Product onboarding remains a critical component in the journey from product discovery to full adoption. It’s not just about introducing your users to your product but ensuring they derive real value from it.
In this episode, Hannah Clark is joined by Ramli John—Founder of Delight Path Product Onboarding Consulting Firm & Author of Product-Led Onboarding—to uncover actionable insights for optimizing user activation and retention through effective onboarding strategies.
Interview Highlights
- Meet Ramli John [01:12]
- Ramli has extensive experience working with SaaS companies, focusing on growth and onboarding.
- Connected with Wes Bush, author of Product-Led Growth, through a shared alma mater, the University of Waterloo (10 years apart).
- Worked at Appcues, a product adoption software for product-led companies.
- Currently at Delight Path, helping product-led companies enhance their onboarding experiences.
- Common Misconceptions in User Activation [02:12]
- Many product teams overcomplicate activation by chasing metrics like Facebook’s “seven friends in 10 days,” which isn’t fully data-driven or applicable to all companies.
- Instead of complex metrics, teams should focus on simple, meaningful “sticky moments” that require user commitment.
- Onboarding is often mistaken as solely a product issue, but it’s a cross-functional challenge involving marketing, especially in messaging and positioning.
- Unrealistic user expectations from unclear messaging can hinder activation, regardless of the quality of the onboarding experience.
- The EUREKA Framework for Onboarding [04:23]
- The EUREKA framework is a five-step onboarding process designed to improve user activation.
- E: Establish a cross-functional team (product, marketing, sales, customer success) to tackle onboarding collaboratively.
- U: Understand what users define as success before designing onboarding pathways.
- RE: Reverse journey map the “happy path” by analyzing successful user behaviors in specific timeframes (e.g., first 7 minutes, days, weeks, months).
- K: Keep new users engaged with a mix of in-product tools (e.g., tours, checklists) and out-of-product strategies (e.g., emails, educational content).
- A: Apply changes, iterate, and personalize onboarding for different user needs and “jobs-to-be-done.”
Before we think about in-product features, onboarding emails, or anything else, let’s first determine what your users consider success. If we don’t have that clearly defined, we risk building the wrong path to the wrong success outcome for your users.
Ramli John
- Types of Friction in Onboarding [06:42]
- There are three types of user friction: product, social, and emotional.
- Product friction: Barriers within the product itself, like too many steps, overwhelming fields, or excessive pop-ups.
- Social friction: Challenges in gaining buy-in from others, such as team approval for purchases (in product-led) or resistance to change (in sales-led).
- Emotional friction: Psychological fears about change, risk of failure, or negative outcomes, like losing credibility or a job if the product doesn’t deliver as promised.
- Product teams often focus on product friction, but addressing social and emotional friction is equally critical for successful onboarding.
- There are three types of user friction: product, social, and emotional.
Part of onboarding that people often overlook is the change it involves. Onboarding isn’t just about introducing them to the product; it’s about onboarding them to a new way of working or living.
Ramli John
- Enhancing Adoption through Human Interaction and Insight [09:59]
- Social and emotional frictions are harder to measure and require qualitative insights to understand drop-offs in adoption.
- Early-stage companies should prioritize one-on-one onboarding to uncover challenges and barriers.
- Reviewing customer onboarding and sales recordings can reveal critical insights, especially around conflicts or buy-in issues.
- Adding human interaction, educational content, or tailored emails can address non-product barriers.
- Example: Installing a code snippet often involves social friction (product managers needing engineering help) and emotional friction (fear of breaking production). Providing clear instructions for collaboration can alleviate these issues.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration for Onboarding Success [12:34]
- Align cross-functional teams on a common success metric to foster collaboration and eliminate silos.
- A champion, often from customer success, can bridge gaps between teams by showing how activation impacts sales, marketing, and retention.
- Executive buy-in enables forming dedicated cross-functional “growth squads” to tackle specific business problems collaboratively.
- Example: At Appcues, a “tiger team” worked across marketing, product, and customer success to improve trial-to-paid conversion rates.
- Conduct onboarding audit workshops with diverse team members to align on user success definitions and create cohesive strategies.
