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We Keep Building Platforms For The Wrong People

· 3 min read

Back in 1962, Everett Rogers spelled out a theory of how new ideas are adopted. I have leaned on this for years as a fundamental truth of my job. The image below breaks it down.

innovation

Most internal platforms get designed for innovators. Teams get excited when new technology gets introduced and engineers who are pushing the leading edge spend a lot of late nights and weekends learning the nuances of the new thing. It happened with early data warehousing. With cloud. With blockchain. These days with AI. The rules for the "new thing" are defined by the capabilities of the hardest of hard core engineers.

The issues is that the innovators and early adopters are a small slice of any population, roughly 16% on Rogers' diffusion curve. The other 84%, the early majority, late majority, and laggards, are the people who actually run the enterprise day to day. If we design for the 16%, we've built something most of the company may not fully understand but will use for the next few years.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who's led a platform team. A group of strong engineers builds something for engineers like themselves. They are curious, comfortable with rough edges, happy to dig through source code when the docs run out. We make so many decisions based on their ability to keep it running.

But what happens when they leave the room?

Folks who make up the majority (early or late) are the life blood of enterprises. They are the ones who deliver day in and day out. It's easy to get distracted by the shiny new penny, but we still have work that needs to be done, and these teams are the ones who do it.

The challenge is that, despite the high-value work these teams deliver, they don't always have the skill set to counter an incomplete platform that was designed for a diferent type of engineer. These are the people who focus on business value every day. Chasing the latest tech is not their priority. We need to build platforms for this group.

So what does it actually take to design for the majority? A few things I've come to believe matter more than almost anything else:

Make it opinionated. One clear path with minimized flexibility and a focus on the basics. Flexibility sounds like a feature, but for most users it's a tax they can't afford to pay. Focus on minimizing low-value choices that innovators would call "flexibility" but the majority would see as toil.

Some recommendations:

  • Make it boring. If it takes a conference talk to explain whats going on, it's probably not ready for a broad audience yet.

  • Build in guardrails instead of relying on documentation. Most people won't read the manual, and that's fine. Make the safe path the easy path.

  • Lead with proof. The late majority adopts because their peers already did and nothing broke. A few trusted teams inside your own company using something successfully is all the evidence you need.

  • Measure adoption. Use data to help you understand what is and isn't working.

None of this means we stop innovating. Early adopters still need room to experiment. That's how the next good idea gets found. But the platform you scale across a whole company is a different thing than the one you prototype with, and treating them the same is how you end up with something that never quite meets your expectations.

- Will