Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder & CEO at Chameleon, talks to Maze about the relationship between user onboarding and product-led growth and how to design successful onboarding experiences that delight and guide users.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
You can connect with Pulkit on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Resources mentioned:
Follow Maze on social media:
To get notified when new episodes come out, subscribe at maze.co/podcast. See you next time!
Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers, and researchers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
Today, I'm joined by Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO of Chameleon, a product adoption platform that helps teams quickly build in-product experiences like onboarding, tours and microsurveys. Pulkit studied engineering at Cambridge and previously worked in startups, non-profits and consulting. He writes extensively about user onboarding, product-led growth and UX design. It's a pleasure to have you, Pulkit, thanks for being here.
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. It's going to be a really fun conversation and I'm excited to participate.
Ash Oliver:
I'm super excited. So our topic is on the relationship between user onboarding and product-led growth. But first, I thought we could start with the founding story behind Chameleon. What was the original motivation behind the company?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. We were inspired, I guess, in a way by Asana. We were trying to learn how to use Asana and we were really struggling. So we had the help center–which is really fantastic—headed up on a different monitor actually, and we had Asana on our main laptops and we were like, "Okay, let's figure out how do you do this?" And we'd go to the help center, read a bit, then go back to the product and try to do that. Then we'd play the video, the teaching video which was in the help center, pause it, recreate it. And there's all this back and forth switching. And we were wondering, we're like, "Does everyone do this? Is this how you learn software?" And it felt like it wasn't very sustainable. And so then we started asking people, "Wait, what do you think about your user onboarding? Are you happy with it?"
Pulkit Agrawal:
And people were like, "No, it sucks." We're like, "Well, why don't you fix it?" And they're like, "Oh, it's such a big project. We don't have time. There's a backlog of features." We realized that there really wasn't an easy way for teams to help coach their users in context, depending on where the user was in their journey, what they needed to learn. And that was preventing people from employing an iterative and continuous improvement approach to user onboarding. And as we're seeing, people don't spend that much time on marketing websites, they want to just go and try the product. In this product-led movement it's all about "actually, does the product stand up?"
Pulkit Agrawal:
And so in that world, we need to continue to iterate and optimize and test and experiment with flows like user onboarding. We can't employ the old waterfall approach of, "Well, we're going to do one big project. We'll make it amazing and then we'll leave it for nine months. And then we're realizing it sucks again and we have to fix it again." So that's what the inspiration was behind building something that lets non-engineers really start to play around with creating this UX and that UX being very contextual and targeted and personalized.
Ash Oliver:
And this was how many years ago? Because I'm thinking about how timely and important this is now, most especially with PLG. But when you got started with this, what was it like for the scene at that point?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. This was some years ago. We went to market in 2016 and I think at the time we had to face a couple of objections. One was like, "Well, why do we need a tool for onboarding? We can just build it ourselves." And I think that represented some of the thinking back then which is, "Actually, we're still really protective of our product. We don't want to use tooling if we can build it in house." And I think that's evolving now. I think companies are realizing it's often way cheaper to buy a solution than to employ a person to do the same job. And also these solutions can go way deeper than you do it in house. And we've learned from folks like at Atlassian who built this in house. And that's what the big companies can do. They can build, they have teams working on this and they're building their in-house tooling. But then how do we make that easy and accessible for every other company?
Pulkit Agrawal:
So that was one of the objections. And then the other objection that we faced was this principle or this idea that, we don't need user onboarding at all. If we have user onboarding the product isn't intuitive and actually, all we need is an intuitive product and we don't need user onboarding. And I think that's also evolved because really the fundamental principle behind that is, well, it's only intuitive if a user has seen it and done it before and they're familiar with it. Now, that's fine if you're doing something that's very similar to what exists. But if you're innovating in any way—you have a different UX pattern, you have different terminology, you have a different way of connecting the dots—the user is going to have to learn at some point and maybe they'll learn by themselves. But actually, folks like B.J. Fogg, who's a professor of Persuasive Technology at Stanford, talks about how do you drive action for users? How do people take action?
