Persuasion: Getting Your Tech Widely Adopted

These are the slides from a talk I’m giving at Chippewa Valley Code Conference this weekend.

Download the slides here

Here’s the talk abstract:

Brilliant developers, project managers, and IT professionals build tools perfectly suited to their users. So why don’t those users use them? In this talk, you’ll learn new ways to frame your discussion of your technology to make your users excited about the tool you’ve built to help them.

It’s frustrating when you’ve poured your creative energy into a tool that solves a problem for your users, but they don’t buy in . You know your users - they turn to you for help with their information problems, and you have the analytical skill to find solutions for them. So why is it so hard to get them on board with a new piece of software or hardware? As a developer, I found that subtly changing the way I talked about the exact same software led to way more progress with my users. Learn ways to get stakeholder buy-in using lessons in persuasion from entrepreneurship.