Why Open Source Projects Need Product Thinking to Achieve Adoption

Open-source tools often fail to gain adoption not because the code is weak, but because the user experience around them is underdeveloped. In a blog post, Jesus Manuel Olivas argues that product thinking, including documentation, developer experience, feedback loops, and promotion, plays a central role in whether developer tools are actually used.

Drawing on the experience of building Drupal Console with co-founder Omar Aguirre, Olivas says the project’s adoption did not come from adding more features alone. He points instead to work on understanding users, improving onboarding, investing in multilingual documentation, and making the tool easier to integrate into real developer workflows.

The article presents this as a broader lesson for open-source maintainers: strong code does not guarantee adoption if users cannot quickly understand, trust, and apply a tool in practice. Olivas argues that open-source projects benefit from the same product principles used in commercial software, particularly when the goal is long-term use rather than simple release.