Pulkit Agrawal:
And it's a combination of these three things. It's not just about having the ability, you also need to have motivation. And it's not just about having motivation and ability, you need to have a prompt or a trigger that actually causes that action. And so if we translate that to the world of users and software, motivation is analogous to value proposition. Do people feel motivated or do they understand the value proposition of what they might get or why they're doing this? Ability is analogous to the interface or the ease of use, are they able to do this thing easily? But then you still have these trigger.
Pulkit Agrawal:
And so that trigger is where you might have onboarding or a prompt in the product to help drive that action. So that objection about it all just being intuitive is also unraveling. And so I think now as product-led growth and really usage based pricing comes into the forefront where it's absolutely critical for companies to drive usage of their products by their users, I think teams are becoming much more aware of the value and the benefit solutions that drive and improve user onboarding can provide.
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. Well, and when you said that objection around not needing onboarding if the product is designed intuitively, it makes me think of the antiquated notion that you don't need marketing. If the product would sell itself, it doesn't need any marketing to drive any awareness. I'm curious, maybe we can have you lay some groundwork. How would you necessarily define user onboarding and where is the starting point of user onboarding?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. Good question. So I'll talk about what I think it is and what also it's not. So as a simple definition, it's the system to get users to new value. Now, the most common place to apply that is when someone's interacting with your product for the first time and it's like, "Okay. Well, how do we get them to this value?" People talk about aha moments and that's a representation of value. And so how do we get people to the aha moment? Now, it also applies in cases where people are not new to your product. But for example, they signed up a year ago, they didn't use it and now they're coming back. You still need some element of user onboarding because you need to onboard them in this slightly new context. There are other cases where you might do a feature launch and essentially, you're onboarding them to some new value in that feature. Or you might do a redesign or a platform change and it's like, there's some value there.
Pulkit Agrawal:
So I think one thing to realize is that actually, it's not just when the user is new. That also reminds us that it's not just about once they get into your product but it's also very contingent on the context they have before they get into the product. So if they are familiar with your product because you're a really mature product, they're going to have different expectations and different needs than if it's a brand new product. And similarly, over time, your product's context changes as the market changes. And so the user onboarding that you have for new users today should probably be different to the user onboarding that you have for your users in a year. So I think there's some things here about: it applies to different context. It starts earlier in some ways than you might anticipate because the content you're putting out there, the website leads to it—whether or not that's actual user onboarding.
Pulkit Agrawal:
And I think it doesn't really ever end because you're always trying to drive new value to users over their life cycle. Now, a couple of things that it's not, it's not a product tour. Please, don't make your user onboarding a product tour. It's a system and there's multiple components to a system. Now, a product tour or a prompt in the software to direct somebody or signpost to somebody, that can be a key part of the system. But it also means, what is your email cadence around it? How do you track it and how are you successful with it? What are human interactions that you have? How good is your self serve resource center? So there's a bunch of other things that should also be part of it.
Ash Oliver:
I love the fact that you break it down to really being on a system level. I think some of the misconception is in approaching onboarding like a project, like something you do either at the beginning or that you revisit two years later. And the way that you've described it is way more in line with that ongoing and iterative approach so it's always evolving as the product evolves. What do you think are some of the other either pitfalls or misconceptions around user onboarding?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. I think one of the biggest pitfalls is that there's no one that owns it or is responsible and accountable for the success of it. And we see this also play out very obviously in cases of driving onboarding for new features where a product manager just doesn't have the time or is not held accountable to adoption metrics. It's really focused around shipping and that's understandable. And so it's really all oriented around shipping. But really the best companies will have a team or a person dedicated to try and think about this across the product life cycle on a holistic basis, "how do we drive engagement or retention? Sometimes they're a product growth manager or product growth team.
