Your product is not the user’s goal
Users do not wake up wanting to use your product. They wake up wanting to get something done.
Getting users to adopt your product is not your primary goal. Product adoption is your agenda. Your KPI.
For the user, the goal is to get something done. They want to hire faster, learn better, save time, make money, stay informed or solve a problem. Your product is, at best, one of the tools in that process.
This distinction matters because it changes how you build.
If your focus is on forcing product adoption, you may end up adding workflows, rules and dependencies that make your system cleaner, but make your user’s life harder. You may optimize for usage, while increasing friction in the actual job they are trying to complete.
That is dangerous. Never start with “how do I make them use this?”; The better question is “how do I help them achieve what they want?”. And sometimes this may mean your product should stay lightweight, invisible or work alongside existing tools.
That is okay because if your product helps users achieve their goals better, adoption often follows naturally.
But when adoption becomes the goal itself, it is easy to forget whose problem you were solving in the first place.