Rolling Out New Software in Your Tech Stack? Win Adoption with Video.

Mapping Kotter’s 8 Steps to Video-Led Enablement

Let’s break down each of these steps and see how to bring them to life with live, async, and video-first formats.

Step 1: Create Urgency (Without Creating Panic)

The Psychology: People don't change unless the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of changing. Your job is to make the current state feel more uncomfortable than learning something new.

What Works: Data-Driven Reality Checks

When GPT-4 dropped in early 2023, Zapier issued their first-ever "Code Red.” CEO Wade Foster didn’t send a generic AI announcement or a dry strategy deck. Instead, he published a deeply internal memo titled “Competing in an AI world,” where he acknowledged both the existential risk and generational opportunity that AI posed—not just to Zapier, but to every knowledge worker on the team.

Zapier Founder, Wade Foster’s, internal memo to the team

Video play: A Founder-Led Rallying Cry

Wade recorded a short, unscripted internal video recapping the key themes:

• Why AI wasn’t just another tech wave—it was a platform shift

• What it meant for Zapier’s customers, product, and team workflows

• Where employees could start experimenting right away

It wasn’t polished. But it was clear, timely, and deeply motivating.

Use this approach to kick off your own rollout:

• Capture why the change matters, emotionally and strategically

• Anchor it in numbers (time lost, effort duplicated, customers confused)

• Deliver it through a video that feels human, not corporate

  
  

Pro Tip: Lead with Empathy, Not Efficiency
Don’t say: “This new tool will make you 40% more productive.” Instead try: “Remember how it took us five apps and three DMs to find last week’s decision? This change fixes that.”

Your goal isn’t to trigger urgency through panic—it’s to create clarity, conviction, and forward motion.

Step 2: Build Your Coalition (Champions Over Mandates)

The Psychology: Change spreads through relationships, not org charts. One enthusiastic peer often outperforms ten executive nudges. The fastest way to drive adoption is to find the people already leaning in—and put them in a position to lead.

What Works: Recruit from the Inside

At Dojo, a UK-based payments scale-up, the rollout of Notion didn’t start with a top-down announcement. It started with the people already using it.

Small teams in Product and Marketing had quietly adopted Notion for project planning and day-to-day task tracking. Others were using it for personal productivity. Then came a turning point: when Dojo acquired WalkUp, they inherited an engineering team that had already built out a full technical documentation system in Notion. That became the tipping point.

Instead of fighting resistance, Dojo leaned into enthusiasm. They formally recruited 100 internal ambassadors - existing Notion power users spread across departments - and gave them real responsibility:

• Co-developing shared templates

• Running enablement sessions

• Leading documentation practices

As Katie Warwick, Head of People Experience, put it: “Involving, supporting, and training a network of ambassadors was absolutely critical to a successful migration.”

Video Play: Let Champions Speak for Themselves

Once you’ve identified your early adopters, give them the mic. Ask them to record short (30–45 sec) selfie-style clips explaining why they’re excited about the new tool. Keep it honest and informal—this isn’t a corporate ad; it’s peer validation.

Prompts you can use:

• “What made you switch to this tool before the rollout?”

• “What’s one thing this tool helped you do better?”

• “What do you wish someone told you on Day 1?”

Then hare those clips inside Slack channels, town halls, and onboarding sequences. One champion’s face and lived experience often travels further than a dozen “Getting Started” docs.

Pro tip: Avoid the ‘Executive Mandate’ trap.
Stay clear of the top-down announcement that basically says "Deal with it."
Instead, let champions share their genuine excitement. Authenticity beats authority every time.

Step 3: Form a Clear Vision (Make the Future Tangible)

The Psychology: Our brains need to see the destination before they'll take the journey. Abstract benefits like "improved efficiency" don't drive adoption. But a visual story of how someone’s actual day will change? That lands.

What Works: Show the Day, Not the Dream

At Equinox, Lindsey Puccio needed to build Equinox+, a hub for all digital fitness classes across their partner brands. And she was asked to do it using Airtable—a tool she didn’t know, and her team didn’t want to learn.

Instead of forcing tool adoption, she reframed the rollout as a workflow redesign. She created personalised Airtable views for each of the eight partner brands so that instructors, editors, and planners could focus only on what mattered to them. Instructors saw class movement fields and music; editors saw timestamps and publishing queues.

