PDF Summary:Product-Led Onboarding, by Ramli John

User onboarding is critical for driving business growth and customer retention, yet it's often overlooked. In Product-Led Onboarding, Ramli John breaks down the strategic process of guiding users to recognize a product's value and adopt it into their lives.

John provides a comprehensive framework for optimizing onboarding through cross-functional collaboration, understanding user needs, defining adoption metrics, and iterative improvements. He explores tactics like reducing time to experience benefits, increasing motivation, and prompting desired behavior—key ingredients for fostering product adoption.

(continued)...

• Use a kitchen timer to create urgency for daily tasks. Set it for a specific duration to tackle chores, emails, or any routine task. This physical countdown can be a constant reminder of your time limit, helping you stay focused and work more efficiently.
• Map out your typical user interactions to spot potential pain points. By creating a visual flowchart of the steps a user takes from discovering your service to becoming a regular user, you can identify where users might encounter problems. For example, if you run an online store, track the steps from landing on the homepage to completing a purchase. Look for stages with high drop-off rates, which could indicate a pain point needing early intervention.

Enhancing and Engaging Users Throughout Onboarding

John emphasizes that onboarding users requires a strategic approach. Simply adding product tours, sending random emails, or hoping for the best won't work. Effective onboarding involves collaboration across teams, a comprehensive understanding of user requirements, a clear definition of goals, and continual optimization.

Cross-Functional Team Key to Effective User Onboarding

John strongly advocates for establishing a multidisciplinary group to handle onboarding. This team should ideally consist of members from product, customer relations, promotion, and sales. Each team brings a unique perspective and expertise to onboarding.

Cross-Departmental Collaboration During Onboarding

John argues that improving how users are onboarded shouldn't be relegated to a single department, typically product. This typically causes a fragmented user experience. Rather, it should involve multiple teams collaborating. Each team fulfills a vital role:

• Product: Responsible for the in-app user experience, including the registration and initial-use process, as well as creating triggers inside the product.

• Marketing: Responsible for communicating the product’s benefits, creating helpful content, and managing onboarding messaging, like emails, notifications, and retargeting ads.

• Customer Success: Responsible for providing support, gathering feedback, and ensuring user satisfaction throughout onboarding.

• Sales: Responsible for providing personalized support, defining expectations for premium accounts, and facilitating upgrades with customized product demos.

Practical Tips

• Create a personal blog to practice content creation skills. Choose a topic you're passionate about and write regular posts that educate and engage readers. This will help you develop the ability to create compelling content, a skill you can transfer to marketing any product.
• Volunteer for a local non-profit or community organization in a role that involves client interaction, and use the opportunity to practice active listening and problem-solving. This hands-on experience will give you insights into user satisfaction and the importance of addressing individual needs, which are crucial skills for any customer success team.
• Practice creating customized demos by using a sandbox environment that mirrors your client's setup. This hands-on approach allows you to become familiar with the client's actual work scenario, making your demos more relevant and effective. For example, if your client uses a specific CRM system, integrate it into your demo to show how your product can seamlessly work within their existing workflow.

Clear Ownership of User Onboarding Drives Improvement

John underscores how vital it is to have a dedicated owner for onboarding. He advises that it should be a high-level executive who can champion onboarding initiatives and pull in resources from cross-functional teams.

Practical Tips

• Volunteer to be a part of a cross-departmental onboarding task force in your organization. This group would be responsible for reviewing and enhancing the onboarding process, including the recommendation to involve high-level executives. By being proactive, you can help shape the conversation and influence the structure of onboarding.
• Create a welcome package that includes personalized items related to your new role or company culture. For instance, if you're joining a company that values sustainability, the package could include a reusable water bottle with the company logo. This gesture shows that you're proactive about integrating into the company's values and culture from day one.
• Organize monthly "cross-pollination" meetings where employees from different functions are randomly paired to discuss their current projects and identify areas of synergy. This can lead to unexpected collaborations, such as a finance expert helping to streamline the budgeting process for a research project, thereby pulling in resources and expertise from across the organization.

Optimize Onboarding: Reduce Time Until Benefits Are Realized, Boost Motivation, Provide Prompts

To optimize user onboarding, John uses the Bowling Alley Framework by Wes Bush and Dr. BJ Fogg's Behavior Model as guiding principles. He stresses the importance of shortening the period before users experience a product's value by building a "Straight-Line Onboarding" with the absolute minimum number of steps. John also emphasizes that onboarding is ultimately a behavioral shift; people must abandon their current way of doing things and adopt new habits with the product, which requires them to be motivated and have the ability to do so with timely prompts.