- Lack of shared understanding of user success among teams hinders seamless onboarding and product adoption efforts.
- Reverse Engineering Success in Onboarding [16:44]
- Reverse engineering success starts with defining the ultimate user win or outcome (e.g., saving valuable data to a list).
- Break down the journey into “mini wins” or milestones leading to the ultimate win, such as conducting a first search or creating a list.
- Focus on key milestones rather than every step, streamlining the path to success.
- Analyze user behavior to refine and simplify processes, like improving search results with suggestions or autocorrect features.
- For complex products with long timelines, identify quick wins (e.g., same-day success moments) to maintain engagement and provide early value.
- Example: At SparkToro, the ultimate win was saving useful data to a list, achieved through steps like conducting searches and creating lists, with optimizations to shorten the journey.
- Example: At Appcues, the ultimate win was publishing live product experiences, but the early win was starting to build tools like checklists or tours on day one.
- Essential Tools for Designing Onboarding Experiences [21:14]
- Product teams need tools for insights, implementation, and experimentation.
- Insights tools: Amplitude, Mixpanel (user behavior analysis), Fullstory, PostHog (session recordings, identifying user frustrations), and survey tools like SurveyMonkey or Appcues (qualitative feedback).
- Implementation tools: Appcues, Userpilot, Chameleon, and Pendo (in-product experiences).
- Experimentation tools: Google Experiment, Appcues, Chameleon, Pendo, and Amplitude (A/B testing and split testing).
- Focus on measuring user success, deploying in-app experiences, and iterating through experimentation.
- Product teams need tools for insights, implementation, and experimentation.
- AI in Product-Led Growth and Onboarding [24:17]
- AI can optimize onboarding by analyzing customer interactions and tailoring experiences.
- Companies use AI models (e.g., ChatGPT) to analyze onboarding and sales calls, identifying pain points and successful strategies.
- Insights from these analyses improve product copy and user guidance to address common challenges.
- AI-driven tools customize in-product experiences based on users’ website activity and behavior.
- To address the “blank page” problem, AI generates tailored recommendations or dummy data, as seen in tools like Zapier offering personalized automation suggestions.
- AI’s adaptability helps refine onboarding paths and training for specific user needs.
- Creating Effective Feedback Loops [27:41]
- Feedback loops in onboarding rely on insights from sales and customer success teams who directly interact with customers.
- Regularly gathering feedback during customer onboarding (e.g., through one-on-one sessions or webinars) helps identify pain points.
- It’s crucial to ensure clear communication between customer success and product teams to act on feedback quickly.
- Teams should align on success metrics for users to identify when onboarding is not effective.
- If there’s a drop in user success, the entire team should collaborate to identify the root cause, whether it’s related to marketing, product, or other factors.
Meet Our Guest
Founder of Delight Path, Ramli John is a leading expert in product-led onboarding for B2B SaaS companies. As the bestselling author of Product-Led Onboarding, which has sold over 35,000 copies, Ramli empowers product teams to design onboarding experiences that drive activation and customer retention. With a background in marketing, UX design, and software development, he has advised companies like Zapier, Appcues, and Mixpanel, creating actionable strategies that boost MRR and customer success.
If you can’t even define what initial success looks like for the user, good luck fixing your onboarding and providing them with a seamless experience.
Ramli John
Resources From This Episode:
- Subscribe to The Product Manager newsletter
- Check out this episode’s sponsor: Wix Studio
- Connect with Ramli on LinkedIn
- Check out Delight Path
- Product-Led Onboarding: How to Turn Users Into Lifelong Customers
- Ramli John’s New Book — EUREKA: The Customer Onboarding Playbook for High-Growth B2B Companies
Related Articles And Podcasts:
- About The Product Manager Podcast
- The Complete Guide To Collecting Meaningful User Feedback
- How To Build A Cross-Functional Product Team
- Product Onboarding Ultimate Guide: Steps, Examples & Tips
- Your Guide To The Fundamentals Of Product-Led Growth
- How To Create An Effective Customer Feedback Loop For Product Teams
- How To Master, Measure, And Maximize Your Activation Rate
Read The Transcript:
We’re trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn’t correct 100% of the time.
