Growth Design Strategy
Context
90% of free trial users churn in the first week
- We’ve already simplified our core flows with the redesign
- We crossed $50M ARR, so churn became a $XM problem
- We need a simple, effective approach to optimize trial -> paid flow
Process
Problem exploration
I advocated for holistic research to understand all problem aspects.
From those research, we found that:
- Most drop-offs happen before the “aha” moment and they often don’t come back.
- Users want to get to value quickly. They don’t care about all the pop-ups we throw at them, especially when the value is unclear.
- Interestingly, many express having a need for some key features, but they aren’t aware that those are even available to them.
We aligned to the problem to solve:
How Might We simplify onboarding and help users discover values?
As well as areas of experimentation and success metrics:
Growth design strategy
I’m a fan of the Reforge model in thinking about motivation. Essentially, we want to match people’s level of motivation to the level of friction that we throw at them.
Vision
First, we defined a vision of how a customer would onboard and continuously discover values. This vision is intentionally vague, as it needs to be informed by experiment results.
Do
We removed most pop-ups, and moved an important step (email verification) to earlier in the flow when motivation is high.
Show
- We defined high-value features that are available (correlated to TPCR).
- For each of those features, we prioritize what step(s) need to be guided.
- Then we defined the content of that guidance.
Tell
To continuously help users explore values, we define different levels of interruptions and simple patterns for each of them.
Example of interruption level & pattern (Wink - Nudge - Hug)
Impact
- New customers have a much simpler activation experience. We found that we got the most impact from removing steps (do) than from adding information (Tell)
- We’ve got a simple vision and framework to continue optimizing the product