Each view became a “you are here” snapshot in a larger production pipeline. And this helped people immediately understand where they fit, what they owned, and how their work connected to others. Eventually, Lindsey codified this into an ideal content supply chain, where data had a single point of entry, but flowed everywhere it needed to—from class planning to publishing to reporting. Airtable wasn’t just a database anymore. It was the system.

Video Play: Visualise the “Future State” in 2 Minutes

Words like “efficiency” or “collaboration” don’t move people. Stories do. Especially visual ones.

Use a short walkthrough video to show:

• A typical team member’s task in the new system

• One or two “frustration to flow” moments (e.g. “This used to take 8 steps, now it’s 3”)

• Tangible outcomes: time saved, tasks automated, confusion eliminated

This doesn’t need to be a Hollywood production. A clear voiceover, screen recording, and a few metric overlays are enough to help people connect the dots.

Pro tip: Include the metrics that matter.
Don’t just promise better collaboration. Show "Reduce handoff time from 2 days to 2 hours" or "Cut project setup time by 45 minutes."

Step 4: Enlist Army of Volunteers (Peer Power > Authority Power)

The Psychology: We're more likely to try something when a peer recommends it than when a boss mandates it. Social proof trumps hierarchy.

What Works: Build a Volunteer Force from Within

At Gojek, one of Southeast Asia’s largest super-apps, the Asana rollout didn’t rely on strict process mandates. Instead, they formed a Champions Club—a network of internal advocates embedded across teams. Each month, Gojek’s Customer Success Manager meets with these champions to discuss new features, share use cases, and surface org-specific workflows.

The Champions Club helps everyone continue to see the value in Asana and bring new ideas back to their squads—creating a self-sustaining loop of discovery, enablement, and internal advocacy.

Video Play: Let Volunteers Be the First to Share Wins

Encourage your champions to record short, informal selfie videos. These can be shared in Slack, your rollout channel, or embedded in onboarding modules for new teams.

Sample prompts:

• “Hey design team! I just built our client feedback tracker in 10 minutes.”

• “Marketing folks, I finally have one place for all our campaign assets.”

These shouldn’t feel like polished corporate promos; they should feel like a teammate showing you something cool they figured out. That curiosity drives conversations. Conversations create pull. And pull > push, every time.

Pro-tip: Start where the energy is
Don’t try to convert your most skeptical team first. Start with the group that’s already looking for a better way. When they begin to share real wins, it creates a snowball effect across the org.

Step 5: Remove Barriers (Training That Actually Sticks)

The Psychology: People avoid tools they don't understand, and they abandon tools that make them feel incompetent. When you don’t know where to start—or worse, feel like you might break something—you avoid engaging with the tool altogether.

What Works: Micro-Learning, Not Mega-Manuals

Rollouts often fall apart because teams overestimate how much context users can retain up front. You might have shared a 40-slide walkthrough or a 60-minute demo, but three weeks later when someone actually needs to create a project or update a record, they can’t remember what to do.

This is where video shines: short, focused clips that walk users through one task at a time; available when and where they need it.

Potential Scenarios

• A product marketer needs to build their first dashboard in your new analytics tool. Instead of digging through a Notion wiki, they click a help icon and watch a 3-minute clip titled “Create Your First Dashboard.”

• A new sales rep is midway through a live call and forgets how to log a lead in the CRM. They search your internal video hub and find a 60-second walkthrough: “Logging a Lead in 2 Steps.”

• A designer hits a permissions error in the new design system. A contextual tooltip appears with a short screen-recording: “How to share files with edit access.”

Each of these clips tackles one task, solves one moment of friction, and builds one unit of confidence.

Video Play: Just-in-time Help

1. Task-Based Micro-Demos:

   Create a library of clips like:

   • "How to Create Your First Project in 3 Minutes"

   • "Moving Your Existing Files: The 2-Step Process"

   • "Setting Up Notifications (So You're Not Overwhelmed)"

     
     

2. Strategic interventions:

   • Embed short clips directly in the software using tools like Appcues

   • Create searchable video libraries organized by role and use case

   • Record common Q&A sessions from office hours

Pro Tip: Address the anxiety directly
Create videos that acknowledge common fears:

• "What if I mess up someone else's project?" (Show permission settings)

• "Will I lose my old work?" (Demonstrate import processes)

• "What if I can't find things?" (Tour the search functionality) </aside>

Step 6: Generate Short-Term Wins (Momentum Through Proof)

The Psychology: Small, visible victories build confidence and create momentum. People need evidence that the change is working before they'll fully commit. Short-term wins reduce anxiety, build credibility, and show that the new tool isn’t just live—it’s making life easier.

