Adoption Is the Real Product

For a long time, I equated shipping with success. Experience corrected that assumption.

Across platforms and enterprise systems, products struggled not because capability was missing, but because users could not understand, onboard, or trust them.

Adoption failed due to unclear onboarding, poor defaults, and high cognitive cost.

Over time, this reframed how I approached product work: onboarding became core design, self-serve experiences mattered more than documentation, and adoption metrics mattered more than launch metrics.