What are some of the challenges with your feature adoption roadmap?

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Some of the challenges I have seen with this:

We front load the roadmap with core features and then our key differentiators are in the back.

The problem I have experienced with this is that we lost their attention once they felt their immediate needs were solved.

We focus on top 10 features and at times the features are unrelated to each other. Makes the value progression move all over the place.

 

What other challenges do you experience?

 

Natalie White

The biggest challenges we have had are; 

• Too many features released at once without a clear thread of impact
• No clear communication with the Customer Experience team on how the feature works and what known bugs are present. This causes a huge headache to customer facing team members. 
• Features that are unfinished and then remain unfinished because the product team moves to the next project. Leaving the CS team to make up and fill the gaps for the limitations. 

Toby Lucich

Interesting question @Kevin Mitchell Leonor! I'm wondering if there are features that can be woven into "early levels" of learning and adoption?

I've wondered how much the video gaming mentality - leveling up - holds true in tool adoption? I get that the core features need to show up fast, but are there moments in the orientation that might give a glimpse to more "advanced" features and use cases? Like foreshadowing or a commercial, offering a glimpse of things to come?

If the training is largely online, you may want to try introducing teasers around core features, suggesting how a new use case could be explored. For example, I'm thinking about setting up a new user, and the familiar rights administration that comes with most admin dashboards. This might be an interesting time to also suggest/ advertise that your product has Access Delegation features, and allow a user doing orientation to 'favorite' this feature for future learning.

Context matters: so often, the coolest features of products are not what I buy them for, and might use the product for months (years) without ever tapping into these capabilities. Unless we have - or can imagine - the challenge our self, these more advanced features never meet a need.

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Absolutely. Many learning modules only cover the exact use and not the correlated features or benefits. I am also a big believer in video game style training as long as the value story we are creating leads to slaying stage bosses aka desired outcomes.