Product managers should be proactive with a repeatable adoption approach that is consistent for all your products, built on a sense-and-respond loop that drives user engagement and revenue.
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How Continuous Technology Adoption Helps Organization to Grow and Face Critical Challenges
By Craig Roth | November 22, 2024
Technology adoption to enhance user and customer engagement and gain competitive edge
Technology adoption is often only considered when a release fails or a major customer departs. By then, it’s too late.
In contrast, continuous technology adoption actively encourages users to engage with new products and features, enabling tech providers to detect and mitigate potential adoption issues before adoption goals are jeopardized.
By combining behavioral science with new technologies like workstyle analytics and nudgetech, product managers can enhance their technology’s performance, reduce customer churn and gain a competitive advantage.
Technology adoption and engagement as a continuous “sense and respond” loop
With a continuous “sense and respond” loop, tech providers can detect and mitigate adoption issues sooner.
Technology democratization creates a moment for user-led growth and continuous adoption
End users increasingly have power over which software they use and how they engage with it. Our research found that the democratization of technology decision-making and ownership influenced 30% of business tech spending in 2022; that figure is expected to rise to 38% by 2026. Product led growth has put a spotlight on this issue since freemium and free trial models use adoption and virality as their primary growth engine instead of sales channels. High readiness levels to adopt new technologies are rare, meaning there is ample opportunity for tech providers and their product managers to drive net revenue retention (NRR) and unaided growth.
How and why tech providers fail to turn user choice into user adoption
To capitalize on the wave of technology democratization, tech providers must first understand why and how their users resist.There are three main causes:
Sporadic execution of user adoption strategies.
Insufficient data to guide the development of these strategies.
A limited set of behavioral strategies for engaging with users.
In addition, awareness of user adoption trends tends to peak after significant events, such as a major new release or losing a large customer. This means product managers miss opportunities to benchmark, and track vital user data, leaving internal stakeholders unaware of how they can help drive user adoption.
How the sense-and-respond loop ensures continuous attention to technology adoption
To ensure consistent user adoption, tech providers need a new, continuous approach. A proactive activity loop, known as the sense-and-respond loop, addresses the signals of adoption barriers. It consists of:
Sense: Leverage your customer, user and usage analytics, along with your business metrics, to understand how users are engaging with your products.
Respond: Act on what you sense by leveraging technical and organizational capabilities to steer user behavior toward adoption.
Events: Turn new product rollouts and major updates into checkpoints for testing and fine-tuning your sense and response processes. Take what you learn and begin the loop again.
This proactive approach improves user engagement, reduces churn and helps tech providers land more high-quality deals. And developing and consistently applying the process can turn adoption from a troubleshooting task into an organizational competency.
Technology adoption FAQs
What are the key metrics for technology adoption?
Four types of metrics are needed to review continuous technology adoption: busines metrics, customer analytics, user analytics and usage analytics.
What is stickiness and is it important for technology adoption?
In the context of technology products and adoption, “stickiness” refers to a product or service's ability to keep users engaged. While it might be measured differently for each product, stickiness indicates that users find a product valuable or helpful to their daily tasks. Usage metrics can be a key indicator of stickiness as they demonstrate how well a product integrates into a user’s daily business routine.
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