Tailored Onboarding (Growth Design Monthly)

May 2022

Hi Readers,As growth designers, we want to do right by our users. We want to focus on them and their needs as the primary way to drive business outcomes.  But how can we keep users at the center while building financially viable companies?Segmentation is one of the most effective ways to practically meet both goals. I learned this first-hand while leading growth design at Dropbox. My belief in segmentation as a dual lever of growth and satisfaction was reinforced by talking with hundreds of tech leaders since co-founding Switchboard. Segmentation makes products more salient to the given user, which lifts performance. Segmentation—especially through tailored onboarding—helps us achieve the ultimate growth win-win: creating better experiences that drive business results.Happy tailoring,Phil Vander BroekCo-Founder, Switchboard 

Why User Segmentation

B2B SaaS products are super complex, especially for new users to get started. Initial setup often requires technical integrations. Once the data is flowing, you’ll need to quickly deliver value to a variety of users with different needs. The job of a growth team is to help different users discover, understand, and ultimately connect with unique values your product offers each segment.Even the simplest approaches to segmentation can lead to huge wins. One of our biggest wins at Dropbox was asking users what they wanted to do during onboarding, segmenting them based on their answer, and then connecting them with that value with unique journeys.

1. Segmentation starts with understanding

The job of a growth team is to connect users with the value your product offers. At the core, this means understanding your users.  What are their biggest problems? And what do they intend to do with your product to solve those problems? The best framework for thinking about what users are trying to accomplish is jobs-to-be-done (JBTD).This framework will help you and your team be grounded in user needs. For example, some of the key Jobs for Dropbox users are “backing up files”, “sharing photos”, and “collaborating with coworkers."

2. Practical ways to learn your users JTBD

The best way to know your user’s JTBD is to simply ask them! Start with a simple open-ended survey question: “What are you trying to accomplish with [product]”? Scaled research platforms like Sprig make this easy, but ad-hoc emails or remote user studies work just fine too. After a few weeks of getting answers, you should start seeing patterns of what your users expect to achieve by using your product.Next, combine the qualitative learnings with other sources of data like analytics and demographic data from a CRM or LinkedIn. This work will help you understand if different types of users using your product have different JTBDs. These are your user segments.

3. Common B2B SaaS segments

As I said above, the complexity of B2B SaaS makes segmentation challenging.  To help you brainstorm which segments might work for your product, here are some of the most common examples of segments in B2B SaaS.

Segment

Example

Thoughts

Plan or SKU

Free trial, Plus, Pro, Enterprise, Add-ons

The most basic segment in B2B SaaS.

Lifecycle

Onboarding, Activated, Highly Engaged, Dormant

Onboarding is only one stage of the user lifecycle.

JTBD or usecase

Product specific. At Dropbox, these could be “storing files”, “sharing photos”, or “collaborating with coworkers”.

This is one of the most underutilized segmentation strategies.

Functional Role

Sales, Marketing, Developer

Common, but a potential trap because often different roles will have the same JTBD.

Collaborative Role

Creator, Collaborator, Viewer, Invitee, Team Creator, Team Joiner

Common for productivity and collaborative products. Team concept is powerful.

Nth user

1st user, Nth user.

B2B SaaS apps often require setup that’s unique to the first user. That first user is also usually an admin (whether they intended to be or not).

Source

Specific landing page, general sign up.

One of the most effective segments because you can capture the user’s intent.

4. Using segments to power experiences

These segments can be mixed and matched.  At Dropbox we would often combine Plan, Lifecycle, and Collaborative Role for powerful results.  For example, we had experiences that helped a new team joiner users on the free trial more easily collaborate with their teammates. But don’t be afraid to start small.Segmenting by Plan/SKU is a good idea because you’ll want to connect users to the different values your products offer. It’s a great place to start, but I’ve heard from my convos starting Switchboard that almost all teams want to segment beyond Plan/SKU. I agree, I think that’s where some of the biggest opportunities exist, particularly segmenting by JTBD.As one example, Airtable tailors their onboarding based on JTBD and Nth users:

"If someone discovers their use case via an Airtable landing page or template, then it's important that we connect them with that value by tailoring their onboarding to the same JTBD. Similarly, a user building their first workflow for personal use has meaningfully different needs than the 5000th user joining Airtable at a large enterprise."

- Lauryn Isford • Head of Growth, Airtable

You have your segments now use them!

Once you have your user segments, the best place to start using them is in creating tailored onboarding.  User onboarding is critically important to B2B businesses. Improving onboarding is one of the best ways to drive retention and is a key driver of a product-led businesses. Even incremental improvements have an outsized impact on the business.And while there’s not a one-size-fits-all onboarding experience for B2B SaaS companies, there is a playbook to get started on creating one that’s right for your unique users, product, and business model:

See the 5 step playbook @Switchboard.cc → 

About the author

Phil is a co-founder of Switchboard, a company that provides APIs and SDKs to help developers create tailored product onboarding, feature discovery, and announcement experiences. Before Switchboard, Phil led Growth and Business Platform Design at Dropbox and was responsible for design for all growth experiences and the internal platforms that powered them. 

✍🏼 🎨 Art and editing by Molly Norris Walker.  Vector art based on the work of Spencer Camp. Pitch us: [email protected]

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