What Works: Celebrating the Right Wins, Fast

Early in a rollout, you’re not trying to prove the full ROI of the tool—you’re trying to prove it’s worth using this week. The best way to do that? Spotlight tangible wins from real teammates.

At Gong, the internal enablement team runs a recurring series called “How Gong Uses Gong”: quick, use-case snippets shared across the company to show how teams are getting value from the platform in their actual workflows.

You can adapt the same approach for any tool you roll out:

• A new project management tool? Show how the design team closed sprints faster.

• A new documentation platform? Highlight how onboarding a new customer took half the usual time.

• A new reporting system? Share how one manager automated a process that used to take hours.

Video Plays: Win Reels that Build Belief

Create 45-Second win reels:

• Quick screen recordings showing updated dashboards or cleaner workflows

• Side-by-side before/after visuals

• Team members recording metrics celebrations (“Week 3 Update: 40% faster sprint planning”; “One month in: Support tickets down 60%”)

Pro Tip: Stack the wins
Don’t wait for leadership to declare a milestone. Let champions, team leads, or even ICs surface the small wins you can package up and share.

Step 7: Sustain Acceleration (Keep the Energy High)

The Psychology: Momentum doesn’t last on its own. Initial excitement about a new tool can quickly fade unless consistently reinforced. To keep teams using and appreciating the tool long after launch, you need ongoing engagement—through inspiration, recognition, and discovery—not another training session.

What Works: Consistent Encouragement + Recognition

1. Weekly or Monthly “Power Tips”
Send brief clips highlighting clever workflows or underutilized features, such as:

• “Find anything in 10 seconds with advanced filtering”

• “Task shortcuts that save minutes every day”

• “Integrate your CRM with the new platform in under 60 seconds”

These quick nuggets help users discover new tool benefits over time—without overwhelming them.

2. Peer-Generated Mini Clips
Invite team members to record short (60‑90 sec) clips of their own workflows—like a marketer automating a campaign flow or an engineer sharing a dashboard hack.

3. Recognize and Celebrate Positive Change
Studies show that reward systems tied to usage and effort can sustain adoption rates by up to 38%. Consider creating internal flash challenges like:

• “Caption this workflow”

• “The week’s best workflow tip”

• “Tool Hero of the week”

These incentives not only keep people looking—but also contributing value back to the community.

Step 8: Institute Change (Making It Permanent)

The Psychology: True adoption happens when people stop thinking about the tool as “new” and start treating it as infrastructure. It becomes the default—not because it was mandated, but because it’s now embedded into how work happens.

What Works: Process Integration, Not Tool Training

The best rollouts don’t end with “here’s how the tool works.” They close the loop with “here’s how we now work.” That means folding the tool into recurring rituals, templates, onboarding checklists, and team processes—until it’s just how we do things here.

GitLab's public handbook is a classic example. It isn’t just company policy; it’s how they operationalise the GitLab platform internally. From engineering workflows to company values, every bit of info and process is documented and continuously updated - even handbook updates are logged!

The legendary GitLab handbook

That’s the real goal of any successful rollout: to embed the tool so deeply into your team’s rituals and systems that using it becomes second nature. Not a one-time training, not a quarterly push—just the way work gets done.

When you institutionalise a tool, you stop thinking about “adoption” altogether. It’s baked into onboarding checklists, project templates, review cycles, reporting cadences, and shared language. That’s when the tool stops being new and starts being normal.

Video Plays: Make It Evergreen

Evergreen Training Library

• Role-specific onboarding sequences for new hires

• Advanced workflow tutorials for growing teams

• Integration guides for connecting other tools

Process Documentation in Motion

• “How We Run Sprint Planning” (featuring the tool naturally)

• “Client Onboarding From Start to Finish” (end-to-end walkthroughs)

• “Quarterly Review Process” (highlighting embedded reports, dashboards, etc.)

Pro Tip: Apply the Goldilocks Principle
Too little documentation and people get stuck. Too much and they get overwhelmed. Aim for comprehensive coverage of core workflows, with short, searchable videos to handle edge cases or rare tasks.