E247: Product Onboarding and Customer Success Beats Features
An interview with Alex Rastatuev, Senior Product Manager @ Keyhole.co
YouTube Link | Podcast Link (all platforms)
Quick interruption: I’m moderating a panel at Product-Led Summit in London on June 24th. Come along and find out about “Product building when the playbook fails” with some great product leaders. You can also get 20% off the event ticket price by using the code jasonknight on this link. See you there!
Who is Alex Rastatuev?
Alex Rastatuev is a Senior Product Manager for Keyhole, a social media insights company, and is passionate about product-led growth. He's also an active mentor, looking to pay it forward to the next generation of PMs.
Alex's hot take? That thoughtful product onboarding and education is more important than showing all your features all at the same time, and will lead to better activation rates and product growth.
Episode highlights:
1. Onboarding > Features
There’s a constant temptation to add features, especially to B2B Products, but this can lead to a cluttered, confusing user experience. Rather than concentrating on shoving as many features in people’s faces as possible, try to optimise how people are introduced to features, how they get value from them, and see your activation rates rise.
2. Onboarding needs cross-functional engagement & ownership
There are so many easy-to-use tools out there these days that it’s incredibly easy to start inserting tooltips and guides without even having to rely on developers. But, this can lead to overwhelming experiences if not coordinated. Remember those old Geocities webpages from the olden days of the web, with 150 banner ads flashing all over the place? Don’t make your product look like that!
3. Use data to provide personalised experiences
Steer clear of one-size-fits-all onboarding experiences and leverage user data to make sure that you provide a responsive experience that helps your users find what they really need and get value as quickly as possible. No one wants to get lost in irrelevant flows or see yet another pop-up for the sake of it.
4. Not everything has to be an automated, guided walkthrough
It’s become a meme that products must be “simple” and that complication or the need to explain is a sign of failure. But there are products out there that are legitimately complicated, and you need to use the right tools to onboard people. Sometimes, this might even include human-led training and onboarding teams; ultimately, just use the right tool for the job.
5. AI can be used to help, but you still need to make the final decision
Everyone’s talking about AI, and cramming it into as many parts of their product as possible. There’s certainly a role for AI in optimising user onboarding, either directly or through analysing usage patterns and identifying underserved user flows. But, this stuff is too important to fire and forget – you still need a person to curate the experience (for now).
Find Alex
Find Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-rastatuev/ or check out his mentoring profile: https://partnerup.intelligentpeople.co.uk/mentor/alex-rastatuev/.
Related episodes you should like:
Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua)
Solving the Growth Equation to Derive Product/Market Fit (Andy Budd, Author "The Growth Equation")
Product-Led Growth - Game Over for the Sales Team? (Wes Bush, Author "Product-Led Growth")