Anyone who tells you to focus on adoption metrics with no other guidance doesn't care about the customer no matter what they may say to the contrary.

When you solve a real problem or pain point that your customer is experiencing, you will get organic adoption and retention. Adoption by mandate alone will never succeed.

If you are Focusing on the Customer Experience, a lot of this will come naturally because you are already honed in on your customer's needs.

Transforming an existing service to operate in this manner, however, does not always align to politics that may be occurring well above our pay grade.

I would encourage you to generally ignore any of those leadership dysfunctions and focus on executing a solution to the problem placed in front of you while keeping in mind that a real pain point drives all of your deliverables.

That pain is felt by individuals. Find those individuals and talk to them.

Understanding the actual problem is the key to success. When people come to me with a technical issue that they are trying to solve one of the first questions I ask is: "What problem are you trying to solve." (often repeated a few times to drill down far enough to the actual root problem). Define the problem, and having your stakeholders agree makes the solving part a [relative] piece of cake.

Most of the time, we end up getting caught up in the implementation details of HOW to solve the problem but everyone having a different perspective of what the actual problem is.

  1. Ground out on the problem statement
  2. Verify the pain it is solving
  3. Execute

In my experience, the first two parts of that will take most of the time, but that time will be well spent with fewer revisions and a higher customer satisfaction rate.

Word of mouth is the most powerful method of adoption. Customers will talk to one another about whether your product is crap or amazing. Solve a real problem for a real customer, and then let them drive adoption for you.