Karbon's primary reason for customer churn is failure to launch. It's a powerful work management platform that can easily overwhelm new users. So I designed an experience to put onboarding 'on-rails' and help accelerate time-to-value.

Mission

Historically, Karbon has prioritised its product team to develop new functionality in its push for product market fit and relied heavily on sales, implementation and customer success teams to be the primary drivers of growth. Karbon needs to deliver a more effective onboarding strategy to convert leads into customers, reward user habits within the product to engage and retain customers, and utilise user activity to promote the product to potential new users.

Impact

In 3 months, I spearheaded the redesign of Karbon's product onboarding flow, helping prospective customers activate their workspace and invite their team before they land in the app. Working in close collaboration with the executive team, I defined the vision, strategy and product-led growth metrics for product onboarding, engagement and retention. And laid the foundations for new design patterns to support more scalable onboarding across the entire product and customer lifecycle.

My Contribution

User Research
Product Strategy
UX & UI Design
Prototyping
User Testing
‍Stakeholder Management

An accounting firm manager who lacks adequate visibility over their team’s work has a hindered ability to ensure they will meet client expectations. They are desperate for visibility and rightfully look to Karbon to address this.

I'd heard time and time again that customers choose Karbon for its solution to work management, only then to discover what our email integration feature can do for their collaboration and communication—our stickiest feature. But I didn't have a definitive answer to what the golden moment is in a free trial that convinces a firm that Karbon is right for them. I observed and spoke to users in their 14 day free trial to better understand their motivations and objectives.

After speaking to users, it was clear that Karbon's first-use experience poses challenges as it is a complex product that requires a lot of set up before a firm fully realises its value.

For example, to experience work visibility and reporting—a critical "aha!" moment—an operational leader would need to:

Build efficient workflows: Setup automated workflows in bulk, assign things like budgets, team roles, and deadlines, before inviting the wider team to experience workflow in Karbon.
Import client contact data: Client workflows are connected to hundreds if not thousands of client contacts. So detailed contact data needs to be imported in bulk before workflows can even be created.
Make individual contributors love Karbon: Only once client work and contacts are set up can individual contributors in the team use Karbon and find value in completing daily tasks and keeping their assigned projects up-to-date—this is required in order for the manager to benefit from that visibility and know work is being delivered on time.

Historically, these things all required hands-on assistance from Karbon’s Sales and Implementation teams. We needed a better way.

How might we simplify the set up process so managers can experience visibility and reporting (with their team's real work) to get answers to their burning questions?

The key to successfully converting a new trial user into a paid customer would be for the product to effectively guide them toward realising the value of Karbon during their initial session. My goals were to:

Clarify that Karbon enhances workflow and team visibility.
Visualise the team's real projects on a Kanban board.
Invite the first team (3–5 members).
Guide them to reporting features to drill down on team progress.

I chose to isolate the set up steps in a guided wizard so I could craft the right story and keep users hyper-focussed on their jobs to be done.

To achieve a populated dashboard of client projects, users need to jump through a series of steps that happen in different areas across the app. So I chose to isolate these steps in a guided wizard to keep users focussed on only the actions they need to take, and let Karbon to do the heavy lifting in the background.

Conscious of the user’s mental load and mindset this early on in their buying journey, my focus was on crafting and iterating the perfect story that would compel users to continue, by boosting their psych and helping them feel a sense of progress and achievement. Karbon won't be the only tool they're evaluating, so if this is as far as they get, first impressions need to count for a lot.

So, how did they go? It's still early days but so far, so good. 87% of users are making it through the new onboarding steps.

Working closely with the Project Manager, I set up an Amplitude funnel to monitor results. It’s still early days, but 88% conversion is looking pretty promising given the amount of friction we introduced to accessing the free trial. Most importantly, users are making it through the flow and now I have a baseline to improve upon.

What next? Karbon's product-led growth strategy is still in its infancy so I'm working to implement the necessary metrics and infrastructure to measure growth loops and retention. Here's a bit about my thinking...

The primary reason for customer churn at Karbon is failure to launch. To truly engage and retain users, users need to develop rewarding habits in the product that align with Karbon's core value propositions, so they have more and more reasons to come back.

Weekly inspecting work progress (Manager)
Daily completing tasks (Individual Contributor)
Daily team communication (Everyone)

Karbon currently lacks the necessary infrastructure to measure product-led growth. So before leveraging opportunities to draw users back into the product, I'm working with senior product and customer leaders to define and implement a health score to measure user and team activation—that is—actions users can take that align to these retention loops. Then I'll be better equiped to guide users towards this behaviour and understand the impact of future onboarding experiments.

Helping users bulk import their client contacts to activate their workspace and onboard their team.

Before firms can set up more client work for their team, they need to import their client contact list. We know from past research that users who engage Karbon’s support team to manually import their client contact data convert at greater than 70%, and this is one of the stickiest activation activities a new user can take.

In a 3 week sprint, I worked with one product manager and two engineers to build a wizard aimed at delivering the shortest route for a new user to achieve a populated client list on their own. By reducing the required contact data fields down to the minimum, we were able to cut the import time of hundreds of contacts from 48 hours (via support) to mere minutes.

Implementing scalable UI patterns to educate and onboard users at every stage of their journey.

Onboarding occurs to varying degrees throughout the entire customer lifecycle but is especially impactful in the evaluate, implement, and adopt stages, to drive acquisition and help users establish positive habits. In a start-up environment, I need to juggle limited engineering resources and competing priorities, so future onboarding experiments must be scalable.

Evaluate: I think of evaluating a bit like dating. The first session is a user’s first date where they will consider; ‘Is this product interesting to me?’—We have minutes, if not seconds, to convince them that we are worth a second, and third, and fourth date and so on.
Implement: I think of implementation more like moving in together. The user wants to know; ‘I am doing this right so it will work for the long term’. We need to pave the shortest path to onboard users onto features they can get immediate value from.
Adopt: Adoption requires a combination of dating and moving in together. The user is drawn into increasingly complex and deep aspects of the product to become power users. Deep learning is required and additional feature areas begin the dating and implement phase all over again.

Challenges faced, lessons learned, and next steps...

Timely access to user behaviour data is critical for effective experimentation.

In a start-up environment, embracing a lean experimental approach is critical to learn, iterate and improve. But when systems don’t speak to each other or it's not possible to get insight into reasons for user behaviour, making informed decisions is very difficult. Data requirements must be properly considered in the planning phase for effective experimentation.

Qualitative evidence is still extremely useful.

Despite not yet having the necessary tooling to understand results, I had to keep moving for the sake of progress and the customer need. Leaning on best practices and qualitative research, I was still able to create some great outcomes and establish new baselines to iterate on. Most importantly, the knowledge and insights collected along the way are helping me build out a more informed strategy, as well as a business case to invest in more resourcing in the onboarding space.

Building out PLG activation and retention metrics to understand business impact.

Karbon currently lacks the necessary infrastructure to measure product-led growth. So before leveraging opportunities to draw users back into product based on user habits, we need to establish a baseline for tooling and measurement of our identified habit loops to understand the impact of our onboarding experiments. My next steps are to build out a more holistic strategy for onboarding, prioritising key features for quick impact, and their aha moments, as well as defining user activation events and metrics to establish a baseline understanding of what an 'activated' user actually looks like at Karbon.