Onboarding in a product led growth environment gets a lot of focus. For good reason—if the customer can’t get onboarded, it doesn’t matter how awesome the rest of the product is. If the door doesn’t open, it doesn’t matter how special the marble floors are in the apartment several floors up. No one sees it. The time to value is years—or until you can get a locksmith to open the doors.
And that’s the point of product-led growth in the freemium model or the try-before-you-buy (trial) model. To get the customer to experience value and reduce the leaks from the funnel. The best way to reduce those leaks in both models is reducing the friction in product led growth onboarding.
And the best way to reduce friction in onboarding is a clear content strategy that supports and educates the customer at the point of need. This is called reducing the ability debt.
Ability debt is the price you pay every time your user fails to accomplish a key outcome in your product.
Bush, Wes. Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself (Product-Led Growth Series Book 1) (pp. 113-114). Product-Led Institute. Kindle Edition.
Reducing ability debt in product led growth onboarding
You have multiple options for reducing ability debt, and most companies need to use most of the options together. All of them come down to reducing friction in using the product. I like to focus on these 2 particularly as a starting place.
- What is the first thing a customer must do in your product? Do they need to create an account?
- How do we want to guide our customers through the first 3 goals to get the value moments?
The answers to these questions drive how you design your product led growth onboarding experience.
Content and the ability debt in product led growth onboarding
Everyone wants to develop the product that’s so intuitive that no one needs instructions or clarifications. We’re all trying to build this mythical unicorn, and none of us will ever do it. But, because we’re humans, we still try. I love that optimism.
Given that your product isn’t a mythical unicorn, your product needs content. It needs targeted technical content to help and support customers to get to those identified value moments.
When it comes to onboarding, most businesses walk you through the entire product but bring you no closer to achieving a meaningful outcome in the product.
Bush, Wes. Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself (Product-Led Growth Series Book 1) (p. 117). Product-Led Institute. Kindle Edition.
How do I solve the content problems in product led growth onboarding using those 2 questions?
The first thing a customer must do in your product
What’s the first thing they need to do? Is it sign up? Is it log in?
Let’s assume the customer must sign up for the product. We have some content decisions to make:
What we want
- What content does the customers need on the screen to do this task?
- If we want their email, what are we going to do with that? Are we emailing them? When? Let’s set that expectation.
- If we ask for their phone number, what are we doing with that? Because most people don’t want to talk to a sales person before they can start the freemium or trial version. They want to see if the product meets their general needs.
- Tell them up front what we’re doing with the phone number. Even better is don’t make the phone number required, so the customer can decide what’s right for them.
What we do
- Does the sign-up page take them to a set up an account screen? Or are they providing their email so we send them a Create an account link? Or something else entirely? Let’s set that expectation now.
- If this is a free trial, does this screen start that countdown? Or does that start another way? Again, tell them up front so they know and aren’t surprised.
- Do we want to send them emails about the product (or other products), based on this screen? Let them decide what they want from us and when. We can certainly give them a checkbox or two to make these decisions up front.
There’s a lot here to decide. Often, it’s marketing and sales who make these decisions. Which isn’t awful, but I really think you need your UX content people involved here, too. Why? Because we specialize in designing useable and clear content, which is precisely what this must be.
Reduce the ability debt for the first 3 value moments
We need to support the 3 tasks that get the customer to the Ah-ha moment–the moment of value. It doesn’t have to be the total value of the product, and that’s far too big a goal. So, what 3 things can the customer do that show them a great outcome towards that total value?
Choosing these 3 goals typically lies in the hands of the product manager, with input from marketing and sales engineers. All things considered, I think that’s a good idea. Overall, these people know the value of the product and what problems the product is solving for customers.
Regardless of the goals, we need to think about content here. We need to look at:
How we communicate
- When are we communicating with the customer to get them in the product? Are we using email or a Slack message? What are we communicating to them in these messages at a high level? What kind of content are we linking to in these messages?
- What happens after this value moment? How do we know the customer completed the first value tasks? What are we doing to help and support the customer to the next value moments? Do we have the customer journey mapped out that we want the customer to follow? Moreover, do we also understand the content needs at the touchpoints?
What we need
- How are we guiding the customer to and through the tasks? Are we using wizards? Should we use an in-app tool like Pendo or Gainsight to walk them through the tasks? How many total steps are we allowing in each in-app guide? If the customer closes the guide or wizard before completing it, how often do they get prompted again? Do they get prompted again?
- Do we have the technical content in a help system or knowledge base to support the customers to get to the value moments we’re guiding them towards? Further, do we know what technical content the customer needs? Do we have those links for the in-app guides? Do we need to create more technical content to get the customer to that value moment? Equally important, are we providing written words or videos or a mix? What sort of technical content goes into each?
Content in product led growth onboarding
This article touches the basics. Although I have more thoughts about the importance of technical content in the product led growth onboarding, I want to mull further before I write more.
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