Successful first product adoption: 4 blind spots

This blog is part of a series on the key questions that climate tech companies should be asking related to their business strategy. As with the other blogs, this is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to product adoption and customer success, but rather addresses common pitfalls that climate tech startups face on the path to commercialization.

You’ve done your user research. You’ve built a climate technology that is highly differentiated vs. competitive alternatives. You’re clear on how this will benefit customers. So why are your first customer wins stumbling around, delaying deployment and possibly shelving your product? 

Working with climate tech startups, I see over and over that they underestimate what it takes to ensure successful product adoption. Here are four common blind spots that frustrate customers and delay commercial liftoff. 

Blind spot 1: The wrong finish line

Startups require passion, hustle and maniacal focus. So much energy goes into winning the first customer (both delivering an actual product and closing a deal) that often the team 100% focuses on that as the finish line, deprioritizing everything else. But of course it’s not the finish line– not even close. 

The finish line for that specific customer is not when you close the deal or even when they initially implement your product or service. It’s when they are getting the actual value from using your offering, enough so that they commit to renewing or doing more with you, and recommending you to others. Remember the “why” you hopefully figured out during your user research, i.e. the end goal? The customer’s product adoption finish line is crossed when their “why” has been achieved. 

The finish line for you as the startup is even further– it’s finding a repeatable pattern of success for a segment of customers and use cases– which usually takes several attempts before nailing down.

This may all seem obvious, but in the day-to-day frenzy of startup life, it’s often brushed aside. Maniacal focus should not mean putting on blinders. Otherwise, customers’ good will is wasted and success may get lost in the scramble to catch up.

Blind spot 2: It’s not a mirror

Your team is deeply expert in your domain and you have rock star scientists and engineers developing your innovative tech. It’s shockingly easy and common to forget that your customers and users do not have the same level of expertise and skills. 
Many technical founders I coach still assume that their users will just “get” how to use their product or service, even after they’ve done a good amount of user research. The problem is the startup is projecting their own knowledge base and skill set onto users. They underestimate how much scaffolding has to be built into the product to guide step-by-step usage, as well as how much education needs to accompany product implementation.

This is where over-the-shoulder user research is critical even before you have a product. Watching how users do their task or job currently gives critical insight into user skills and behaviors that the typical user interview or focus group misses.

Blind spot 3: Flying blind

When you’re developing your product, there are always 5 times more features desired than what you have time and staff to build. However, a key feature that should be an A-1 priority is instrumentation. Without instrumentation, you are literally flying blind.

Instrumentation means embedding ways of sensing, collecting and analyzing user activity and other key product metrics. Having actual product usage metrics lets you analyze trends and identify problem spots (where are users getting stuck?), rather than hoping you can get an interview with a bunch of users post-sale to guess at what they are doing. It pays to put some basic instrumentation into even your v1 product (you can always get fancier later.) And in the climate space, the linkages to MRV make this even more vital.

Blind spot 4: Staffing customer success

I get it. Most startups can’t afford to hire a dedicated customer success manager in the early days. But they should be clear regarding who on the team is responsible for post-sale customer success, even if it’s only one of the hats they wear, and incentivize them to take it seriously. It could be the business development lead, it could be an engineer (particularly for a very technical product.) But someone should be clearly tasked as the point person for rallying the troops to get the customer across the actual finish line.