Pulkit Agrawal:
And once we set somebody with that mandate, that you need to improve activation rates or you need to improve engagement, then they can continue to work on it over time. Versus, if you make it such that it's every PM's job to onboard people onto their feature or it's a footnote to every project to release something, it just doesn't get the time and attention and it can't be a system. It has to be an output and it has to be a project. So I think that's the main thing, how can we help companies think about dedicating a resource to this such that they can continue always iterating and trying and testing and improving.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. That was going to be one of my questions, who owns user onboarding?
Pulkit Agrawal:
I think it is not very standard today. I think product growth can own it and in many cases it owns it. We've also seen scaled customer success own it where it's a tech touch approach to driving engagement and success for customers. We've seen some cases, product marketing have some components to it. I think that's still not quite fully evolved because product marketing typically is focused around announcements of changes and features. I think there's an evolution in the organization that needs to happen around who should own it.
Pulkit Agrawal:
But ideal combination is somebody with some product skillset who can understand trade offs and engagement and who understands flows, UX and design skillset who can understand how does this match our existing brand and patterns, somebody with a marketing mindset who can think about value proposition and benefits. And then somebody with a customer success mindset who can understand the questions and the struggles that customers have in the process. So I think if you can find either a cross functional team with these capabilities or some folks who can bring this to the table that would set you up well for success to drive continued improvements to your onboarding and in-product engagement.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. And what you've said–specifically around the difference in constructing user onboarding where it's bridging the gap to value versus an education or a tour–I think what you've described in the skill sets and the cross functional teammates that might make up a successful team to do this relies on those kinds of capabilities. Because otherwise, you might just get the how to and leave out the value piece which I think is critical to what you're saying here. How about segmentation and personalization, how do these come into play? Maybe this might be more of the advanced type of approach to user onboarding but what you're describing here in terms of knowing all of these flows that are coming into the mix and the different scenarios or context that these users are coming into the onboarding experience, how does segmentation or personalization work within creating this kind of system of user onboarding?
Pulkit Agrawal:
I think it's probably less level five and more level two. I think you need to do it. I think the most annoying thing is getting hit with in-product suggestions that aren't relevant to you because you're immediately looking to dismiss that and it's annoying. It's detrimental if you get hit with content that's irrelevant. It's like a spam email, I don't want it. So instead of doing email blasts, you want to get targeted with your email list and be like, "Hey, who engages with my content? Who likes reading my email? What kind of different groups of people are there on my email list and therefore what content should I share with them?" Well, some are prospects, some are customers. That's a really basic definition. And maybe we can think about, "Well, which of my prospects are in the buyer journey and there's intent or which of my customers are on which plan?"
Pulkit Agrawal:
So why don't we do that to the onboarding? It's like, we've figured it out for email lists, we should apply the same thing for onboarding. I think there is absolutely necessity to have variations of this. If it feels hard, I would say, think about it this way: don't hit everyone with everything. At least try to think about if I'm going to show something, how can I indicate or how can I get a sense of which people might need it? And if you can't get that, let them choose. So offer something, be like, "Do you need help?" That's not invasive, that's subtle. And then let them opt into it. And that way you're giving people the power and control to play and discover which is a really important part of onboarding because we've been thinking about it from a product manager lens. But let's switch it and think about it from a user perspective lens.
Pulkit Agrawal:
I'm going to try a new product, I have a goal in mind, there's a real trigger that's led me to go invest time in exploring something. I want to check it out but I want to play and I want to try and I want to learn by doing. I don't want to have to read a manual before I try the thing. When I find aha moments that give me motivation to keep persevering, it's like, "Oh. Cool, this worked. Now, I'll do something else." But if I have to put in a lot of work and I don't find any aha moments, my motivation will at some point go down to zero and I'm going to bounce. So I think it's really important as product teams or people thinking about onboarding to have the sense of, "Well, where are users getting excited and where can we let them play and where do they find value and how do we orient our experiences and nudges around that?"
