ESSAY · THE SITUATIONS
You shipped. The product does what the engineers promised, the early users who lean in get real value, and the demo still wins the room. And the adoption curve is flat anyway. The board is starting to ask whether the market is smaller than the deck said. It usually isn't. I have watched this exact situation in medical devices, in enterprise software, and in industries in between, and the market is almost never the problem.
What is usually actually wrong
Adoption stalls for reasons that live outside the product, which is why product teams cannot see them. Someone in the buyer's building loses something if your product wins: a workflow, a budget line, a skill that took years to build. Or the person who feels the pain does not control the money, and the person who controls the money does not feel the pain. Or the product asks the customer to change how they work before it pays them back, and the payback arrives on your timeline instead of theirs. None of this shows up in a feature comparison. All of it shows up in a flat curve.
The most reliable tell: your champions love you and your pipeline still will not convert. Champions are people who decided to absorb the change cost personally. A market is what you have when people who will not absorb that cost buy anyway. The work is engineering the path for the second group.
What to do about it
Map who loses what when you win, honestly, name by name if you have to; the resistance you cannot see is the only resistance that matters. Re-sequence the motion so the buyer is paid back inside their own quarter, on their clock, not yours. And separate your champion metrics from your market metrics: champions tell you the product works, only the second group tells you a market exists. The technology was never the problem. The path was.
Juan Vegarra is the author of An Outsider’s Playbook (2026). The views here are his own. More from the Notebook · Advisory · Continue the conversation