Draft
Last week we had a company offsite, and one of our engineering leaders raised an account they were worried about. The work was solid and adoption still wasn't where it should have been. So we spent a while on it, going through where things were working and where they weren't, and then doing the same across the other accounts in the room. By the end we were looking at the same pattern in all of them.
Three roles inside a large company decide whether your product gets adopted: a sponsor, a champion, and a set of real users. You need all three.
The sponsor is the buyer. They hold the budget and they give the team air cover. If the sponsor is also the business owner, that's the linchpin, and no amount of product quality survives a business owner who funded something and then went quiet.
The champion is the catalyst. The sponsor is senior and has no day to day time to rally the troops, so it falls to someone on their team who takes the vision, breaks it into a plan, and runs it. This is the person who knows what motivates the organization and who the detractors are before anyone says it out loud. You can embed as many of your own people inside a customer as you want and you still won't get that signal at high fidelity.
And then there's the trap.
We were close with a champion at a large financial institution, closer than usual, and everything was green for months. Then the users came into the room and told us the thing felt rigid, and that this wasn't what AI had promised them. Integrations, architecture, how any of it had been built: none of that came up once.
They were right. We and the customer had spent those months making the experience work end to end and making the governance hold, which were the correct things to build first and are also invisible to someone who just wants the thing to bend. The more useful part is why it took the users to surface it: we were both pulling hard in the same correct direction, so nothing in the status report could have caught it.
Nobody was hiding anything. Two competent parties, aligned, months of green, and everyone in the room telling the truth as they understood it.
Once we focused on the users, we pivoted and landed a compelling outcome. It didn't take much: the foundation we'd laid was strong, and the champion and the team were already humming together.
The third role is the one that takes actual field work. Sitting with the people who have the job, watching how a day goes, pushing past the obvious use cases you arrived with. It's the least delegable part of the work and the first thing that falls off a plan.
You can get one of the three dialed in most of the time. Two happens more often than you'd think, and two is precisely what a green status report looks like from the outside. All three at once is rarer, and it's the only configuration I've seen where adoption actually holds.
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