Pulkit Agrawal:
So personalization and segmentation and targeting is critical. It obviously does need you to know something about the user. Now, you can collect some of that information through data enrichment services because you can get their title. You can collect some of that data in signup flow. For example, we require you to sign up with a company domain and with that, we can get a lot of information about the company. But you might ask somebody something specific like, "What's your use case today?" If you can't get that in the signup flow, you can ask that as a microsurvey really early in their experience and collect it that way. So I think you do need to get some indications and then you're starting to build a picture of the user and that can start to factor into how you're showcasing experiences. But it's absolutely important to personalize and maybe you have different personas or maybe it's just some people don't like to get taught and they just want to explore and then they get stuck. So I really strongly encourage you to have some segmentation targeting.
Ash Oliver:
That's a topic that I hear discussed a lot and especially, even from a personal example with Maze, the product is used really among people who do research which crosses the chasms—UX researchers and product managers and designers. And so those are three different types of people that would be approaching the product and potentially having a different user onboarding experience. What do you think are some of the other key decisions that are critical to get right in designing user onboarding experiences, especially as we're thinking about how user onboarding really relates to product led growth and how that can fuel the activation and the long term retention? What are some of the ingredients to get right in onboarding in order to have that output?
Pulkit Agrawal:
It's really important to know the aha moments. Now, the aha moment we talked about is the moment where someone gets delight, they are able to connect the dots, they're able to see how this thing can help them succeed and get to their goal or outcome. So, from a user perspective—I'm not talking about activation metrics, I'm not talking about magic number metrics, none of that. Those things are from a product perspective. But from a user perspective, what are the aha moments? And maybe they're different by persona. Once you know the aha moments, it should be clear what the path is to aha. So thinking about user onboarding—understanding the aha moments really clearly and ideally tracking those with some metric like instrumenting an event so you can actually measure it.
Pulkit Agrawal:
Knowing the key path and the key milestones to aha, ideally also tracking that with some events so you can know where drop off is mostly happening. And then looking at identifying the different kinds of friction. There's one resource that I would recommend people to think about when they're trying to assess and improve which is running a friction log or completing a friction log. It's a methodology and it's really great to think through in detail, "what is the emotion a user's having as they have to go through each step of the process?" And then that will help you identify, "Well, this is where there's red emotion. There's red highlights here," and this is something that our user would've bounced if they weren't super motivated and that can help you identify friction.
Pulkit Agrawal:
It's a really great thing to have new people do. Everyone that joins the Chameleon team we ask them to go through a friction log exercise for our onboarding each time. So we're always getting new perspectives and understanding what the friction is and it's hard to get that same perspective for somebody who's been in it for a long time but new team members are a great source of friction log. So I'd encourage folks to try and review and leverage that methodology.
Ash Oliver:
That's an amazing suggestion, I appreciate that. I was thinking about what are some of the approaches that you can use to go through either an audit or what I've seen from more of the design perspective of like a tear down of user onboarding. So maybe is there anything else you can elaborate on there beyond doing this initial inventory of things, what other factors would you be considering? Or even incorporating for tests to validate the opportunities for improvement?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. I think a friction log is a good place to begin because I think it maps out the journey and where people are struggling and it does do that audit pretty well. I think then what you are at is you have to validate your hypotheses. So you'll come up with some hypotheses like "this friction, you know, if we remove it, it'll be successful." And you can validate that by asking people, you can validate that by running a test in some way, you can validate that with a fake door test, you can make the change and run an AB test or series test. There's a bunch of ways to validate that. I would also recommend just looking at other examples. So I always shout out useronboard.com. Samuel Hulick has done a really fantastic job at just showing lots of different setup flows, sign up flows. And I think with the commentary around that, you can learn a lot of the basic principles.
Ash Oliver:
Amazing. So in your mind, what companies have standout examples of excellent or successful product onboarding experiences?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. I can't not talk about Slack.
