There's a version of the adoption problem that gets talked about a lot: the user who's confused, stuck, frustrated. They hit a wall. They file a ticket. They churn loudly.
That user is recoverable. You can see them coming.
The user I'm more worried about is the one who isn't confused at all. They know exactly how to use your product — or at least, they think they do. They've found a workflow that works. They come back every day. They'd give you a 9 on NPS.
They're also using 15% of what you built for them.
Why "Just Tell Them" Doesn't Work
The obvious response is communication. Send a changelog email. Launch an in-app announcement. Run a webinar about the new feature.
These work at the margins. They don't solve the structural issue.
Users don't ignore feature announcements because they're lazy. They ignore them because they've already decided how they use the product. Their mental model is set. A changelog email about a new workflow automation feature lands in the inbox of someone who's never thought about automating that workflow — so it doesn't register as relevant.
To want something, you have to be able to imagine having it. Users can't imagine using a feature they've never encountered, for an outcome they've never experienced.
The Intent Layer
Every user session has a job. The user opened your product to accomplish something — export a report, update a record, track a metric. Most analytics platforms tell you what they clicked. Very few can tell you what they were trying to do.
That distinction matters enormously for adoption.
If I know a user just spent 12 minutes manually pulling together data across three screens to build a report they do every week, I know something their click data doesn't tell me: they don't know about your saved reports feature. Their clicks say "active user." Their intent says "this person is working harder than they need to be, and they don't know it."
That's the gap. And nobody is bridging it.
What Proactive Actually Means
"Proactive CS" mostly means "reach out before the red account goes red." That's still reactive — it's just earlier in the decay curve.
True proactivity is about intent. It means intercepting a user at the moment they're doing something the hard way, and saying: here's the better path. Not because a CSM noticed a low health score. Because the system understood what the user was trying to do and recognized the gap.
The Users You're Losing Quietly
The intent gap is the most common mechanism of silent churn. These users aren't frustrated. They're operating at a ceiling they don't know exists. And when renewal comes, they're evaluating the smaller version of your product — because that's the only version they've ever experienced.
The users who stay, expand, and advocate are the ones who kept discovering. Not because they were more curious, but because something kept connecting their jobs to the product's capabilities.
The question for every product and CS leader: how do you make that happen systematically, for every user, at every account, every week?
That's what we're building at Deway.
Alon Binman is the co-founder of Deway (deway.ai), an AI-native autonomous adoption layer for SaaS products. Before Deway, Alon spent 15+ years at the intersection of product and customer success, including roles as a Product Manager, founder, data and product strategy consultant, and Senior Solution Architect at Mixpanel. You can reach Alon on LinkedIn.