All aboard!

In an ideal world, your product is so intuitive that every single customer and user could pick up your product and immediately start using it without any help. This is not an ideal world. So we need to find ways to assist folks who need a little help getting started with our product without getting in the way of those who don’t. Falling on either side of that razor’s edge can seriously hamper first impressions of your product. (Clippy, we’re looking at you).

Meanwhile, in product news, there are tools to help you build your onboarding, AI can read the manual for you, maybe we need one app to rule them all, and that one app may be SQL.

10 User onboarding behavioral principles and dark patterns you need to know. How often do you ask yourself: “What do our users need or care about?" Kate Syuma likes to keep it simple: “What is good for the user is good for business”. Kate started reminding herself more often about this thesis when thinking about the onboarding advice she gives to companies, course materials she creates, or practices she shares.

Digital onboarding: How to make it work for you. Digital is in. And digital onboarding is just one of many processes that companies are adopting to keep up with the new online business environment. Research shows that companies who offer digital onboarding see a 50-60% increase in conversion when compared to traditional onboarding. Consumers desire the ability to interact with businesses digitally — whether it's shopping online or completing onboarding from home. Alana Chinn, MBA explains how you can provide a seamless digital onboarding experience for your customers .

Product onboarding ultimate guide: Steps, examples & tips. Done right,?product onboarding?can do wonders for your SaaS company. It helps: improve user activation and retention, reduce customer acquisition costs, prevent user disengagement, improve customer loyalty, and reduce customer abandonment and burnout. Hannah Clark explains how to get user onboarding right , plus her favorite tools for getting your users settled in and ready to rock.

Behind the Product: ONCE. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson , recently started ONCE, an initiative that offers software products users can buy once and own forever. They envisioned a model where the code was transparent, allowing users to host it themselves, free from the constraints of recurring fees and external control. Here are the highlights from Mike Belsito ’s conversation with Jason Fired about launching ONCE and its family of products.

15 Best examples of customer onboarding videos. When time is money, no one wants to spend hours reading thousands of words on a page to learn how to use a single product feature, and expecting your customers to do it is like waiting for pigs to fly. That's why the folks at Synthesia gathered?15 inspirational examples of the best customer onboarding videos ?- some of which you can even replicate yourself.

Do you like what you see?

If you like what you're reading, go to ProductCollective.com and subscribe. That way, you can get this newsletter in your inbox every Friday before everyone else.

This week on Rocketship.fm

Mastering stakeholder management as a product manager/product leader. In this episode, host Mike Belsito sits down with Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Appel, co-authors of "Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders." The three discuss the often challenging world of stakeholder management, offering practical advice for product managers and leaders looking to navigate complex organizational dynamics — covering topics such as understanding organizational structures, building rapport with stakeholders, and managing roadmap changes.

Product Management News: Week of August 12, 2024

While we’re talking about onboarding… The founders of Flow have explored the variety of ways to create user onboard and have been left wanting for more. So they created their own. Flow is a new tool for creating onboarding flows and product tours that offer more flexibility, more power, more control and more features without a higher price.

Why RTFM when AI can do it for you? Studies show that many of us don’t bother to read the user guide (20% in the UK, 50% in the US) While it may be ok for consumers to skip the occasional user guide, it’s probably not a good idea in the world of industry. To make sure engineers know exactly how the systems they look after work, UK industrial software firm Aveva launched an AI system that can read and learn operating manuals on their behalf. Let’s just hope the AI didn’t hallucinate too much.

“There’s an app for that” was all wrong. The conventional wisdom for B2B SaaS founders is that their software should solve one pain point, gain customers, then add features as their company grows. Parker Conrad, founder and CEO of Rippling, thinks that’s the wrong way to do it . That approach leads to businesses having to manage 100 different separate pieces of software to run their business, leading to lots of inefficiency. His suggested approach - one app to rule them all, like Rippling (or Microsoft Office, or your favorite ERP package).

Well, I can spell SQL. If you’ve ever faced the challenge of getting data out of a wide range of data sources, the folks at Anyquery have your back. This command line interface tool allows you to write SQL queries on pretty much any data source. It is a query engine that can be used to query data from different sources including Google Sheets, Chrome tabs, Spotify libraries, Notion databases, CSVs by using SQL.

Resources and news curated by Kent J McDonald