Your product has been on the market 10 years. How do you keep your early adopters excited about taking the next leap forward adopting the latest "WIDGET"?
value progression. the new feature or widget must either tie to the same value as another or build off of it. So I try to map feature journeys with product roadmaps in mind
Two fist bumps to @Emma Mailey and @Jay Nathan for their respective responses. THREE fist bumps to @Arit Nsemo. Love the idea of getting early adopters only product councils - partnership and co-creation. Simply fantastic!!!
@Scott Hopper a slightly different approach, specifically for the early adopters. When we bought a bunch of on-prem customers to cloud, they were early adopters to our cloud platform but mature users of our on-prem solution. The CSM team ran a program called called as 'Discovery Weeks'. The program was designed in such a way that the customers got only a high-level understanding of the platform first. Then, they were assigned a test cloud setup to play around and come up with use-cases on their own. They would have a follow up meeting cadence with CSM's. Use-cases were discussed and solutions were presented out of the box. If not, enhancements were considered. This helped keep the engagement levels high, as the customer felt they found solutions to their own problems. It created a memorable connection with the platform.
I didn't bound it, but maybe your feature list isn't so exciting because you are given a smaller budget. If your Microsoft, or Adobe, you have very competitive product budgeting.
Completely agree with both @Emma Mailey and @Jay Nathan . One thing that I've seen work well is to invite those early adopters to be your beta group members, or to invite them to a customer product council (like an informal advisory board focused specifically on product roadmap ideas). Getting them involved in the process can make them feel both like true partners and also like co-creators.
That's a wonderful idea.
I like @Emma Mailey 's answer. Also think that if your product team is delivering real value, solving new problems (not just feature / widgets) then it's easy for customers to stay excited.
It's when we mistake incremental features for real value that customers lose interest. Gotta keep innovating!
Great question. I've seen pairing early adopters with newer (and super creative) customers helpful in generating excitement for a "leap"
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