A team of eight managers across four countries. A coaching program that ran for four months. And a shared workspace that nobody opened after week two.
The original setup
I chose a project management platform because it had everything: task tracking, notes, file sharing. The problem was that none of the participants used it in their daily work. It became one more tab to close.
How to avoid the same outcome
- Before selecting any tool, ask what the participants already open every morning. Work inside that environment.
- Run a one-week pilot with a single feature before committing to a full platform.
- Assign one person per group as the tool contact — not to manage content, but to flag when something stops working.
- Reduce the number of tools to two maximum: one for sessions, one for async follow-up.
- Review tool usage data at week three. If fewer than half the participants are active, replace the tool, not the content.
By month three I had migrated everything to a shared folder inside the tool the managers already used for team updates. Engagement went up within days.
The content was never the issue. The friction around accessing it was.Experienced coaches often over-engineer the environment. Simpler setups with familiar tools consistently outperform feature-rich platforms that require onboarding.