The Anatomy of Great Onboarding: Best Practices & Ideal Setup 📊

A sign-up is not a real win. Making the client successful is. Here at House Of Products we’ve learned from experience, that the difference is often Great Product Onboarding. In the first two posts of this series, we showed why it matters. Then, why it fails. Now let’s build one that works. The best Onboardings aren't a tour, but tailored experiences that drive action, adapt to context, and solve the problems the product was hired to solve. Here’s how to design yours so it delivers expected outcomes, scales with your product and turns clients into fans.

🧩 Which best practices to follow?

🔸 First make sure you really understand your clients’ goals, what they expect from your product and the context in which they will be using it. Then design your onboarding so that it teaches clients to perform the tasks the product was hired to do quickly and without friction and help them reach the goals they are after. Mind their individual contexts - in B2C markets there will probably be just one user per product, while in B2B the same product can be used by many different users in different roles.

🔸 Clients will have different objectives and those with the same objective might have drastically different characteristics. You should handle that plurality with personalisation, creating a different Onboarding experience for each relevant customer segment.

🔸 There are many benefits in making Onboarding a part of your product and you should avoid solutions like programmed email sequences or a slapped-on toolkits. If your product is an app, your onboarding should be a core feature of that app. This will allow you to onboard in a contextualised way and while they use the product. “Learning while doing” is best. Also when Onboarding is built into your app it will likely be able to generate and consume usage data from the product’s database, facilitating personalisation and onboarding progress tracking.

🧩 Here’s an extra tip from Žiga, our Product Manager that has built quite a few Onboardings for different products over the years:

“Treat your Onboarding as a Core Feature of your product. Besides the technical benefits, it will also prevent you from looking at it as a one-of project and will hopefully inspire you to keep iterating on it, experimenting with different iterations and thus keep learning about your clients and your product. Experimentation in quick iteration cycles and consistent knowledge generation about clients needs is what turned my Onboardings into growth tools. Getting your technical setup right is important, but it’s usually how you use it that will determine success or failure. With RD Station Marketing this approach helped us improve Product Adoption by almost 40% in a relatively short time. It really works if done properly!”

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