Proven Platform Adoption Strategies
March 13, 2025
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Platform building is in many ways like city building. It is an ever-evolving journey that benefits from being prepared for unknown future requirements. Akin to a city, successfully launching, scaling, and evolving a platform hinges on user adoption, whether it is a software solution, a community hub, or an internal developer tool ecosystem. A technically brilliant platform is useless if no one uses it. This post explores proven platform adoption patterns and key strategies for driving high internal adoption to draw on established best practices and illustrate principles with relevant examples.
Value Proposition Storytelling
Stephanie Wong, Google’s Head of Technical Storytelling, emphasizes that “building an incredible product is essential — it’s table stakes, but I think storytelling is even more important.” Potential users must understand why they should adopt your platform. This isn't just about listing features; it’s about clearly articulating the value proposition. Focus on the benefits first, not the technical details.
Develop compelling messaging that resonates with each user segment. Showcase real-world examples of how the platform has solved problems for others. Create explainer videos, tutorials, and FAQs that address common questions and concerns.
Example: Slack’s early success stemmed from its clear value proposition for teams: streamlined communication, reduced email overload, and improved collaboration. Their marketing focused on these benefits and successfully resonated with businesses struggling with traditional communication methods.
Comprehensive Communication and Engagement
Engaging with prospects and users from various angles helps build a thriving community that can turn into a fly-wheel effect attracting more of the best fit users throughout the platform's lifetime.
Multi-Channel Communication: Implement comprehensive communication strategies e.g. quarterly platform updates, newsletters, brown bag sessions, Ask Me Anything (AMA) meetings, detailed platform logs, and a platform podcast.
Collaboration and Transparency: Encourage company-wide input, communicate roadmap priorities transparently, foster inner sourcing, maintain architecture decision records (ADR), and explain the platform evolution.
Example: Open-source projects thriving on community collaboration often with recorded special interest groups (SIG) and product sessions, e.g. Crossplane SIGs.
Market the platform internally as if it were an external product, using branding and other marketing tactics.
Example: Nike promotes its new sneaker releases internally to employees, often giving them early access to try out products and share feedback.
Example: Samsung uses internal communication channels to educate employees about the latest technological advancements in their devices and encouraging them to be brand advocates.
Example: Patagonia actively communicates its commitment to sustainability and environmental responsibility to employees, mirroring its external marketing message.
Ease of Use and Seamless Onboarding
A complex or unintuitive platform will deter even the most motivated users. Prioritize user experience (UX) to ensure the platform is easy to navigate, understand, and use. The goal is to reduce the cognitive load required from your platform users compared to their existing workflows. A smooth onboarding process is crucial for first impressions.
Invest in user testing to identify and address usability issues. Create interactive tutorials and guided walkthroughs to help new users get started quickly. Offer personalized support and resources to assist users during the initial adoption phase.
Example: Dropbox’s simple drag-and-drop interface and seamless file syncing made it incredibly easy for users to understand and adopt. This focus on simplicity was a key driver of their rapid growth.
Example: Most online video games do an excellent job of onboarding its players. Fantastic examples are these Perfect Day Games titles offering a world-class experience for mobile platforms.
Incentivization and Gamification
People are motivated by incentives. Consider incorporating elements of gamification or reward systems to encourage platform adoption and engagement.
Drive Usage: Offer badges, points, or other rewards for completing specific tasks or achieving milestones. Run contests or challenges to foster friendly competition and drive usage. Recognize and celebrate early adopters and power users.
Example: Duolingo’s gamified language learning platform uses points, badges, and leaderboards to motivate users and keep them engaged. This approach has been highly effective in driving user adoption and retention.
Example: Github profiles show badges and contributions. Users can pin their favorite repositories at the top of their profile.
Targeted Outreach and Community Building
Don't just launch your platform and hope people will find it. Actively reach out to your target audience and build a community around your platform. There will be more vertical than horizontal SaaS winners, both internally and externally. Even if you think you are one of the few horizontal ones, you need a vertical outreach strategy to win in the competitive market. Tease out your win rate by customer segment.
