If the customer refuses to accept the new product, how will you handle it?

Clarifying Question

• What goal does this product achieve for user?

• What is the new product?

• What platform are we trying to build it on? why? 

Assumption - Goal is to improve productivity of users; so that company’s metrics can be achieved. since, it is an internal tool, it would mainly focussed on desktop (scoping out app for now). 

Identify User 

• Internal user can be any function i.e. Customer support, marketing, sales, HR etc.

User pain points

1. New product is not able to fulfil user needs > wrong problem discovery or wrong solution to the problem.

2. Friction to Adoption > Difficult to use the product, learning curve (require handle holding)

Solution

Case 1 - understand the gap (Gap in capturing problem statement or in solutioning)

• Identify how far off is the correct solution. Is this solving user’s basic needs? 

  • If yes, show user how the product can fulfill there basic needs. Identify if the rest of the problem can be solved in other ways. If yes, tell the team to bring adoption. 

  • If no, take new requirements from team. Show low fidelity wireframes to team. Once agreed, redesign it as enhancement and get it ready for development. This needs to be clarified to all stakeholders (effective communication).

Case 2 - Train team (KT). 

• Tell user how can it help user bring productivity and save time. 

• Define metrics for task completion (time taken to finish task). This will help bring adoption in this case. if the task performed by new system is taking more time (then it needs improvement > to achieve the productivity metrics the feature focusses to bring)

Step 1 : Check Awareness

Are they aware of it? if not then communicate and make them aware.

Step 2 : Check Objectives behind Development of the Tool

• Productivity Improvement
• Process Improvement
• Performance Tracking/Visibility

Also check if there are any conflicts such as

• visibility improvement but decline in productivity
• Improved productivity but lesser visibility

Step 3 : Check whether these objectives are met

if objectives are met for the team ? 

• if yes, communicate and benchmark with existing
• if partially met, then try to ask for adoption with rest things to be deliveded in pipeline

Step 4 : objective are met but resistance to adoption ? 

• either due to usability/ease of use/training needs/learning curve
• due to increased workload. we may need steps to reduce the workload/normalise
  • more staff not in our hand
  • more case on automation of the tool
  • automate cases that are incerasing workload eg. approval and review flows
  • reduce monitoring cases from product give notification to time critical thangs
  • bulk actions supports
• Or it can be a typical change management case
  • workshops/benefits/deadline for forced adoption/ escalation from leaders 
  • post adoption
    • check usage
    • verify if all existing tasks process that product was supposed to replace are taking place in product
  • how to measure?
    • quantitative data eg no of tempaltes created before and after product
    • usage summary
      • dau / wau / mau as per personas - approvers, reviewers, project or tasks owners
    • no of customer bugs discovered - qualitative measure
    • regular feature request/ bugs from  customer is good measure of adoption