A platform capability is objectively better than what teams are doing, and adoption is low. How should the gap be diagnosed?

The diagnosis

Adoption is a product problem, not a compliance problem. Low adoption means the platform is losing on a dimension its team is not measuring.

Talk to the teams that did not adopt, and treat what they say as product feedback rather than as non-compliance. The answer is almost always one of a short list:

1. Migration cost exceeds the benefit. The capability is better and moving is a quarter of work that competes with their roadmap and loses. This is the most common reason and the most fixable.

2. Time-to-first-success is too long. If adopting takes a day of reading and a ticket, and their current approach works, they stay.

3. A legitimate need the platform cannot express, with no variation point — so they cannot adopt partially.

4. Reliability or responsiveness worse than what they have. If the platform's availability is lower than their own, or a needed capability takes two quarters to prioritise, staying is rational.

5. Loss of control during their own incidents, where they cannot diagnose or mitigate the platform layer.

What actually moves adoption

Make migration the platform team's job. Tooling that performs the migration, or the platform team doing it directly. Telling teams to migrate is a request that competes with their priorities; doing it for them is a gift.

Then: reduce time-to-first-success as the primary metric · add the missing variation points · publish and meet SLOs · and find the teams who will go first, since the second adopter is far easier than the first.

What does not

Mandating. It produces compliance where unavoidable and workarounds everywhere else — and it drives the workarounds underground, where they are harder to see and support.

The measure

Voluntary adoption rate, and time-to-first-success for a new team. Mandated adoption measures nothing; voluntary adoption measures whether the platform is genuinely better.