Hannah Clark: As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. I think that old chestnut really sums up the product onboarding to adoption pipeline; just because a user has found your product doesn't mean they'll end up paying for it. I get it; it's frustrating when new users seem to arrive at your product, take a sniff, and gallop off into the sunset. But we're not here to commiserate about runaway users, we're here to zoom out on this kooky little analogy and understand how to get that horse to drink. Because when you look at the context around successful product adoption, you'll notice that many parts of that journey actually begin long before and continue long after user activation.
My guest today is Ramli John, author of Product-Led Onboarding and the founder of Delight Path, a product onboarding consulting firm. Ramli is like, THE guy for product-led onboarding wisdom. So we were really lucky to have him come on and share some practical frameworks, tactics, and tools for figuring out how to evaluate and refine your user onboarding journey. So to come back to that horse analogy, it behooves you to try them out. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Let's jump in.
Welcome back to The Product Manager Podcast. We are here today with Ramli John and we are very excited to have you here today.
Thank you for joining us, Ramli. How are you doing?
Ramli John: Pretty good. How about yourself, Hannah?
Hannah Clark: Feeling really good.
Can you tell us, to start off, a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are and your whole journey in product-led growth and onboarding?
Ramli John: Yeah, I got in, I've been working on SaaS for quite some time. I got a chance to work on growth and onboarding with SaaS and then eventually connected with Wes Bush. He wrote the book Product-Led Growth and people don't know this, we actually went to the same university, University of Waterloo, but 10 years apart.
He's 10 years younger than I am. Yeah, that's how we connected. I got a chance to work with him and work with product-led companies and help them with onboarding and I got on to work at Appcues as well. It's a product adoption software for product-led companies. You can probably see the pattern is all product-led and now I'm in Delight Path.
Or I help product-led companies with their product onboarding experiences. So just a little bit about me in 60 seconds or less.
Hannah Clark: Yeah, perfect. Well, and this all connects to our core topic of the day, which is product-led growth. Product onboarding is part of that product-led growth process. So let's kick it off.
What are some of the key misconceptions, as far as your experience has shown you, that you think product teams have about activation and user retention in that whole journey?
Ramli John: Yeah, I think in terms of activation itself, people think, first of all, there's a few ones. One that really gets to me is like the whole, the classic example with just have seven friends in 10 days, that's a Facebook metric.
I think that is a great metric because it's easy to explain, but the challenge with that is even the head of growth at Facebook, they were straight up saying that it's not fully based on full data. Like they don't have the full correlation because it's hard. And for a lot of B2B companies, they don't have enough data to do that.
They picked that number because they found a pattern and it was easy to communicate. And there's obviously a lot of different variables that get into stickiness. And that's why teams that I work with I need to get that seven friends in 10 days metric. It's you're overcomplicating it. Just pick a deal moment, like a sticky moment or a moment where it requires commitment from the user and just get users to do that once.
And that's a good place to start in terms of activation. That's a common one. Second thing is often that it, they see it as a product problem. And often onboarding is actually such a very cross functional issue that marketing has input into it, especially the positioning and messaging that I got a chance to chat with the folks at Fletch, Anthony and Rob.
And really, if you don't have your messaging and positioning nailed down, then it's really gonna impact what people expect from your product. And if people come in with unrealistic expectations of the profit there's no product experience onboarding or in product guidance or tours that can really help them get to that aha moment cause they had a different aha moment in their minds.
It's not really going to happen there. So I think there's just a couple I can keep going on and on. We could probably dedicate a whole episode of this, but I think those are a couple of common ones in terms of misconceptions about activation.
Hannah Clark: So you're the founder of Delight Path product onboarding consulting firm. You're the author of Product-Led Onboarding. Very well respected literature in the space.
And you also have developed a five step framework called the EUREKA framework for onboarding. I want to dig into the framework because I don't think we've got time to go through everything in the book. Can you walk us through how that helps the organizations that you work with user activation?
Ramli John: Yeah, of course. I think touching upon it first, that misconception I mentioned. When I approach it, this is like five step. It's an acronym for EUREKA and one of them is the two letters. So it becomes four or five steps into it. First one is really about establishing that team, the cost for show team.
