Building It Isn't Enough: What Driving Adoption Has Taught Me

Throughout my entire professional career, one of the most rewarding challenges, and the kinds of challenges I gravitate to invariably, are being faced with a problem, and the process of learning about that problem, understanding it, building a solution, iterating on it, and helping to drive adoption of that solution across an audience. On its face, the work itself might seem very obvious, but it's a cycle that has tied all of my various past professions together into a single throughline. I love being part of a solution, and ensuring that that solution fixes the problem for users. Whether those users are smallholder farmers in Zambia, a full-time medical team for a sophisticated medical camping program, or developers at a Fortune 50 company.

Of course, another throughline in my career has been employing technology to solve problems -- when you're familiar and comfortable with a tool, it tends to be the first thing you reach for, regardless of the problem.

In this thread, I really want to explore what building solutions across fields and within organizations has taught me about driving adoption of your solution, because it's never a foregone conclusion that users will readily adopt a solution, even if it actually solves the problem.