Platform Adoption Audit Nitish Rana / Portfolio

Free diagnostic · Platform & internal product

Every PM playbook assumes a customer who can leave.

Platform PMs have the opposite. A captive audience, no revenue signal, no churn number, and a spreadsheet that half the org quietly keeps open in another tab. This audit is built for that job.

0 25 50 75 RE-SCOPED AROUND 3 WORKFLOWS 27% BASE CAMP 76% YOU ARE HERE
Back-office platform, ten squads, ninety people. The first three months went into training sessions, comms and an executive mandate — none of it moved the number. What moved it was cutting the roadmap down to the three workflows agents actually lived in.

The terrain

Low adoption is a product problem wearing a change management costume.

Internal platforms hide their own failure. Nobody churns, so no cancellation signal ever reaches you. Teams just keep the old spreadsheet open, route around your API, or quietly build their own version over a long weekend.

By the time it surfaces in a metric, it usually surfaces as a reorg.

Almost everything written for product managers assumes an external customer, a revenue line, and a churn rate. None of it transfers. So most platform PMs work the job out alone, change companies, and work it out again.

Before you set off

Run the adoption audit on your own platform.

Fifteen scored questions, built from turning around platforms nobody was using. It takes about ten minutes and it will probably annoy you. Five of them:

  • What happens when a team does nothing at all?
  • How long from a new team's first commit to their first working outcome?
  • Are workarounds being shared between teams, or invented separately?
  • Who can bypass you entirely, and how often do they?
  • Can you state the counterfactual — what these teams would have built instead?

Ten more, plus scoring and what to fix first at each band.

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Who's writing this

Nitish Rana

Sixteen years in B2B SaaS — eight building software as an engineer, eight leading product. Currently a senior product manager at TELUS Digital, working on internal platforms across ten squads and ninety people.

Before that, mobile and accounting products at Sage, and a marketing platform at Maropost where I built a mobile SDK from nothing. The through-line has been the same problem every time: something got built, and the people it was built for weren't using it.

  • 27% → 76%Platform adoption, 6 months
  • 9 → 5 weeksCycle time across 10 squads
  • 5 weeks → 8 daysSDK integration time
  • $1.4MNew ARR from a 0-to-1 SDK