3 Concepts on Scaling New Product Adoption
From a product perspective, the moment just before launch is often seen as the finish line. Features are scoped, built, and tested - ready to roll out. But for internal platforms, that’s when the real work begins. Adoption isn’t a given. It has to be earned.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve been deep in the weeds with platform migrations for internal ops teams—sunsetting legacy tools that had been the backbone of how teams worked for years. We weren’t just building a shiny new interface—we were rewriting workflows that entire generations of employees had been trained on. These were systems people optimized their careers around. Adoption in that context? It’s not a training plan. It’s behavior change at scale.
Here’s what’s worked for me—and where I’ve stumbled.
1. Adoption Begins with Empathy, Not Enablement
It’s easy to get excited about what we’ve built. But if you’re asking users to swap out their entire workflow, you’re asking them to give up speed, accuracy, and confidence - at least temporarily. The question I always try to center: What are users really afraid of with this change?
For ops teams, it’s often about performance. They’re hitting 50 tickets a day on a legacy tool they’ve mastered. Now we’re telling them to slow down and re-learn? That’s a hard sell unless we’re speaking directly to their day-to-day pain points and making it crystal clear how this new tool helps them do their jobs better, not just differently. Put differently: before you can drive adoption, you need to earn trust.
2. Enablement Is Learning Design—So Design for How Adults Learn
One of the most valuable things I carried over from my time in training and L&D is how product rollouts are learning experiences.
Adult learners don’t want abstract concepts. They want relevance and real-world utility. That’s where two learning concepts come in handy:
Experience-based learning – Anchor new workflows to things they already know. Lean into side-by-side comparisons or shared language from legacy tools.
Problem-centered learning – Frame everything around the user’s core questions: “How does this help me close tickets faster?”, “How do I avoid context switching?”
When enablement is grounded in their world, not yours, the ramp gets shorter and the buy-in gets stronger.
3. Operationalize Testing as an Early Enablement Tool
This one’s always a battle, especially with tight timelines. But user testing is one of the most underrated tools in your adoption toolkit—not for catching bugs, but for building advocates.
The more users you involve early, the more real-world feedback you collect before launch. But maybe more importantly, you’re creating internal champions. These folks become your unofficial trainers, your slack thread responders, your cultural translators.
In one case, we opened up our test group to a broader cohort—just 30% more people. Post-launch, we saw feedback volumes double and issues resolve 25% faster. Why? Because these testers weren’t just flagging issues—they were helping others figure out the new system on day one.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, adoption isn’t a check-the-box task at the end of your product roadmap - It’s a core part of the product development lifecycle. Especially for internal tools that ask people to unlearn the familiar.
So whether you’re launching a new platform or just rolling out a new feature, remember: empathy, learning design, and early user buy-in aren’t nice to haves - they’re your fastest path to impact. They make all the difference between a feature that’s used and one that’s abandoned.
These are just a few reflections from my own product journey. What’s worked for you?
