Description
A significant issue is that users enter Slack at a point where they are "evaluating" Pants (and sometimes other options) and take many months to feel comfortable regarding themselves as a user/adopter. Many, for instance, specifically reject that self-concept because they don't feel they've adopted enough of Pants' features or use it deeply enough throughout their projects. We need to reframe what adoption is and at what point it's legitimate to consider oneself a user for purposes such as:
- Providing community mutual support
- Listing in Who Uses Pants
- Being interviewed for the Pants blog
- Tweeting about their experience of Pants
- Writing case study
- Etc.
Goals:
- Reduce the perception that there's a lot to mull over or adjust before trying Pants
- Remove the perception that there's a bar to meet before ascending to status of "legitimate" adopter
- Get people doing any one thing with Pants as fast and quickly as possible and then immediately explicitely endorse them as users and instill confidence in themselves as qualified to endorse Pants
Content Change
Rejigger introductory content into a minimalist QuickStart focused on fastest possible basic adoption of one tool and that ends with, literally, "Congratulations, you are now officially a Pants user! Add your organization here." So, help them to pluck the low-hanging fruit as fast as possible, pat themselves on the back, and brag. THEN move them into deeper usage.
Process Change
Before closing out a "add us to Who Uses Pants" issue, tell the person to tweet and give them example text so that they can cite @pantsbuild and the page's URL correctly. Essentially, let's get a personal endorsement via Twitter while we're picking up the organizational one via web. 2 for the price of 1.
Culture Change
Look for opportunities to explicitely tell people on Slack and GH that they are adopters. Use the literal word; "adopter", "adopted", etc. using present tense or past tense. If they are using Pants at all, regardless of where or how officially or at what level of sophistication, they are already adopters. Give them the endorsement aloud so that they develop comfort owning it. Avoid using future tense ("when you adopt", "after you add Pants", etc) except when no other tense is appropriate at all. Consider first how a sentence could be restructured to make present tense appropriate.
Example:
- "Once you finish adopting" -> "Now that you have adopted Pants and are evaluating its more advanced features"
- "As a former user" -> "As a long-time Pants 1 adopter"
Vernacular Change
"Incremental adoption" may be lead to an impression that "adoption" is unfinished until all incremental steps have been completed. We need to adust language so that it's clearly understood that "adopter" is a simple approachable binary state, not the distant finish line of a gradual process.
Activity