Impacts of a few in-depth write-ups and an abundance of getting started

Masoud Kalali included in Product Adoption

2022-04-05 403 words 2 minutes

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Amount of information about how a new component or software system can solve all the problem in a specific area is sometimes overboard. The hotter the topic or the framework the more information is scattered around the web for it. For example:

Have you seen the plenty of use cases that every vendor in every segment of tech stack provide as part of the adoption or success story?
How about the tutorial that shows how quickly and easily something as significant as a an observability solution can be set and be up and running?
And many other medium that one way or another demo how easily a solution can be used/adopted.

Existence of such case studies and tutorial is amazing contribution to the overall wealth of knowledge and understanding in the tech sphere, no doubt avbout it. Sometimes I see engineering team members speaking about adopting a new infrastructure component or a brand new CNCF project with estimations that are 1/20st of the realistic time that it would take to adopt such a solution into our infrastructure. Any of those can be an entry point for a team or organisation deciding to adopt something and then endup in the pink elephant. With the adoption takes longer and longer and at the end of the day the organisation endups with half baked integrations and a team or an individual who is in charge of maintaining something that is not ready for prime time but is in widespread use.

If vendors and contributors that are writing quick tutorial can be more straight forward with the write-ups in relation to things like compliance, governance, automation, seamless integration, security, etc. that an organisation must take into account before thinking about adopting project/product XYZ.

Over short term there might be fewer attempt at adopting new components, products and projects but in the long run there will be more success in the industry which hopefully make everyone happier. Consumer of tech products will be happier with bug free, and less breaches in the product they are using and the practitioners will be happier with better build and well thought IT ecosystem.

On the other end of it, it may result in less experiments and thus less feedback to the product owners on how to improve or enhance different aspect of the product. From the rollout to the usability of it, it is a trade-off and a balance for sure.