BJ Fogg's Behavioral Model: Easier Onboarding, Increased Motivation, Timely Prompts

John incorporates the BJ Fogg Behavioral Model into the onboarding process for users. He argues that to successfully change how users behave, you should simplify the required action as much as you can, boost their motivation, and prompt them at the right time.

He explains that within the Bowling Alley Framework, Product Bumpers (in-app triggers) and Conversational Bumpers (external triggers) can be used to enhance the onboarding experience for users by making it easier, increasing motivation, and prompting behavior.

• Making it easy: Minimize cognitive load by using visual cues to guide users, create helpful empty states that show the next steps, and provide templates or shortcuts to speed up the onboarding.

• Increasing motivation: Speak to users' desires by emphasizing product benefits, show their progress with progress bars, welcome them with personal messages, celebrate their wins, and build credibility through social validation.

• Prompting the right behavior at the right time: Use omnichannel, personalized prompts to lead users through the Straight-Line Onboarding. He suggests designing onboarding emails tailored to important benchmarks and user behaviors.

Practical Tips

• Experiment with different prompts in your environment to trigger desired behaviors. Place visual or physical cues in strategic locations where you're likely to see them when you need to perform a specific action. For example, if you want to drink more water, keep a filled water bottle at your desk, by your bed, and in your car. The presence of the water bottle serves as a prompt to take a sip, gradually increasing your water intake without much effort.
• Use the "one-click" principle in everyday decisions by setting up default options for recurring choices, like having a "standard grocery list" that you can order with a single click from an online store. This reduces the time and effort needed to make the same decisions repeatedly, streamlining your daily routines.
• Develop a habit of sending one motivational message to a friend or colleague every day. This could be an inspiring quote, a short anecdote of success, or a note of encouragement. By doing this, you not only uplift others but also reinforce your own belief in the power of motivation, creating a positive feedback loop.
• Pair a new habit with a well-established one to create a compound routine. If you're trying to practice mindfulness, do a one-minute breathing exercise right after brushing your teeth in the morning. The established habit acts as a natural prompt for the new one, making it easier to remember and stick to.
• Create a personalized welcome message for new members of your online community using their interests to guide the conversation. By gathering information about new members' interests during the sign-up process, you can craft a welcome message that not only greets them but also suggests topics of discussion or groups within the community that align with their interests. For example, if a new member is interested in photography, the welcome message could include a mention of an upcoming photo challenge or introduce them to the photography enthusiasts' group.
• Organize your email with automated rules that sort incoming messages into pre-set categories using visual indicators, such as stars or flags. This way, you can prioritize your inbox at a glance. For example, you might set a rule that all emails from your boss are flagged red, while newsletters are marked with a star and sent to a 'Read Later' folder.
• Volunteer to help a local small business or a friend with a side project by brainstorming a benefits-focused marketing message for one of their products. Take a product that they offer and come up with a list of tangible benefits it provides to customers, then help them craft a simple advertisement or social media post highlighting these benefits. This exercise will give you practical experience in applying a benefits-oriented approach to real-world scenarios.
• Use a whiteboard to map out progress for skill development, such as learning a new language or instrument. Divide the board into sections for different levels of proficiency and mark your current level with a magnet. Move the magnet up as you improve, giving you a clear visual cue of advancement and keeping you motivated to reach the next level.
• Use social media to send occasional, direct shout-outs to individuals in your network. By tagging them in a post that either celebrates their achievements or offers a personalized greeting, you create a public display of personal attention. For instance, congratulate a colleague on their work anniversary with a post that not only acknowledges the milestone but also highlights a fond memory or shared success.
• Start a "Success Journal" where you write down daily or weekly personal wins. This could be as simple as cooking a healthy meal, helping a friend, or completing a work task efficiently. The act of writing reinforces the positive behavior and serves as a reminder of your capabilities when you're feeling down.
• Volunteer to be a guest speaker or contributor on topics you're knowledgeable about. Reach out to local community centers, schools, or online forums and offer to share your expertise. This positions you as a credible authority in your field and the endorsements from these organizations act as social validation, which you can then highlight on your resume or LinkedIn profile.
• Streamline your information consumption by customizing news and content feeds. Use news aggregation apps that allow you to select topics, sources, and even authors you prefer. Over time, the app's algorithms will learn your preferences and provide a more personalized content stream, saving you time and enhancing your reading experience.
• You can streamline your onboarding process by creating a one-page checklist that outlines the exact steps new users should take. This checklist should be visually clear and easy to follow, ensuring that users know what to do next without feeling overwhelmed. For example, if you're onboarding someone to a new software, the checklist might include steps like "Create an account," "Watch the introductory tutorial," and "Set up your first project."
• Use a free email automation tool to send yourself encouragement or prompts when you tend to procrastinate. If you find you're less productive on Wednesday afternoons, schedule an email for that time with a motivational quote or a quick task to kickstart your productivity.