If you're like, Oh, round me, we need help fixing our onboarding. And as somebody from product, I'm working with a team right now. And it's from somebody from product-led growth, their product team. It needs to be cross functional, especially if it's B2B. Customer success is an input. Marketing has an input.
Sales has an input into it. So I bring that team together. And the first step in the EUREKA is establish that team. So E. The next I walk them through some exercises. And it's U. U stands for understanding success for your users. So even before we think about in product, out of product, onboarding emails, let's first figure out what does your users think is success? Because if we don't have that nailed down, then we're going to build the wrong path to the wrong success state for your users. That's the second one. The third is RE, so that's reverse journey map, the happy path. So it's really about reverse engineering.
What does your best customers, what do they do in the first seven minutes, in the first seven days, in the first seven weeks, in the first seven months? And map out like what they're doing already and see, Hey, this is what they do. Let's create the same pattern and reverse engineer what success is like.
And then K stands for keeping the new user engaged, figuring out both in product. So like product tours and checklists and out of product, like onboarding emails, human interaction and educational content, like the right kind of mix to get the right users engaged throughout this journey. And the very last step is A, which is about applying these changes and repeating it for different kind of use cases and personalize that for different "jobs-to-be-done" or customer jobs that your users are trying to get to.
So that's the EUREKA framework is five steps into it. And if you wanted to dig into each one, I'm happy to do so.
Hannah Clark: I think we'll come back to that because I'm actually very curious about the reverse engineering path. So let's put a little pin in that one.
But I want to talk a little bit about friction. I think it's often pinned as the main obstacle in onboarding. And I think there's just, there's many opportunities for users to hit friction. But you said in the past that there's three types of friction. So there's product friction, there's social, there's emotional. Can you break down the different types of friction and how each one of them affects the user journey?
Ramli John: I was inspired by, he was the former head of product at LinkedIn. His name is Sachin Gupta. And I've adopted it to apply to the jobs we've done in framework. And he called it the hierarchy of user friction in terms of user experience. But I said, in B2B, actually, it's different. So the very bottom is product friction, like you mentioned.
Those are things that are barriers in the product itself. Things like too many steps or overwhelming them with showing too many fields or pop ups or whatever's in the product friction. The one above that, that people don't often think about, it's the social kind of friction. And I think this applies to both consumer products.
Especially social products where you show your friends and colleagues, but more so in B2B as well, where sometimes you need buy in from your team. And this applies to both product-led and sales-led. So for product-led, the user signs up and they need to get the buy in from their manager or director to Hey, we should pay for this.
It was like that social friction where they have a challenge within the organization to sell the product itself. And then in a sales site org where it's top down, sure, the buyer, maybe this executive level bought the software for the team, but they're too ingrained in what they're doing already that they're like resistant to that change.
So social friction is, it's all about that politics, that organizational barriers that can block your customer from fully adopting it. And then at the highest level is emotional friction. And that's like deep seated, psychological fear about change, things like adopting something new could be threatening.
There's a saying that you can never go wrong buying IBM. There's a reason why they say that is because it removes the risk of making the wrong choice. And for a lot of companies, if you pick the wrong product, your job could be on the line. And especially if it's an expensive product that it promises, it's going to 10x your productivity or bring in 10x the revenue. If that doesn't happen, emotionally, you're like fear of my job is on the line.
I could look bad in front of other people. And that is part of the whole onboarding that people don't think about as a change. Like onboarding is not just onboarding them to the product. You're onboarding them to a new way of doing work or doing life. And change is usually a scary thing for most people.
So those are the three levels of friction that a lot of teams don't think enough a lot about, they often just think about, let's just tackle product friction 'cause it's easy. But social and emotional friction are something that often you can't tackle with just a simple product change.
Hannah Clark: We actually talked a little bit about this in an episode previously with George Brooks on, I think is something that the effect of the barriers to product onboarding aren't what you think. It had a lot to do with that like like, social and emotional friction that kind of takes place outside of the purview of the, analytics that we're collecting that we're trying to gauge, what's going on? Why are we losing people? Why are we not getting the adoption levels we want?