Ash Oliver:
It's a good one.
Pulkit Agrawal:
I mean, everyone expects it. So I won't talk about it too long. But I think Slack did a good job and there's a few things beyond the standard. One is it hides stuff that's not relevant. So you'll see it, it's like gliffied out or it's like blocks. And it's like, actually don't focus on the stuff, focus on the stuff that you need to care about. And that's something that we can all do as products, how do we just hide stuff that isn't relevant so we don't overwhelm users or we don't have them go down the wrong path or different branches? The other thing Slack does really well is it's really bright and bold about its sign posting and suggestions. So it's not like, Oh, this is really defensive, it's a tiny little tool tip. It's hard to find. It doesn't look that great because it's the JavaScript library and no one's really done any treatment on it.
Pulkit Agrawal:
It's really bold and bright. It's like, Hey, this is a bright blue tip tool tip. Or this is a bright green banner or whatever it is. It's like, Hey, we're confident about this help and we want to make sure that you notice it and you can decide. It's not invasive. It's not getting in your face, stopping you doing things. You can decide if you want it but we want you to notice this. If you're going to offer any sign posting, make it bright, make it bold, make it confident, make it succinct. It's pretty succinct, you don't have to read paragraphs or watch long videos on Slack to move forward.
Pulkit Agrawal:
The other thing tip on that tangential tip is that people end up using titles ineffectively. When you have a title and body text, people will scan the title and decide if they want to read the body text. So if all of your value is contained in the body text and your title is just a header that's like "introduction" or "welcome," that doesn't help someone decide that they want to read the body text. There's so many things that Slack has done. There's others that are more complicated, like maybe Duolingo or games do a really good job. But I also want to make it accessible to everyone. You don't have to build a game to build good user onboarding, you can just learn from these simple principles.
Ash Oliver:
This is a really great example. It makes me wonder how do you intentionally incorporate the brands in onboarding? Because it's also, just like what you've described with Slack, like an extension of that brand recognition upfront. So what are some ways beyond perhaps tone of voice or colors that you can really infuse the brand in user onboarding?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. I think even the tone of voice and color is actually sometimes not well handled because sometimes it's thought of a disconnected thing to the rest of your product. So I think starting with having a mini design guide for your user onboarding prompts or anything that's one time in-product experience is helpful. Now, what we see often is people having, for example, they have a white application and they'll have a white help tip. And actually you think as a product manager like, "Super obvious, oh my God, this thing's sticking out like a sore thumb." But actually a user has no idea. They're like, "Oh, this is like one of the many boxes on the page." So making it such that it is distinct and it has its own style. Also something that we do is we try to have a clear color palette for things that are helpful and informative and guide like, and then things that are like, for example, upsells or locked states or things that you can have access to at a premium.
Pulkit Agrawal:
Beyond that, I think applying the same product design principles to your user onboarding. It needs to be compelling, it needs to be easy to use. The CTA should be like something that people want to click on and it should be easy to dismiss it or defer it. Don't be unnecessarily obtrusive. I think there's lots of ways that you can just employ good product design practices. So I would just recommend thinking up front a little bit and preparing some little mini design guide and then your teams can then not rely on designers each time.
Ash Oliver:
That's really smart because I mean, even thinking to my own product onboarding experiences, I'm a big Sam fan as well, and as a designer I'm looking and paying attention to these things as I'm trying out new products. And it's always really disappointing to feel captivated and pulled into the product from either the landing page or the marketing site. And then you go into the product and you're hit with almost this ad experience. And even that doesn't look at all like the rest of the tool. It looks, like you were saying, like old JavaScript that was just thrown there to do this education experience.
