In an age where adoption is more important than ever—as new AI companies are started every day and AI has meant that delivery is no longer the bottleneck—adoption of features has become the critical differentiator.

Fixing this isn't about working harder, throwing more people at the problem, or blaming anyone. It's about fundamentally rethinking how these teams are incentivized, how they collaborate, and what they're measured on.

1. Prioritize Product Users, Not Just Key Buyer Personas

Set up direct feedback loops with end users—the people actually using your product day-to-day. Remember that CSMs, by necessity, represent buyers. That's valuable, but buyers aren't always the ones experiencing the friction or discovering unexpected value.

Direct user feedback gives PMs the insights they need without putting CSMs in an impossible middleman position.

2. Make Feature Adoption a Joint Responsibility

Adoption can't be Product's problem or CSM's problem. It has to be a shared metric with clear ownership and processes.

PMs need to prioritize existing feature adoption before investing in new features. Ask: are people not using this because it's hard to use, or because they don't know it exists? That answer should drive very different roadmap decisions.

CSMs need visibility into feature usage data and the tools to drive adoption at scale—not just for their top accounts, but across their entire book of business.

3. Build Continuous Discovery Loops

Open up feedback channels directly to end users. Make customer discovery a regular part of the PM's workflow, not an occasional event that depends on CSM gatekeeping.

This doesn't mean cutting CSMs out—it means giving PMs the context they need to make better decisions while freeing CSMs from being the sole conduit for customer insights.

4. Review Your Incentive Structures

If CSMs are incentivized purely on renewals and expansion while PMs are incentivized on shipping roadmap items, you've built conflict into the system.

Consider shared metrics around feature adoption, time-to-value, or customer health scores that both teams can rally around.

The Path Forward

Solving the adoption gap requires acknowledging that the way most organizations structure CSM-PM collaboration is broken by design. But there's a fundamental reality we need to accept: you can't solve a scale problem with a human-only solution.

The breakthrough is that AI can now handle the repetitive, time-consuming work that keeps CSMs trapped in reactive mode. Instead of your best CSMs answering the same "how do I..." questions across 50 accounts, AI agents can deliver personalized, contextual guidance to every user—not just the buyer—at the moment they need it. This isn't about replacing CSMs. It's about liberating them to do what they do best: building strategic relationships, identifying expansion opportunities, proving ROI, and driving executive alignment.

At the same time, this approach gives PMs direct, unbiased visibility into how users actually interact with features across all accounts, not just the squeakiest wheels. Product teams can finally validate assumptions, measure true adoption patterns, and make data-driven decisions without depending on filtered, secondhand feedback.

The result is a new operating model where adoption doesn't fall through the cracks because no single team owns it. AI handles the scalable, repetitive enablement work. CSMs focus on strategic, high-value activities that drive expansion. PMs get the continuous discovery loop they need to build the right things. And most importantly, every user gets the guidance they need to realize value, not just the ones at accounts large enough to warrant CSM attention.

The companies that embrace this model won't just improve adoption. They'll unlock a compounding advantage: better feature adoption drives more renewals, cleaner product feedback, faster time-to-value, and ultimately, a more capital-efficient growth engine.

The question isn't whether AI will reshape how teams collaborate on adoption. The question is whether your organization will lead the shift or scramble to catch up.

‍