The Tech Adoption Lifecycle
In 1991, Geoffrey Moore published Crossing the Chasm, a framework for understanding why some technologies achieve mass adoption while others stall after an initial burst of enthusiasm. The model describes five distinct groups of adopters, each with fundamentally different motivations.
Think of it like a new restaurant opening in your city. Some people will line up on opening night just because it's new. Others will wait until their trusted friends recommend it. Most will only go once it's been reviewed in the local paper and has a two-year track record. And a few will only show up when their usual diner closes permanently.
The five groups, in order of adoption:
-
Innovators (The Techies): They try your platform because it uses interesting technology. They will forgive bugs, missing documentation, and rough edges. They are intrinsically motivated by novelty. They represent roughly 2.5% of your audience.
-
Early Adopters (The Visionaries): They see a strategic advantage in adopting early. A team lead who believes your new deployment platform will let her team ship twice as fast is an Early Adopter. She will work through rough edges to capture that advantage. She represents roughly 13.5% of your audience.
-
The Chasm: This is the massive gap between the Visionaries and the Pragmatists. It is not a gradual slope — it is a cliff. Most internal platforms die here. The strategies that won over Early Adopters actively repel the Early Majority.
-
Early Majority (The Pragmatists): They do not care about the technology. They care about stability, support, and social proof. They will not adopt until "everyone else" is already using it successfully and there are proven answers to their questions. They represent roughly 34% of your audience and are the key to mass adoption.
-
Late Majority (The Conservatives): Similar to Pragmatists but even more risk-averse. They adopt when not adopting becomes the riskier choice. Another 34%.
-
Laggards (The Skeptics): They will only switch when you forcefully turn off the old system. Trying to convince them is usually not worth the energy. The last 16%.
The Mistake Most Platform Teams Make
Platform teams often market to the Majority using arguments that only appeal to Innovators. Announcements like "We rebuilt our CI pipeline in Rust with a WebAssembly plugin system!" generate excitement in the Slack #platform-engineering channel and silence everywhere else.
The Early Majority does not care about the architecture. They care about three things:
- "Will this break my weekend?" (Reliability and SLA)
- "Who do I call when it breaks?" (Support)
- "Is anyone else using this successfully?" (Social proof)
If your platform announcement cannot answer all three questions, you are speaking a language the Majority does not understand.
Interviewers at senior platform engineering roles often ask: "How would you drive adoption of a new internal platform?" A weak answer focuses on technical quality. A strong answer demonstrates understanding of the adoption curve: "I'd identify a beachhead team from the Early Majority, build the whole product including SLAs and documentation, use their success as social proof, and only then push for broader rollout." This signals you understand that adoption is a product and change management problem, not just a technical one.