Ash Oliver:
Just going back to what you were talking about in terms of really drawing out the value, I think it's maybe an oversight by some teams because it's just maybe looked at always from the lens of describing how to do something instead of connecting it to the actual benefit and value of doing it. Is there anything in terms of that specific point, how to be able to highlight the value, not just the how to inside of user onboarding?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. You set me up really well here because I talk about not focusing on the how and focusing on the why. And that's another relatively, straightforward shift that folks can do. They can audit their existing onboarding and be like, "How much of this is about how and where is it about why?" And I will be willing to bet that most folks, their user onboarding is going to be all about the how. You think the problem is people don't know how to do something and that's why they're not doing it and that's that one axis, that ability or ease of use. But they forget about this other axis which is motivation and value prop. And so if we think about all of the great work on the marketing website which is all about the why, the benefits, the value prop, and then in the product it's like about turn into just the how. But actually, because people are evaluating not just on the website, they're evaluating the first experience and when they're in the product, you need to have components of that website in the product.
Pulkit Agrawal:
And it needs to be drip fed to users across because they're still making those buying decisions in the product. And so we need to have some of the same language flow in, some of the same design flow in, but some of the same value proposition and reinforcement of the value that you can get. And so when people ask me, "Hey, what videos work well in when you're onboarding?" I say, "Hey, put a case study, put an interview with a customer, put a message from the founder." It's that kind of video where you want people to engage with the purpose and the mission and the success out of it. Not like, "Hey, here's a intricate six minute video of how you set this thing up." So I think we need to focus on the why, as much as the how.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, definitely. I'm thinking too about maybe how you've observed this differently from like a B2C versus B2B. Because I'm thinking about onboarding within an enterprise context. Nowadays, we're seeing a lot of that B2C trends and best practices that are now coming over the fence into enterprise because our buyers and users of enterprise software expects consumer grade product experiences. So how does that translate in terms of the difference in user onboarding in a B2C versus B2B environment?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. I think B2C just has had to be better at it because people are making decisions in the moment and it's not an organizational decision, it's an individual decision. So I think we are having to upgrade our B2B experiences in UX to be consumer grade as you said. Now, the one benefit of B2C that doesn't exist in the B2B world is scale and the data you can leverage in the B2C to quickly run experiments and get to understanding of what's working and what's not working.
Pulkit Agrawal:
So in a B2B context, you might be a relatively big business with high value users but you're in the scale of thousands or tens of thousands of users, not in the hundreds of thousands of millions. So I think how do you bring in scalable and lean fashion insights from your users? And I would highly recommend microsurveys as an approach to do that. That can also help teach you what's going on, what are users thinking? Why are they here, what do they like and dislike? Because the data might tell you where the problem is but it's really hard to figure out why the problem exists just with the numeric data.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. I'd love to have you speak on that a little bit further because that marriage between the qualitative and quantitative is an important aspect and it triggers in the mind of when you're talking about the event tracking and all of these things that we have to instrument before we can necessarily construct the onboarding experience around it. I see that as maybe a potential hurdle for teams, especially when we're talking about early stage startups, maybe they don't have that tooling or level of event tracking to be able to make these decisions. So when you're talking about microsurveys or alternative methods to incorporating this information, I'm curious if you could expand there.
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. So what comes to mind when you think about a survey is like, "I don't want to do a survey." Someone sends me an email first, "I don't want to do it." But actually, microsurveys have an extremely high response rate, on average 60 to 70% of people are completing them. So it's like, "Wait, what's going on there?" And what we can do is understand, "Well, why do people complete microsurveys? And let's define microsurveys," which for us is a single question survey. And the reason that people are doing them is because they're in context and they're really easy to answer. So in context, if you ask me about how good is my reporting and I'm on the reports page, I can connect the dots about like, "Well, my effort here is going to go to a really clear result because they're thinking about improving the reporting page."