So I'm curious from your perspective, is there any way that we can bake accounting for those factors into the process of evaluating how adoption is going and rather than just going, well, it's not being adopted the way that we expect, it's got to be a product problem.
Ramli John: Yeah, I would say the two, both the social and emotional, the high above product you mentioned is a lot harder to measure because you're just seeing a drop off in people like not doing that. I would say that's where human interaction is very clerical and qualitative data is really important. We're trying to understand the why behind why they're not fully adopting it and understanding who are the other stakeholders involved and figuring that out.
That's why I'm a big fan of especially earlier on doing one on one onboarding process, especially for companies that are more product-led. Cause those things are things that you can uncover to figure out like, Hey, we'd love to help exactly why the challenge is to this step not happening. And they can provide some kind of explanation or other things like that in terms of that.
I would also suggest trying to figure that, if you already have some recordings from your customer onboarding as well as sales process, that could definitely be something that could be mine for insights like those as well. So anytime they can use words there's conflict or any kind of barriers in terms of getting buy-in, I think those are critical things that is okay, there's a challenge here.
How do we add a human or educational content or the right kind of email when we know that the reason why they're not completing a certain step in onboarding is not necessarily product friction is actually barriers. An example I can think of is when I was working at Appcues, one of the key steps, and this is for a lot of B2B products.
Where they had to install a code snippet to their production code base. And often the person signing up a product manager is not the one who has access to the code snippet. And that is something that often we found that a human interaction and asking for help and what kind of technical limitations or challenges they're facing was the critical path as well as if they say they're a product manager, right, and the onboarding.
How do we Hey, here's how you can invite and provide the right kind of instructions to engineering, because we know that this is not a product friction. It's a social and also an emotional friction, because if the code breaks your production, that's not a good experience for your users itself.
So I think there's just some kind of tips and example of how this can be baked into the whole onboarding process.
Hannah Clark: And I like this train of thought too, because as you mentioned earlier, like this is a cross functional endeavor. So have you had any other kinds of breakthroughs in the past that have been like, ah, like this is an antidote to some of the silos that are really inhibiting us from really creating this really seamless product onboarding journey.
That's like leading to higher adoption rates or any kind of like breakthroughs that you've been able to conquer with, you know, your consulting clients where it's just ah, like if only everyone was doing this.
Ramli John: Yeah, I would say the first thing, and this is, I'm going to go from the hardest way to do it to the easiest way to do it.
Maybe let's start with a quick win. I think that's a common quick win. It's like aligning the different teams into a common metric, a success goal in terms of how it would impact them as well. For example, rather than telling the sales, Hey, we need you to like, tell us exactly why, what are the challenges in terms of your sales process that are activation rate is falling off.
Instead of saying that, I think it's getting everybody on the common ground. Hey, If we can get this right, then it's going to be easier for all of us to not just sell the product, but actually to keep those customers going on, going forward. There needs to be a champion who would explain exactly why that is such a critical moment for everybody and tying them, okay.
The reason why activation impacts sales is if we know that they're the right kind of people coming in. And they're more likely to close and how it's going to impact marketing is that we know that based on this kind of channels here are the ones that are actually bringing this in. Often I find that the champions for this experience is somebody from customer success, and they bring that in and tie everything together.
That's, I think I would say quick when it's not really quick when, because it is pulling everybody together. One that I found easiest that we actually did at Appcues, it's when there's executive buy in from the leadership level, they actually got a chance to form a growth squad. We call it the tiger team, essentially, where it's a cross functional team and they found a business problem.
Our trial to pay conversion rate was low. So how do we fix this? So they form like a cross functional team. Somebody from marketing, I was part of that, somebody from customer success, somebody from product. And for six months, we met every week to just hey, we need to raise this twice what it is right now.
How do we do that? What are the thing, different components that we can impact in terms of product, in terms of marketing, in terms of sales, in terms of customer success. So together we're tackling this problem from different lenses that we all come from. And that is, for me, the ideal situation where you can pull everybody together.
