Intercom on Onboarding

It’s a common mistake for companies to launch features in products without any context. Your goal should never be “get it launched”. Your goal is “get it used”. That’s why the right time to promote an improvement is not only when someone is in your product, but when they’re in a position to use it.

When we think about onboarding we usually don’t think beyond signup. In reality, your onboarding is just getting started. You haven't turned users into experts, and they haven't yet given up all the other products they used before yours. If you only focus your onboarding efforts on new signups, you’re leaving a massive opportunity on the table – passionate, engaged customers.

Multi-team onboarding – the right way
So how do you organize your teams to create a seamless onboarding experience? Here are some steps you can take:
Periodically review the entire experience. Each team responsible for a part of the onboarding flow should review the entire experience end-to-end. This is good for context, so there’s an awareness their part of the process needs to work well with the rest of it. It also helps reveal awkward transitions between different areas of ownership so they can be addressed.
Assign one onboarding owner from each team. It’s critical organizational alignment is created where key people share responsibility for the onboarding flow. The more teams and owners that proliferate, the more silos occur. When you hear people deflecting responsibility, “Oh, you gotta talk to the growth team about that”, rather than, “Let’s work with the growth team on this together”, you know you have an issue. Organizational alignment creates a structure that increases the likelihood of success.
Align each team behind a shared goal. If one team’s goal is to educate the customer, and another’s is to get them through signup as quickly as possible, you can see how cracks in an onboarding flow might occur. Make sure each owner agrees with and works towards the same goal i.e. create the most intuitive, efficient and delightful onboarding experience that results in higher customer conversion.
Enforce domain overlap. Most companies like to box off responsibilities for each team so they can focus on their specific problem. Onboarding doesn’t have that luxury – team overlaps need to be woven together. Instead of fighting these overlaps, iron them out so there’s a smooth transition. In our example, the marketing and growth teams might be responsible for the start of the signup flow and growth and product might be responsible for teaching the customer how to use the product once they buy it. By creating a shared responsibility at each transition point, we create a better model for a more fluid onboarding flow end-to-end.