Pulkit Agrawal:
So I'm motivated to actually contribute. But if I'm out on the street and I get an email about, "Hey, fill in your feedback about this product," and it's a 10 question thing, I'm just like, "I don't really care, where is it going?" It's just out of context. So putting a microsurvey in the product, on the right page, at the right time. And the second thing is it's just easy to answer. It's like, "give me a very simple question. I don't have to invest that much time in it. I'll do it." It's just obvious, it's low friction. So microsurveys are also part of this trend of, how do we become more conversational? And so instead of having to ask all of the stuff up front, you can ask lots of different questions across the user lifecycle as they take actions and it feels like it's a conversation.
Pulkit Agrawal:
It's like, "Okay. Well, it's just this thing, let me interact with this with good feedback and close the loop." And so microsurveys are effective and they're a really good way to collect feedback at scale. In the last years, we have become very good at shipping quickly and being lean and continuous deployment. But we haven't done a good job of continuous feedback. The feedback is still very much ad hoc and project based. We'll do a UX research project or we'll set up 10 interviews and we'll do all that once and we'll get some insights and then that's it. We're not going to do that until the next project. So how do we change from that to keep up to speed with all the stuff we're shipping? We need to find better ways to do it.
Pulkit Agrawal:
And we think these targeted contextual in product microsurveys are a really valuable tool to do that. And they can bring both data that's more discovery based by having an open field which is like, "Hey, why are you here, what do you care about?" Letting people type those answers out. But it can also bring structured data, which of these use cases is applicable to you or like what's the most valuable feature or how much would you recommend this feature to other customers? And then that structured data can flow into all these other places. You can do analysis based on that and look at people who choose one thing versus the other and how they get retained or you can target them with other follow up experiences based on what they respond. So I think there's a lot of power here in thinking about leveraging microsurveys for user onboarding but for also other use cases.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. That's what I was going to say. You see microsurveys and user onboarding going hand in hand, not necessarily to say all the microsurveys get deployed within whatever the confines of your user onboarding experience would be. But I'm thinking about what you were talking about in terms of personalization and segmentation where these microsurveys can be designed to fit that use case. And so the journey of that user experience for that particular persona has also a particular set of microsurveys within it.
Pulkit Agrawal:
Absolutely. I think one thing that I often see people make the mistake of is they go and build their user onboarding but they're not super well connected with what the pain points are. So I ask them like, "Hey, before you build something to solve a problem, can you just spend a little bit of time discovering or validating the problem?" And so microsurveys are a good way—even before you think about solving it with user onboarding experiences or changes in your UX—to validate that. So that's a great way. And then I think microsurveys can be great if you're going through the user onboarding and getting checkpoints of like, "Hey, are you clear? Do you need help? What is it that you're struggling with?" And I mean, it doesn't have to be just microsurveys but you could offer people a prompt to book a call at the right time or join a webinar.
Pulkit Agrawal:
We saw one customer have a ton of success with having people sign up for their get started webinar series. But when they were just emailing users about it, it wasn't very effective. They had low turn up. But when they put it in the product on a page where people struggled, the sign up was immensely high. And then they got a lot of people onto the webinar, they were able to educate them on all these things and that help drove conversion. So I think it's the ability to have targeted prompts and those are questions in a way like, "Do you want to join a webinar or do you need help?" I think that can be really effective.
Ash Oliver:
I'm interested, and this maybe brings us back to our starting point in the conversation. But why do you think user onboarding hasn't been getting as much attention when it's so clearly linked inside of a product-led growth operation?
Pulkit Agrawal:
I think it's more that product-led is having its heyday because there's novelty to it. And I think it's bringing focus to a pretty age old perspective around self-service. Product-led growth existed way back, it was just called self-service and companies didn't focus on it as much. And maybe because there's that consumerization of the buyer or there's individuals buying, we're moving to usage based pricing. All that's leading to a renewal and thinking about how do we drive self-service growth. And someone's framed it as product-led growth and that's why it's predominant today. I think for anyone that's actually a practitioner and thinking about product-led growth, they're probably already thinking about user onboarding and activation metrics.