When I work with teams, that is the first step I do Hey, Ramli, we need help fixing our onboarding. I like, I'm going to do this onboarding audit workshop, and it's going to be multiple people from different teams that are coming into this so that we can get all on the same page. Because often those teams don't talk to each other, they don't really understand what, first of all, what is the aha moment or activation moment for the product itself.
And that's what happened to us at Appcues, where product and customer success and marketing, we all had different definitions. And if you can't even define what initial success is for the user, then good luck trying to get them, fixing your onboarding and getting them a seamless experience. Those are just a couple of ways I think that could really make a big impact in terms of getting everybody on the same page and working together.
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Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cause I think this is just like every organization, especially remote organizations. So always a struggle to try and get folks to work together the way that we envision that should work. So I really appreciate those tips.
But I think this is a really good kind of segue into going back to the reverse engineering part of the framework, EUREKA framework, because I think that in general, we accept that reverse engineering success is a good, best practice, but how that actually looks is murky.
Like how do we apply that physically? Would you be able to pull like an anecdote or tell us the story of an actual kind of like process that you've used to reverse success. Like how did that functionally go? How can we like copy and paste that into our own strategy?
Ramli John: Yes. This is how I think about it. I start off at the end. So the end in mind with an example, I got a chance to work with a team SparkToro, which is like a audience intelligence software or platform where I know that sounds like a buzzword, but it's actually to help you find where your audience hangs out online so that you can do co-marketing with influencers or find the right kind of places to market your product.
So that's what they do. They have this database that you can search for specific keywords. One of the questions I got a chance to chat with their team, Ren, Amanda, and Casey was starting with the end in mind. So the question I have is what is the ultimate win? What is success for the user itself?
What would they do that you're like, Oh yeah, they actually got something valuable. And one of the things that they had in terms of end success is when you find something valuable in terms of okay, my audience hangs out at this Subreddit at reddit.com or they listen to this specific podcaster. What they would do and what most people would do at Airbnb or in other kind of search type functions is they save it to a wishlist.
So they have a list function and that to us was like, okay, this is a leading indicator that yes, they found something and they've added it to a list. That's the ultimate win. So we work there. So what are the, I call it the win mapping. What are the mini wins along that way that gets them to that ultimate win?
So if they need to get him on a list, so first of all, they need to do a first search. So that's another win. So they find a first search, like search I don't know, product manager or some kind of keyword. What do they need to know before that? So they need to, first of all, understand what search works and what, find the result and get a good result.
And another win is creating like a list. So creating, actually creating and naming a list is actually important before they can get to the ultimate win. So rather than like mapping out all the steps, I'm just like, Hey, what are the key milestones, but I call it, what are the key mini wins or wins to get them to that ultimate win and along that way, okay, here's like this ideal journey.
So first win is make that first search. Second win is, it's actually create a list and then the ultimate win is actually finally saving an item to that list. We found that it took about two to five searches before they found that. So we talked about how do we reduce and refine the search and kind of offer them suggestions as autocorrect to get them there as well.
So that's how I would think about it. Obviously for more complicated products, there could be like seven or eight wins, many wins until they get to the ultimate win. And even for more complex products, let's say Appcues, where the ultimate win can take two to three weeks because they need to set up some stuff.
One of the things I suggest to those teams is like, is there like a same day win that you can do for your users within them? So the Appcues, we focus really on getting them to start building right away. So building a tour or a checklist and any kind of other in product experience, because we found through customer interviews, it's like, Oh, That's like an aha moment, like an early aha moment.
And the ultimate win was getting it published live and then actually getting data with that. So that's like a high level approach. So find your ultimate wins, first step. Second step is what is like the mini wins along the way. And the third step is actually filling in all the steps along that, like the minimum number of steps under set up that mini wins.
Hannah Clark: I really liked that process. That kind of reminds me, I don't know if you ever did in school. There was this exercise, I remember doing it in like middle school where they're like explaining instructions to open a jar of peanut butter and make a peanut butter sandwich or something like that. And you have to really think is so much of it is muscle memory because you're so close to that.
It's just so, every day that you don't even think about the steps, like the many steps that lead to like that, like ultimate goal. So like thinking about it, like really granularly, what are even just like the foundational knowledge? Well, you have to know to do this. It's a process that merits a lot of thought.