Identify key influencers and early adopters within your target audience. Engage with them and encourage them to spread the word. Create online forums or communities where users can connect, share tips, and ask questions.
Example: Salesforce’s success is partly attributed to its strong community. They actively cultivate a network of developers, partners, and users who contribute to the platform’s ecosystem and help drive adoption.
Iterative Improvement and Feedback Loops
Platform adoption is an ongoing process. Progress comes from continuously gathering feedback from users and using it to improve the platform and address any pain points, balancing the quality of existing functionality and tech debt removal with delivering new features, increasing test automation quality assurance, and doubling down on early focus groups.
Listen: Implement feedback mechanisms, such as surveys, user forums, and in-app feedback tools. Regularly analyze user data to identify areas for improvement. Be responsive to user feedback and demonstrate that you are listening and making changes based on their input.
Example: Many successful SaaS companies, like Asana, prioritize user feedback and continuously iterate on their platform based on what they learn. This commitment to improvement is crucial for long-term user adoption and satisfaction.
Example: Datadog’s agent has a fantastic flare feature that gathers technical information that it attaches to a customer support ticket. This reduces the required communication for support engineers to resolve issues and accelerates the customer journey.
Phased Rollout and Pilot Programs
Instead of a big-bang launch, consider a phased rollout or pilot program. This allows you to test the platform with a smaller group of users, gather feedback, and make necessary adjustments before a wider release.
Pilot: Identify a representative group of users to participate in the pilot program. Provide them with extra support and resources. Gather feedback regularly and use it to refine the platform before launching to a wider audience.
Example: Many enterprise software deployments utilize pilot programs to ensure the platform meets specific organizational needs and to identify any potential issues before a full-scale rollout.
Customer-Centric Development
Steering Committee: Establish a steering committee comprising existing and future platform customers. Prioritize their needs and roadmap timelines, dedicate significant portions of development capacity to their requests. This fosters ownership and ensures relevance.
Example: Open-source governance models like the Apache Software Foundation's community-driven development.
Greenfield Engagement: Embed platform team members within teams developing new features. Collaboratively launch these features on the platform, turning early adopters into advocates.
Example: Beta programs and early access releases like Microsoft's Windows Insider program.
Strategic Leadership and Planning
Executive Sponsorship: Secure executive buy-in for them to provide resources and influence. Constraints motivate out of the box thinking, trade-off decisions and automation. A platform requires a minimum level of resources and an evolving tool ecosystem. The order of magnitude is related to its ambitions for solving business problems that include unleashing faster application team innovation through platform use and building a competitive edge. Make a business case in support of economic and organizational benefits to secure the required platform resources for the right business reasons.
Example: Epic Games created Unreal Engine primarily for itself out of a resource constraint. This helped speed up game development and power the Unreal game in 1998. The evolving engine became highly successful to this day and was made available to third parties that are thriving because of it.
Phased Rollout Support: Leverage leadership to help influence who will be onboarded at which point in the journey. Implement a phased rollout or pilot program to gather feedback and refine the platform before wider release. This minimizes disruption and allows for iterative improvement.
Platform adoption requires various skill ratios from its builders at different points in the journey. Adoption hinges on feature readiness to meet essential requirements that may differ across application teams. Allow for adoption acceleration within suitable teams, and build your community with positive compound impact over time through the strategic support of your leadership.
Example: Microsoft Xbox grew the initial adoption of its platform to the first 1 million hardcore gamers consciously holding back initial television advertisements supported by its leadership. This resulted in a major upside because of the community of supportive players enabling platform team learnings with opportunities for iterative technical updates prior to hitting the mass market. Early players would later also help the next generation that were drawn in through broader marketing.
