Conclusion
The number one mistake every business makes with onboarding is thinking from the inside out. Instead of starting with the outcomes a customer wants, they start with a model of a profitable customer and try to reverse engineer what needs to happen to get them there. Over the past five years, we’ve discovered the only proper way to onboard people is to understand where they are, what capabilities they have, where they want to get to, and then use a combination of interface, communication, tooltips, nudges, and messages to ensure they’re never stuck on the path to achieving their outcome. That’s what successful onboarding looks like – unifying a successful business outcome and a successful customer one. I hope these chapters have shown that onboarding is everyone’s job and getting users set up is only one piece of the puzzle. If marketing can’t describe the outcome customers are looking for, if product can’t build a signup process people understand, if customer support can’t help get to those successful outcomes, onboarding breaks down. So many forces feed into onboarding, so don’t trick yourself into optimizing one small sliver of your onboarding and ignoring the others. When you think about it, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, without onboarding it’s meaningless. Onboarding is the bridge between the user’s stage of desire for value and the value they actually get – that’s what makes software successful.
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