Since we're talking about brass tacks, I want to move on to something a little bit more concrete as well, which is tooling. I think that's something that we don't talk about enough on this show. What tools would you say are essential for product teams when you're designing onboarding experiences?
We're thinking about this cross functionally, but I'm thinking more in the scope of the product team.
Ramli John: Yeah, okay, in the scope of the product team. I think in terms of the product team, I would look at a few things. I would, first of all, look at gathering insights, and then second is like actually implementing the in-product experience.
And then third, I would be looking at how do you experiment with that? So I think in terms of the data in analytics itself, there's some great tools out there. I'm not associated with any of these. I've never worked for them. I'm not paid by them at all. Things like Amplitude, I think Amplitude and Mixpanel is great.
One of the things that I like about this couple of tools there, they can cheat sheet and what they do is they try to find the correlation or try to figure out the exact user actions that lead to retention. So they're like a based on your best user, they do this three things in the first week, which is like super cool for them to be able to pull in that insight.
Obviously there's other tools like June that I saw is great for more B2B stuff. So I think analytics like that. So that's more analytics. There's also user session recording. I'm a big fan of Fullstory and PostHog, where you can actually watch your users, click around and surf, which is great. The great thing about Fullstory is you can actually, they have some kind of algorithm that kind of figures out when users are rage clicking is what they call it.
We're like, they're clicking something multiple times because they're frustrated or they're angry, or there's a error code in the product itself. So those ones are, and I think in terms of the last one in terms of analytics, it's gathering information. So like qualitative surveys, like in product wise.
So, when you're signing for a product, there will be a thing that would pop up on the side that would say, Hey, What made you sign up today? Or what kind of challenges do you have? So things like ServingMonkey, I think can do that. Appcues can do that as well. And then that's the first set of tools.
The second set of tools is around like in product experience. So obviously I used to work at Appcues, heads up. Appcues is one of them. There's also a bunch of other ones that have similar capabilities. Things like Userpilot, Chameleon, there's Pendo, different tools like that. And then I think in terms of the experimentation side, I think that's where I find huge challenge.
And I think I've heard Google experiment can do this and Appcues and Chameleon and Pendo can also do split testing where they send you users to different experiences. And based on that, they can analyze that as well as amplitude. So I think those are just a few tools that I know, there's so many tools out there.
I would look at those three things to start off with. Like, how do you measure success for your users? And how do you know they're getting there? Second is like, how do you deploy in app experiences in product experiences? And third is like, how do you experiment and continue to improve over time?
Hannah Clark: Yeah, awesome advice. Yeah, always love to hear recommendations from folks who are really in the space.
Recently, we did a panel event that you were part of. Thank you so much for doing that, by the way, that was awesome. And we talked a little bit about the intersection between AI and product-led growth. But it was a very, folks can check out the panel.
It's all available on our website if you're interested, but I would like to reiterate some of those points and talk a little bit about how AI kind of, how some of these new AI features that exist in some tools are helping to facilitate and optimize onboarding. Can you talk about some of the ones that you found to be like the most ROI positive?
Ramli John: I think in terms of AI and specifically, let's say more focused on, I think this could apply to both product-led and sales-led company that I got a chance to work with. What they did was like, Oh my goodness, this is so cool. What they do is they take 5 or 10 of the best customer onboarding calls.
There's one on ones for enterprise. They fed it into a ChatGPT and funneled it in to Hey, learn what these people are saying, what are the challenges. They train the model and they ask straight up, just what are key moments that people struggle? What are steps that they're struggling with and how do we deal with them?
So like what kind of like things did our customer onboarding managers or customer success team members do to overcome this challenges? So mining hours of calls and just getting data from that to improve your in product experience is so, so powerful. And one thing that I suggested to them as well, it's like, why don't you go further and get your best, maybe even your worst sales calls and put it into that model.
And ask like, where are people getting confused? Cause that's where copy within the product experience can also inform okay, here are where most people are getting challenged. Where, how do we overcome that in product as well? There's one way that I've seen it. There's another one that I'm really excited about.
