Ask people to brag

Most rollout plans have a line that says “appoint champions”. Ours didn’t need one. We asked people to brag, and the champions turned up on their own.

What happened

We set up a Slack workflow called “share a successful use”. Anyone could use it to post something Claude had helped them do. Nothing more formal than that.

The number: over 30

Over 30 successful uses were logged in the first months. They ranged from a monthly newsletter to diagnosing a client’s error emails end to end. Each one was posted by the person who did the work.

What went right

The log did something no plan could have done. It showed us who was actually using Claude, and for what, without us asking anyone.

Three of the entries stood out, because each came from someone nobody had asked to lead anything:

• Someone sick of six clicks to log their time built a timelog skill.
• Someone built a prioritisation matrix for a client meeting.
• Someone wrote a personal skill, then wrote a wiki article on how to install one, so everyone else could do the same.

That third one is what a champion looks like. Not a title. Someone who solved their own problem and then made it easy for the next person.

None of those people were appointed. If we had picked champions at the start, I doubt we would have picked these three.

What went wrong

We also set aside thirty minutes every Wednesday to share what worked. Leadership wanted an hour. The business wanted none. Thirty minutes sat between the two, which meant it fully suited nobody.

What the time is for matters more than its length. Without it, the wins stay in the log and never reach the people who could copy them.

What we would do now

Start the log on day one, before anything else is working well. The first entries are the most valuable, because they tell you which uses are spreading on their own and which ones you would have to push.

Read it every week. The log is not a morale exercise. It is the best data you have on adoption that isn’t a licence report.

And when someone’s entry shows they have solved a problem other people share, ask them to show it in the weekly slot.

If the log is quiet, the tool may be in the wrong place. Ours was for a while. Take the tool to where people already work.

One thing to try this week

Make a place, in the channel your team already uses, where anyone can post one thing Claude helped them do. One line is enough. Post the first one yourself. In a month, read it back and look for the names that keep appearing.

Those are your champions. You didn’t have to appoint them.