One of our design leaders referred to our adoption problem in a unique way: the competitor is sleep. Here's what changes when you design for customers whose attention is already spent.
During our design leadership weekly, one of my leads renamed our adoption problem in 3 words: the competitor is sleep. Our customers’ calendars fill wall to wall with sessions, and whatever attention survives the last appointment goes to dinner, family, and bed. Not to our release notes. Not to the feature tour. We’d been treating low adoption as a discoverability problem, and the rename made it a scarcity problem: the attention we’re bidding for barely exists.
The evidence was already in our own research, we just hadn’t stacked it up yet. Trial feedback full of customers who never found features. An onboarding test where the busiest roles skipped everything. My own note from a recent issue that the morning sign-in is the wrong moment because clinicians go straight into sessions. Every one of those is the same finding wearing different clothes: there is no spare hour in this job. Our product serves people whose workday is other people, back to back, at real emotional cost.
Every nudge you ship is bidding against someone’s recovery. Price it accordingly.
Once you accept the reframe, the design brief changes. Engagement mechanics from consumer products assume slack attention, and there is none here, so the bar for interrupting moves way up. What clears it: help that arrives inside the workflow at the moment of need, shortcuts that hand minutes back, and features that prove their value in the first 30 seconds of contact. What stops clearing it: digest emails, tour carousels, and anything that asks a tired person to go exploring.
The shelf
There’s a warmth in this framing I didn’t expect. If sleep is the competitor, our best growth strategy is giving people their evening back. Time saved became our sharpest success metric this year for exactly that reason, and it doubles as the most honest marketing sentence we own. Beat the competitor by conceding to it: build the product that lets them close the laptop earlier, and adoption follows the gratitude.
The teachable part
If your customers’ attention is consumed by the work itself, stop designing for spare attention. Interrupt only inside the workflow, prove value in seconds, and measure time given back.