How Product Managers can facilitate adoption
“One team, one direction, one strategy, one goal.”
It starts with trust. Here are some learnings for achieving adoption quickly and at scale.
Build trust with stakeholders, customers, and engineering teams
Trust is a crucial component of achieving product adoption, but it isn’t just about customers trusting a product. Product Managers must earn the trust of customers, stakeholders, and engineering teams. Here are her tips for developing trust across these categories to aid in product adoption processes:
• Customers and stakeholders: Meet with both customers and stakeholders, understand their pain points, and over-communicate to them. Express information about new products using every channel possible.
• Engineering teams: Behave, act, and work as one team. Adopt the mindset that you are not successful if your teams are not successful.
Create effective and efficient plans
At Product Ventures, we stress the importance of maintaining solid plans throughout a product adoption process. Here are some tips:
• Get influential customers to adopt first. They can help you reach a wider customer base.
• At the end of the quarter, pause and reflect on all the new products you launched. This is very motivating for your teams.
• Connect work with the impact it will have.
• Ask this question: “What can we do to keep our systems or products stable?” Product Managers shouldn’t forget that we also need to keep the lights on.
• Maintain a close dialogue, so nothing comes as a surprise. This gets teams moving faster by keeping everyone on the same page.
• Communicate to ensure teams are prioritizing the most useful missions.
• Involve all teams and engineers with work that the whole product area is doing to establish clear priorities and maximize efficiency.
• Keep OKRs to track adoption and delays. Keep them inspirational and focus on impact over delivery.
Optimize for fast and frictionless adoption
When adoption is frictionless, it is faster and more scalable. Here are tips for optimization that aids in product adoption:
• Optimize your product for the most common use cases and make it possible for the least common ones.
• Run usability tests as soon as possible and incorporate feedback.
• Have awesome documentation. Keep issue trackers, a live document to update and address feedback, and solve for this feedback moving forward.
• Improve performance and be cost-efficient.
Three main takeaways
As Product Managers, we can optimize to achieve digital product adoption.
- Behave and work as one team. If not, you will have delays, struggle to fulfill the correct requirements, and the product adoption process will not be smooth.
- You need your engineering teams, stakeholders, and customers to trust you. But you also need to trust them.
- Optimize your product for the most common use cases, and make it possible for the least common ones.
At Product Ventures, we help partnering teams build useful, high quality digital products.
We bring expert level product skills within your organization. We play a hybrid role of; Product Owner / Manager, and Product Coach.
We collaborate with your product, executive and internal teams to deliver value in a deliberate way.
Connect with us to discuss your digital product needs.
