Software Adoption: The Simple Tool You’re Missing

Vasil Nedelchev
2 min readNov 2, 2023

--

I’m not going.
No one can make me do it.

I decided that I would stay at the bus stop and let the buses pass me.

In the past few weeks, the art lessons got boring.
Since my parents told the teacher that I’d be applying to art school, she started with the still life assignments. And still life it was.

An apple. A vase. And a piece of fabric. Kill me now.

It was monotonous.
I couldn’t bear to do another lesson.

So I was sitting at the bus stop, making up the story I’d tell my mom. How the bus didn’t come, and now it’s too late, so I came back home.

I get reminded of this childhood memory of mine every time I design custom enterprise software.

Management wants this new piece of tech for the good of the company. To scale and make the lives of the people working easier.

But the employees don’t really want this new easy life. They like the current familiar one. And no one can convince them otherwise.

That’s often the reason why software initiatives in inside companies fail. It’s not the tech or the design. It’s the adoption of the new tool.

No one likes to be told what to do without being included in the decision-making process. So people quietly rebel using their old ways, tossing aside the new shiny tool that the company spent millions to develop.

But what if there was a better way?

What if the story employees tell themselves is that they are the hero? The driving force for making their company thrive?

Instead of a victim of circumstances.

For that, we need product teams to recognize the power of storytelling. Using storytelling to encourage employees to adopt new software.

So alongside the product spec docs, roadmap, and user flows, we develop our product narrative. The narrative that will make people feel excited. To realize they are key characters in the company’s success.

And not make them feel like kids who rebel against decisions they haven’t been a part of.

--

--

Vasil Nedelchev
Vasil Nedelchev

Responses (1)