toolbox for Driving Product Adoption
Tools can make processes and systems much easier to adopt and implement, and with a plethora of SaaS solutions available, here are some of our favorites to manage change and help your product gain better adoption.
Get to know your users
The more you know them and the more feedback you can get, the easier it will be to pre-empt their reactions and create a well-suited product adoption plan.
- Calendly: helps you easily schedule meetings with customers
- Lookback: helps run user tests for prototypes or betas
- Zoom: reliable video calling and screen sharing
Plan and manage launches
Getting your own people on the same page is crucial for getting your messaging correct and coordinating all channels.
- Google Docs and Sheets: getting better and better for collaboration. Alternatives include Quip and Coda.
- Trello: easy visual organization of tasks and projects
- Product Hunt: an early-adopter community to launch and gather feedback
Analyze your product
- Segment: the best way to instrument your product analytics — frees you to turn other tools on and off for your site
- Heap: automatic event collection so you can review results retrospectively
- FullStory: watch users navigate your products
Communicate changes
- Intercom: send emails and engage in chat with users in your app
- Buffer: schedule posts across all your social channels
- Chameleon: highlight changes and guide users around your product interface
Note: we built Chameleon to work within your product stack and we connect well with the likes of Segment, Heap, FullStory, Intercom, Calendly etc. Learn more about our integrations here.
References
Originally published at www.trychameleon.com.