Bumpers Guide Users Towards Their Desired Outcome

John recommends using Product Bumpers, like introductory notes, tours of the product, bars to track progress, checklists, tooltips, and empty states, to guide users in-app towards the desired outcome, a.k.a. the First Strike. Similarly, Conversational Bumpers like onboarding emails, text messages, and notifications from browsers can be used to engage users outside the app.

Practical Tips

• You can create a personal engagement system using calendar reminders to reach out to friends and family. Set up recurring events in your digital calendar to send messages or emails to people you want to stay in touch with. For example, schedule a monthly reminder to send a personalized email to a friend, or a weekly prompt to text a family member. This mimics the idea of conversational bumpers by ensuring you regularly engage with your social circle.

Onboarding Tactics, Techniques, and Ongoing Optimization

The last section shifts the focus from self-serve onboarding to onboarding that's sales-assisted or a combination of approaches and emphasizes the ongoing nature of the onboarding optimization process.

Sales-Assisted Onboarding Enhances a Product-Led Approach

John explores how a team of salespeople can enhance a product-focused onboarding strategy, particularly with hybrid onboarding models. He argues that while product-led growth (PLG) emphasizes self-serve product experiences, a well-trained sales team can enhance the onboarding process by providing personalized support, guiding users through complex workflows, and helping them unlock more value from the product.

Sales Teams Guide Users Through Buying, Showcase Value, and Encourage Use

John highlights three primary advantages of adding salespeople to self-service onboarding:

• Direct users to find value: Even with the best onboarding design, some customers might struggle to discover the core value of the product. Salespeople can act as coaches, providing guidance, resolving issues, and helping these individuals achieve their goals.

• Help grow the product's reach: For products used within larger organizations, sales teams can boost product usage by onboarding new teams or departments and selling additional seats.

• Assist users during purchase: For medium and large enterprises, buying can be complex and involve multiple stakeholders. Salespeople can assist users in navigating different purchasing stages and addressing their concerns.

Other Perspectives

• In some cases, automated systems and well-designed user interfaces may be more efficient and scalable for guiding users to find value in a product than human sales teams.
• The cost of expanding sales teams to grow product reach might not always justify the return on investment, especially if the product could spread organically through word-of-mouth or internal referrals.
• Some customers may prefer a more hands-off approach and might find the presence of sales teams intrusive or unnecessary, especially if they are confident in their ability to navigate the purchasing process.

Salespeople Transition From Pursuing Prospects to Coaching Through Product-Led Strategies

John emphasizes that in a product-led model, a salesperson's responsibilities are quite different. Instead of aggressively chasing leads, they focus on coaching people who are already interested and have interacted with the product. This involves a shift in mindset and approach:

• From chasing to coaching: Salespeople become experts in the product and its use cases, helping users overcome challenges and achieve their goals with it.

• Tailoring the message to different audiences: They must be able to articulate how the product is valuable to both end-users and decision-makers, highlighting benefits relevant to each stakeholder.

• Leveraging product engagement data: Unlike traditional sales models that rely on marketing qualified leads (MQLs) based on marketing activities or firmographics, PLG sales teams use leads that are qualified based on product engagement.

