Rollouts don't fail at launch. They fail in week three.
You've run one of these before. Everyone took the assessment, the workshop went well, and by March nobody could find the handouts. Here's the rollout that doesn't do that, and the honest state of the paperwork.
- Pilot on the free tier
- Signed DPA before you pay
- Consent is architectural, not policy
Why the last rollout faded by March.
Four failure modes, and all of them are structural rather than about enthusiasm. Any programme that doesn't design against them will repeat them.
The output lived somewhere nobody goes
A portal, a PDF, a shared drive. Adoption was a function of remembering to visit, and remembering is not a strategy.
Insight and need were weeks apart
The workshop was in January. The difficult conversation was in March. By then the insight was a vague memory of a colour.
It got used for something it wasn't for
One manager quoted a type in a performance review, word got round, and the programme was over. Not slowly — that week.
The fastest way to kill this is one manager quoting it in a review.
Which is why the refusals are in the server schema rather than in a prompt or a policy document. There's no setting to loosen, no enterprise tier that unlocks them, and no support escalation that turns them on.
There is no API call that ranks a team, scores potential, supports a promotion case, or assembles a profile of someone who hasn't consented. The cleanest way to guarantee a tool is never misused is not to build it.
Evidence
- Absent from the schema
Source
Not gated
Consented profile
Refusal behaviour is checked on every release, because an assistant's instinct is to be helpful and improvise. When someone asks anyway, it explains why it won't and offers the version of the question it can help with.
Evidence
- Part of the release suite
Source
Tested, not promised
Consented profile
Three stages, about ninety days, with a real stopping point at each one.
Each stage has a decision at the end of it, and “we stop here” is a legitimate answer to all three.
One pilot team, on the free tier
Five people, no procurement, no budget line. The question is whether managers use it unprompted in week two, once the novelty has gone.
Stop if: nobody asked it anything after the first week.
A manager cohort across functions
Fifteen to twenty managers from different parts of the business, so you find out whether it travels or whether the pilot team was unusual.
Stop if: it only works for one function's kind of work.
Org-wide, still by invitation
Open to everyone, mandated for nobody. Opt-in rate is a signal worth reading rather than a number to push — a low one is telling you something.
Stop if: you find yourself needing to chase people.
The DPA, the sub-processors and the honest compliance table are on where the paperwork stands.
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Where our compliance paperwork stands today.
We'd rather write “not yet” than let a badge imply otherwise. The full detail is on the security and privacy page.
How we keep it trustworthy- GDPR and UK GDPR: in place. Signed DPA with standard contractual clauses before you pay anything
- SOC 2: we are working towards SOC 2 and do not hold a report yet
- ISO 27001: not started, and not on this year's plan
- Penetration testing: first external test booked for Q4 2026
- Self-hosted deployment and customer-managed keys: scoped, neither has shipped
What people ask before they try it.
Four measures, and the first is the honest one: unprompted queries per manager per week, after the novelty has gone. Then a two-question pulse before and after, one-to-one specificity sampled by the managers themselves, and time-to-productive for new joiners.
The metric to distrust is opt-in rate. It's easy to move by pushing and it tells you nothing about whether anyone found it useful.
Also worth reading
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