Adoption: Is your feature discoverable?

Part 1: Define your core action (with a small prompt for you to exercise)

Assumed audience: People who want to measure their features adoption.

Hi friends,

When you build a feature, an adoption metric is the early signal you can get to measure the performance of that feature. It helps you answer the question: How many people have used your feature? This question is the first question to ask. Do people even aware the feature exists?

This is what the feature adoption metric is all about. Let's say we build a chat feature on Airbnb. Then maybe we can see the adoption rate is 50%. It means that 50% of the target audience has used the chat at least once.

There are multiple steps in calculating an adoption rate:

1. Define core action

2. Define the target audience size

3. Calculate the adoption rate

4. Analyzing the adoption rate

In this post, let’s go through the first step. Then we will go through the other steps in the upcoming posts.

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Step 1 - Define core action.

Every feature should address specific user problems. The core action is something users can do in your feature that will fulfill their needs or problems. Here are a few examples:

• Airbnb chat feature → the user need is “I need to send message to the guests.” So, the core action is “Sending message for the first time.”

• Pinterest board feature → the user problem is “I need to collect inspiration for my project.” The core action is ”Creating the board.”

• Gmail tags feature → the user problem is “I need to organize my inbox based on certain categories.” The core action for this feature is “Adding tag to an email.”

We can count users who already do the core action as adopted users for that specific feature. Adoption is on the feature level, not on the product level. So this is the perfect exercise for you to work on a new or improve an existing feature.

Prompt for you

Go to the comment section and share the feature you’re working on. Then, reflect on the problem your feature is trying to solve. Think about the core action your users can do in your feature to solve that problem. What is the core action? What questions do you have?

If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments below or on Twitter or Instagram by tagging @buditanrim.

I hope to hear from you.

Budi

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