Practical Tips

• Develop a personal CRM system to track interactions with potential customers, focusing on their needs and progress rather than sales targets. Use a simple spreadsheet or free CRM software to log conversations, interests, and feedback from individuals you engage with. This approach allows you to tailor your coaching and advice to each person's specific situation, fostering a relationship that's more consultative than sales-driven.
• Develop a series of instructional videos tailored to common user challenges and share them with customers who have recently interacted with your product. This proactive approach can preemptively address questions and improve user experience. For instance, if you're selling a complex software package, create videos that tackle frequent stumbling blocks in the setup process or feature utilization.
• Start a peer learning group with fellow salespeople where each member specializes in different aspects of the product. Meet regularly to exchange insights and learn from each other's expertise. For example, if you're selling software, one person could focus on security features, another on usability, and another on integration capabilities. This collaborative approach expands your product knowledge beyond your individual experience.
• Create a personal "challenge-resolution" journal to track how you use products to overcome daily obstacles. Start by listing challenges you face and then note how specific features of products you own can be used to address these challenges. For example, if you struggle with time management, you might find that a feature in your smartphone's calendar app can help you set reminders for tasks.
• Practice adaptive storytelling by sharing a recent personal success or challenge with three different friends, focusing on different aspects of the story each time. For example, when talking to a friend who values creativity, emphasize the innovative approaches you took. With a friend who prioritizes efficiency, discuss the time-saving strategies you employed. Reflect on their responses to gauge how well you tailored the message and what you could improve.
• Role-play sales scenarios with a colleague or friend, alternating between the roles of end-user and decision-maker. This exercise will help you practice articulating the product's value from both perspectives. For instance, when acting as the end-user, focus on the product's usability and satisfaction; when playing the decision-maker, concentrate on the financial and operational benefits. This role-playing will sharpen your ability to empathize with and address the distinct needs of each party during actual sales interactions.
• Create a scoring system for user actions within your product to prioritize leads based on engagement. Assign points to different actions that users can take, with more points given to actions that indicate higher engagement or interest. For instance, completing an onboarding process might score higher than just signing up. Tally the points for each user over a set period to identify those who are most engaged and therefore more likely to be interested in further discussions or sales opportunities.

Continually Optimize the Onboarding Process

John stresses that onboarding users is not a one-time project. He advocates for continuous optimization and adaptation using user data and feedback. As the product evolves and user needs change, onboarding must also evolve.

Using "Triple A": Analyze, Ask, Act to Improve Onboarding

John recommends an iterative process to enhance onboarding with the "AAA" sprint:

• Analyze: Determine the main factors driving the desired onboarding outcomes.

• Ask: Define the target outcome, identify the levers that can be manipulated to attain this outcome, and choose which input to focus on.

• Act: Implement the chosen input, evaluate the outcomes, and reiterate the cycle.

This iterative process allows for rapid experimentation and testing of different onboarding strategies based on data and user feedback, similar to the process used by kindergarteners when constructing the tallest pasta tower. John recommends using an Action-Priority Matrix to prioritize which tests to conduct based on impact and effort.

Practical Tips

• Use a decision journal to track the effectiveness of your actions. Start by writing down the decision you made, the reasons behind it, and what you expect to happen. After a set period, review the outcomes against your expectations. This practice will help you see patterns in your decision-making and improve over time.
• Create a visual impact-effort board using sticky notes and a large poster. Write down tasks on sticky notes and place them on a poster divided into four quadrants labeled "High Impact/Low Effort," "High Impact/High Effort," "Low Impact/Low Effort," and "Low Impact/High Effort." This tactile approach allows you to physically move tasks around as priorities shift, and the visual layout makes it easier to see where your efforts should be focused.

Sharing Learnings and Celebrating Onboarding Successes Maintain Focus and Stakeholder Support

John encourages sharing onboarding insights and wins with everyone in the company. This promotes transparency, builds team empathy, and encourages stakeholder buy-in. He suggests using email updates, dedicated Slack channels, presentations, or regular meetings to ensure the organization stays informed about the progress and effect of onboarding initiatives.

He further highlights that onboarding activities should continue past the initial phase. When new users become active customers, they can be further onboarded to adopt new product capabilities (going deeper) or explore solutions for other problems that your product solves (going wider).

Practical Tips

• Start a peer-shadowing program where existing employees can sign up to shadow a new hire for a day. This not only helps the new employee feel supported but also allows the existing team members to gain fresh perspectives on their roles and the company culture.
• Develop a personal "onboarding roadmap" for learning new skills or hobbies that extends over several months. Instead of just focusing on the basics, plan out advanced learning stages and set milestones. For example, if you're learning a new language, your roadmap might include initial vocabulary and grammar, followed by conversational practice, and eventually immersion experiences like joining a language club or traveling.
• Develop a "Customer Journey Map" that outlines potential touchpoints for introducing new capabilities or products. Use this map to identify when a customer might be ready for more advanced features or complementary products. For instance, after a customer has used your basic service for a month, the map might suggest sending them information about a premium version with additional benefits.