🏴‍☠️ ⚡️ Implementing Segment-Based Onboarding to Improve Conversions (OKR Teardown)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. The Objective and Key Results

2. Select Commentary on Key Results (prerequisites, failures, etc.)

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🛠️ OKR TEARDOWN

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📻 LISTEN:

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THE OBJECTIVE & KEY RESULTS

As a point of departure, I’ve included the full OKR below to set the foundation for a teardown of our approach thus far…

OBJECTIVE: Implement a segment-based and product-native onboarding experience to set the foundation for improved trial-to-paid conversions (Trailing 30 Day Base Rate: 7.41%)

KEY RESULTS:

1. Create an Onboarding Experience Flowchart: Work with Customer Success and Design to develop an onboarding experience flowchart that conveys the onboarding steps and respective action items / exit criteria for each step by January 19th.

2. Build Onboarding Wireframes: Complete initial onboarding wireframes with the design team, ensuring the substance of each onboarding step is generally mapped to the user experience and functionality requirements by February 2nd

3. Execute engineering, Iterative QA and Testing: Work with engineering to implement each step of the new onboarding experience (as available) in the testing environment with the first onboarding step ready for QA by February 9th.

4. Record and Add Video Content: Record the necessary video content for each onboarding step and update the staging environment by March 1st

5. Launch and Monitor New Onboarding Experience: Release the new onboarding experience, targeting a completion rate of +75% (respective to the segment’s most important outcome), by March 8th

6. Collect and Analyze User Feedback: Initiate a feedback survey upon the conclusion of each respective user’s trial experience to inform immediate iterations of the onboarding experience.

SELECT COMMENTARY ON KEY RESULTS

CREATE AN ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE FLOWCHART

The most important prerequisite here is that you have defined your customer segments based on the attributes that distinguish each segment and the most critical outcome (or job-to-be-done) for that respective segment. To do this, you must analyze quantifiable attributes among your user base to uncover patterns or natural groupings - complexity, as measured by employee count or revenues, is usually a good starting point (here’s a much deeper dive into the topic). Once you’ve identified the characteristics of each segment, you can use surveys or observe product usage / behavior to inform the most important outcomes based on the segment.

At this point, the priority shifts toward the account creation / sign-up process for new or trial users, such that you can determine the segment they fit in to optimize their onboarding and product experience accordingly. Many in the industry call this profiling, and there are timeless tradeoffs involved. Every question you ask to inform their segment introduces friction, which increases the likelihood they don’t complete the account creation or signup process. It is a delicate balance, the pareto principle is your best friend.

Now that we’re clear on our segments and the most important outcomes, we can move to designing the onboarding experience after the account creation / sign-up process. The north star metric is time-to-value or time to achieving the ‘aha moment’ where a user perceives the brand promise.

What are the minimum viable steps a user can take to achieve the stated desired outcome?

This requires stripping away all unnecessary complexity (settings, clicks, and so on). Ideally, you can then chain the minimal viable steps into a cohesive experience, as opposed to bouncing the user around the application to get there.

EXECUTE ENGINEERING, ITERATIVE QA AND TESTING

The most common pitfall is neglecting the principles you’ve established related to product management. We suggest an agile approach, where you design and engineer a usable onboarding experience in staging, one onboarding step at a time. This allows you to uncover technical hurdles, execute testing, and extract relevant learning, which can apply to the remaining steps. Once the new onboarding experience is complete and released into the wild, you observe, collect data, and iterate accordingly.

Hopefully, the above is useful; godspeed on our mutual paths toward user onboarding nirvana...for the love of the game.

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