Paved Road Adoption

---
name: paved-road-adoption
description: Get teams onto the supported path through incentives and migration support rather than mandates. Use when a better platform exists and teams are not moving to it.
---

# Paved road adoption

Mandates produce compliance without adoption: teams do the minimum and
keep their old setup running. Adoption happens when the paved road is
genuinely faster and someone helps with the move.

## Method

1. **Make the paved road clearly better.** Faster setup, less
   maintenance, and better defaults, since teams adopt what helps them
   rather than what is required (see platform-as-product).
2. **Do the migration with teams, not to them.** Platform engineers
   doing the first migrations both accelerates adoption and finds the
   rough edges.
3. **Migrate a willing team first.** An enthusiastic early adopter
   produces a reference and an advocate; a reluctant one produces a
   cautionary tale.
4. **Automate the migration where possible.** A tool that converts the
   old setup removes most of the objection (see integration-migration).
5. **Publish the deprecation timeline early.** Teams plan quarters
   ahead, and a surprise deadline forces bad work (see
   api-deprecation).
6. **Let some teams stay off-road with a reason.** Genuine exceptions
   recorded rather than fought preserve credibility for the rest.
7. **Track adoption and blockers as a metric.** What is stopping the
   remaining teams is the platform's backlog.

## Boundaries

Adoption cannot be forced without damaging trust, and coerced adoption
produces minimal compliance. Migration effort is real and belongs in
teams' planning. Some legacy systems should not be migrated at all and
are better left until replaced.