I'm seeing some teams like hatched together in product experience. So based on what users are surfed on the website itself, they actually tailor like an in product experience for them so that they can actually see a different guidance and a different tool based on what they've done as well.
That's another great example of one where it leads them to a different path based on what they've done. And the third one that I'm seeing more and more teams apply AI for is a lot of this tools that require data. They have something called the blank page problem. Where you come in, there's no data.
So what do you do? And often the approach is okay, let's just give them dummy data. So let's give them like fake call or records, Bruce Wayne at brucewayne.com, something like that. Whereas I guess obviously a fake support ticket or fake contact in the CRM, but I'm seeing more products, they actually use AI to like.
What are you trying to do? An example is Zapier. Zapier is like an automation tool. They have different zaps. They have millions of zap potential. They're like, what are you trying to do?
Hannah Clark: Big fan of Zapier, by the way.
Ramli John: Yeah, same. And you can just say, Hey, straight up, this is something they implemented in the last year.
We're like, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to connect this and this? It's well, here are the top three recommendations for zaps for you, which is like super cool. So I'm seeing more tools do use AI to kind like, tailor, custom recommendations or as well as build teaching or training path for them specifically.
Hannah Clark: I always love a really actionable, really useful recommendation for AI because there's so many features. It's hard to tell which ones are actually worth the squeeze. So I appreciate that very much.
Last question here, out of left field. Talk a little bit about feedback loops. How can teams create feedback loops during onboarding to keep iterating and improving? Cause we're talking a little bit about like improving things over time. I think that's a really good way to put a bow on this.
Ramli John: Yeah, I think in terms of making sure that there's clear feedback loops, it goes back, yeah, I think you mentioned it putting a bow on it. It goes back to, there are some valuable insights that sales as well as customer success, who are always chatting with your customers, as well as your prospects.
They have insights there where it's so valuable to have that connection with them as often as possible. So that you're pulling in those insights and getting feedback as to especially cause if you have a one on one customer onboarding experience, or even like a human led customer onboarding experience, where it could be one to many, where it's like a live webinar with multiple customers, new customers, there's so much insights where like you're hearing straight up customers saying, I'm struggling to do this.
I don't know how to do this. That is such great feedback that often like that is lost in terms of the loop cause there's not that much connection. I keep going back to Appcues because like we were trying to be as product-led as possible, even for us, that feedback loop back to product team from customer success often was like, how do we have the right kind of process?
How do we send this insight into product, the product team so that they can get action it, whether it's through a spreadsheet or a Slack channel that's focused on customer onboarding feedback that we're getting, whatever it is. I think that really needs to be tied back to the product team as well. I think the second thing in terms of feedback loop, it's making sure that everybody has like a clear line of what the success for our users looks like. Because if we see a drop as a team in terms of users getting there on a specific week or a specific cohort of users, then that is something that needs to be tackled together as a team. And okay, where did it go wrong?
Or what was the challenge? Is it because we marketing did our campaign and it was targeting a lot of Facebook users and they don't get activated. So it's not a product issue. It's actually more of a channel issue or versus like product team actually released a new feature and it messed up the whole onboarding experience.
Or is it the sales team? Did they promise something out of left field that nobody knew about? Now people are not getting to that success or aha or ultimate win for your product. Or is this something else where, there was a lot of people in customer success that was sick and then they weren't responding to the there's so many possible issues and it needs to be really needs to be pulled in together, especially if you have a common metric that you're like, this is what's exciting for our users.
If it's, we're not hitting that, then we need to have a discussion together as a team.
Hannah Clark: Legit. That concludes our discussion today on product onboarding. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can our listeners follow your work or, access some of the resources you mentioned today?
Ramli John: Yeah, for sure. They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm quite active there. Ramli RJ John. I'm also have all my content, my newsletter, as well as the new book I'm writing in 2025 delightpath.com. So the new book is called EUREKA, which the framework that we talked about is I've refined it for fast high growth B2B companies. So this all in delightpath.com.
Hannah Clark: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing that and for for joining us today. It's always a pleasure, Ramli.
Ramli John: Thank you so much.
Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The Product Manager, wherever you get your podcasts.