Adoption is a proxy for how effectively your feature is surfaced and communicated to your active users.
If users don't see or understand your feature, they won't adopt it. You want to first focus on adoption, before even thinking to its retention or satisfaction.
How do you know if you have an adoption problem?
Once you have the adoption metric for a feature, you need to evaluate that metric: is this a bad adoption, good or great? What is my benchmark here?
Junes answers that question in terms of problem severity: how critical is the problem you're solving with that feature?
If the problem severity is low, we would expect these features to have lower adoption. But if the problem severity is high, we would then probably set the bar to have high adoption.
As a general rule of thumb, for high severity features you want to target around 80% for adoption.
If the adoption is below these parameters, you may have an adoption problem:
80% for high severity feature
50% for medium severity
30% for low severity
How to improve your feature adoption
Make feature visible as part of your critical product flow
Communicate the feature to the eligible audience
inside the product: chat, tours, banners, etc
outside the product: emails, post on socials, content, webinars, etc