Mastering onboarding

Lauryn Isford, former head of growth at Airtable and earlier a product growth lead at Facebook, discusses onboarding as a major growth lever. The conversation covers when to experiment versus ship, how Airtable rebuilt its onboarding flow, choosing and operationalizing an activation metric, freemium versus reverse trials, and a PLG funnel framework.

01Key learnings

• Experiment when you need to, mainly as risk mitigation for big changes; let customer research and mockups provide conviction for smaller launches, since experiments are expensive in people's time.
• Onboarding is a critical choke point for self-serve products because downstream conversion, deal closing, and team-wide adoption all flow from it.
• For complex products, an immersive guided wizard that reduces cognitive load can outperform tooltips; tooltips still have a place when the need is lighter.
• Segment onboarding by how people learn and build (learning and building style) rather than only by job title, since this produced better activation results.
• Pick an activation metric that is specific and hard to reach, ideally in a low single-digit to low double-digit percentage range, because it tends to correlate more strongly with long-term retention.
• Break your activation metric into its component parts and add supporting metrics such as retention and sophistication, so teams can see which levers they can directly move.
• Revisit your north star metric as the business evolves, but keep it stable long enough (at least around six months) to build momentum and expertise.
• Consider a reverse trial that combines freemium with a time-limited trial, letting users experience premium features while keeping a free tier for user growth and brand awareness.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.