Implementing a new digital product is only half the way to success. The key is ensuring it is effectively utilized and delivers maximum value.

​In 2025, IT spending in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is projected to reach $230.7 billion, marking a 7.4% increase from 2024. However, despite these significant investments, many digital solutions fail to deliver the expected results. Challenges such as underutilized technology and poor productivity practices have led enterprises to lose over $104 million in 2024 alone.

This leads to an ongoing issue of underutilized resources — assets that companies could have leveraged more efficiently. Without a focused approach, the gap between technological capabilities and an organization’s ability to extract value from them will continue to widen.

Therefore, digital product adoption is a crucial metric that must be monitored from the earliest stages of project implementation. Let’s see what it consists of.

Laying the foundation for success

To improve digital product adoption, companies must address three key stages of its deployment:

• During the initiation and design phase;
• At the product launch;
• Throughout the operational phase.

Step 1: Ensuring feasibility before development

It might seem surprising, but many companies make a critical mistake before starting the project: they fail to assess whether the technology will actually have practical applicability or be feasible to implement.

Meanwhile, businesses should ask themselves questions such as:

• What problems will the digital product solve? How will business processes change as a result?
• What are the business metrics for success? How will the product impact financial or operational performance?

Let’s take a case as an example to illustrate what we mean. A manufacturing company wanted to implement software that precisely regulates furnace temperatures down to a single degree. The data science team successfully developed a model, and the company was ready to proceed. However, they later discovered that their existing equipment could only adjust temperature with a ±10‑degree margin of error. Thus, the entire initiative became pointless, as the expected business impact was lost. Time, budget, and effort were wasted, and the project became unprofitable.

Step 2: Supporting employees during launch

Once the technology is proven and ready for deployment, companies must ensure employees can use it effectively.

Here, we suggest paying attention to three key actions:

Personalized training for each employee
Individual hands-on training sessions are essential, especially if the system interface is not user‑friendly. Managers should ensure that every team member is familiar with the technology, even those on vacation or working alternate shifts.

From our experience, we know how detrimental neglecting this stage can be. We are aware of cases where some employees did not even realize a new system existed until six months after its launch, continuing to work manually instead.

Clear and concise user guides
Traditional user manuals often contain hundreds of pages of screenshots and text. No wonder most employees won’t read them in detail. Instead, provide short, visually engaging guides that highlight the most important functions.

Dedicated support system
Ensure there is a team of technical specialists available to answer user questions. A lack of support can lead to inefficiencies and underutilization of the solution.

Step 3: Ensuring long‑term efficiency

Even after deployment, digital product adoption must be actively monitored. The most important actions are as follows:

Automated monitoring of digital system performance
Ongoing health checks are crucial. Minor technical issues (such as cache buildup) can degrade system performance despite being easy to solve. Without proactive monitoring, users may assume inefficiencies are «normal.»

Quarterly feedback sessions from users
Gather direct input from employees to assess the most useful functions and identify pain points. For example, a feature designed to work in one click may actually require six clicks, leading to inefficiencies.

Measuring digital product success

To ensure long‑term effectiveness, organizations should track key business metrics automatically — without manual reporting.

We highlight the following five main categories of metrics:

1. Economic impact

This includes, for example, reducing operating costs and optimizing resource usage. Suppose a processing company aims to cut expenses by minimizing liquid iron residues by implementing a new digital solution. By relying on the system’s data, it can assess how effectively this metric is achieved.

2. Manufacturing process metrics

These metrics evaluate the impact of a digital product on a company’s production technology. Continuing with the processing company example, they can be used to assess cost reductions for specific materials or improvements in alloy quality by adjusting the proportion of certain chemical elements in the composition.

3. Operational metrics

These metrics assess the impact of the service on the company’s process performance.

4. User metrics

They help determine user activity: how often the program is opened, in what situations it is used, at what time, and whether the program remains open without actual interaction (e.g., no mouse movement). There are various technical methods to measure user activity within software applications.

5. Usage metrics

These are criteria that assess the completeness of the service’s process coverage. This metric can be considered an NPS‑like (Net Promoter Score) indicator of user loyalty. It reflects how effectively the new digital service has automated workflows and simplified processes for users.

Why does this matter?
Tracking these metrics helps identify and resolve problems before they escalate. Rather than accumulating inefficiencies, businesses can proactively refine and optimize their digital systems, ensuring they truly become an integral part of operations.