Ash Oliver:
Interesting. I'm wondering, it's been seven years now since starting Chameleon if my math is correct. What comparisons can you draw between user onboarding now and then? Were there any really big surprises or big learnings over your time so far with Chameleon?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. I can talk about maybe more of a very specific example to us and how our understanding of our own user onboarding changed. We first went to market in 2016 with the expectation that we could be a fully no touch sales process. And so it was a completely self-service. We had no sales people, no one to really talk to you. And that was a misestimation or understanding of the market. And we realized over time that actually it's very valuable to customers to speak to a product expert or consultant in their evaluation process because they have all these detailed questions. In some ways there is friction, because you have to set up a call to figure it out. But if we can get over that friction, we can make it very, very valuable to a user and get them to aha moments. And so that was an approach where we realized actually we needed more friction and that will help long term success.
Pulkit Agrawal:
And then when we introduce that friction, we're now also trying to figure out, "Well, we've got this friction, it drives a lot of value, but how can we make it easy to even get here?" So one change that we did is for example, on our demo page, we added a short video explaining what we cover in a demo. So it's just like, we've introduced friction, we think we need to have a demo because that helps people get the answers to the questions they care about, but how do we make that friction a little bit less? And it's like, "Well, let's give people a sense of what they're signing up for and what they expect," and that helps. So I think, over time, the thing that's still holding true is user onboarding is really critical to the success of the company and you need to keep it iterating and improving it over time.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. And it sounds like that continuous feedback is right there in line with all of that. It's the ingredients to making it all work. It's been so insightful. It's really a crash course in user onboarding. At the last end of our segment here, I have a series of what we call hat trick questions that we ask every guest just to get a sense of the person that we're speaking to. So the first question I have for you is, what's one thing that you've done in your career that has helped you succeed that you think very few other people do?
Pulkit Agrawal:
So I think when I've had career transitions, I have quit my first thing without having the second thing lined up. And I think a lot of people want to have the second thing lined up before they leave the first thing. If you always have the next thing lined up, you don't give yourself space to explore and really find a more global optimum. So I found it extremely valuable to take some months off between transitions and give you space to really figure out what you want to do.
Ash Oliver:
Oh, I love that. That's a really great piece of advice. My next question is, what is one industry related book that you'd recommend the most and why?
Pulkit Agrawal:
So I probably haven't given it out and maybe I should be giving it out more. But I really like this book called Nudge. It talks about information architecture and how people make decisions and choice architecture and how you can help them make decisions. It's a very easy read but if you're interested in psychology or how people make decisions and UX, it's a really, really good read. And also because it goes through a lot of examples that are from the real world, and that can help translate into software. It's a pretty popular book but I recommend that.
Ash Oliver:
Amazing. My last question for you Pulkit is, what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Pulkit Agrawal:
Okay. So something that people think is weird is I often take my shoes off at restaurants or I'll just sometimes even put my feet up and it's really impolite, maybe, I don't know. But I like the connection of my feet to the surface. And I think it's a really good signal for me. I enjoy it. I wear the Vibram five finger shoes when I run and when I hike, and so I really enjoy not having my feet trapped in socks and shoes. I actually went to the Gusto office at one point and I love the fact that in the office, it's a shoes off policy. And if you're a visitor, you take your shoes off and they give you socks to wear. And I think it's just wonderful to have that grounding with the earth. And so maybe that's a weird enough or absurd enough thing to do.
Ash Oliver:
That's definitely one of the most unique answers I've had and I love it. I mean, I'm a no shoes household. And I feel like there's a very polarizing topic. Amazing. Pulkit, this has been really an incredible opportunity to connect with you. And I appreciate all the insight. This has been great.
Pulkit Agrawal:
Yeah. It's been really fun. I've really enjoyed myself and you've had some really great questions. And hopefully, it'll be insightful.
Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by Ash Oliver and brought to you by Maze, a product research platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening. And until next time.