Flexibility and Integration
Escape Hatches: Offer flexibility by allowing integration with existing tools (e.g., CI/CD systems like Argo, Flux and Jenkins). Support popular internal systems to ease the transition. This recognizes that not all teams will be ready to fully embrace the platform immediately.
Example: Project management tools integrating with communication platforms like Slack.
Empowerment and Support
Education and Documentation: Provide comprehensive, up-to-date documentation, version-specific feature mapping, self-service training labs, and soon agentic AI. Be aware that your documentation is also consumed by a growing number of AI RAG agents that will help your application teams. Higher accuracy will yield better widespread results.
Example: Software companies provide extensive documentation and tutorials. Some companies found that internal platform developer self-help documentation reduces the need for custom training. Platform feature templating increased application developer velocity because the developers can remove capabilities from the templated instances easier and faster than fact finding how to add their desired behavior.
Absorb Adoption Burden: Create migration tooling. Do not underestimate the adoption threshold in light of lacking migration support. Factor this into your automation approach. Various user demographics may originate from different starting points and will need matching migration tools to successfully start using your platform. Phased roll-outs to suitable teams will help keep the iterative tool creation focused for maximum business benefit of spent energy compared to realized gains.
Example: AWS Aurora was widely adopted after the company made migration tooling available.
Key Anti-Patterns to Avoid
Over-Reliance on External Contributions: Avoid depending heavily on application teams for mission-critical core platform development. While contributions are welcome, ensure dedicated resources are available to maintain quality and consistency within roadmap timing.
Confidence in Organizational Scalability: Be wary of organizational scaling issues as the user base grows. Focus must remain consistent to execute effectively.
One More Game / Patrick Wyatt - Founder: We started working with two different startups using their products, and the problem we had both times was that as they acquired more customers their focus changed, and their ability to execute diminished because of the loss of focus.
Microlithic Architecture: Avoid tightly coupled microservices that require coordinated updates. Strive for decoupled, stable, reusable microservices.
Stacklok / Craig McLuckie - Co-Founder / CEO: A counter-example that I saw a few times was what I called “microlithic architecture” anti-pattern. The idea is that an organization would take a monolith and break it down into microservices. They would however retain coupling (syntactic or behavioral) between the microservices and would have to coordinate updates across several microservices concurrently because they sort of missed the point of designing microservices as atomic, reusable, stable, decoupled entities. This ended up collapsing under its own weight eventually because they traded a vertical scaling problem (monolithic architecture) with a challenging orchestration problem (as services were tightly coupled and had to be versioned and managed together). I used to love asking the question, “How many microservices are typically touched during a continuous integration cycle?” to determine the probability of 'microlithic collapse'.
80/20 Pareto principle: 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes that have an outsized effect. Use this for initiative prioritization. Avoid focusing on snowflake capabilities for specific users.
EPAM / Jamie Allen - Chief Technologist: The flip side is the 80/20 rule. You can't be everything to everyone, you have to have specific capabilities for specific users. If you try to build one platform to rule them all, it will be a mess.
Ignoring Competition: Whether you are building an internal or external platform, do not ignore competition. It does exist. Determine how to handle it. Should there be collaboration? Should there be co-existence? What are the reasons for other groups or companies to build competing solutions? How does it help the user experience?
Conclusion
Successful internal platform adoption is an ongoing process. By focusing on customer needs, strategic planning, flexibility, continuous improvement, and effective communication, organizations can maximize the value of their internal platforms and drive widespread adoption. While specific tactics will vary depending on context, these core principles offer a solid foundation for success.
It's important to note that direct links to specific internal platform adoption case studies are rare due to confidentiality. The examples provided illustrate the principles involved, even if they are external examples. The core ideas of user-centricity, iterative development, and clear communication are applicable in both internal and external contexts.
By implementing these strategies, you can significantly increase the chances of your platform’s success. Remember, user adoption is a journey, not a destination. Continuously focus on providing value, improving the user experience, and building a strong community to ensure that your platform thrives.