Improving Day 0 Engagement (in progress)
Task
Purpose: this document proposes a hypothesis testing program built around an opportunity to improve trial to paid CVR by +40% by introducing a more guided Day 0 onboarding experience
PB is a highly sophisticated tool that drives collaboration on multiple PM use cases at scale, but our key challenge is unlocking that value for new spaces who trial our product.
It’s difficult for self-service customers to get started and scale their usage with our product due to the cumbersome Day 0 experience we present which fails to provide structured paths that lead users towards product value as soon as possible.
Here are some startling facts about trial engagement (July ‘24- April 25):
- Trial to paid conversion (CVR) has steadily declined from 4.5%—> 1.5% (Q1 ‘23 – Q1 ‘25)… a relative drop of -67%
- Day 7 retention is currently less than 20%; in other words, only 1/5 trial spaces log an event in the first week after starting a trial
- Less than 10% of trials log even just 10 onboarding events* we have enormous upside to deliver a better Day 0 for the remaining 90%
In short, the problem is Day 0 – most potential customers can barely get started with key set up actions, then quickly become discouraged and tend to abandon the trial shortly after. Faced with heavy friction and a lack of clear product value, these users don’t stay potential customers for long.
Our goal is to guide new trialists through the minimum viable setup steps required to get value as efficiently + effectively as possible on Day 0.
The pathing hypothesis:
We believe that when users are guided through a clearer, more educational onboarding experience with a more coherent sense of purpose They are more likely to get efficiently set up with relevant data, grasp the value of the product early, and reach activation + multiplayer moments faster in their journey.
By laying strong foundations and making the product’s power visible from the start through stronger pathing on Day 0, we believe we can drive more trialists to convert into engaged customers who become embedded in the product over time.
We plan to iteratively test our pathing hypothesis using the “Getting Started” page all new users see following sign up. Here is the revised onboarding flow we propose
- Set up your product hierarchy: walk the user through a simple 3-5 step flow on /products where they name their product, create structure via components, and define some features
- Add/edit your features: take user to a grid board with pre-selected columns (e.g. status, team, release, timeframe) where they can efficiently set up their data to be “roadmap ready”
- Build a roadmap: take user to timeline board and trigger a product tour to add their roadmap ready features to the plan
- Invite your team: show users how add their team + gather feedback
- (optional) Next best use case…: allow users to choose which use case to tackle next
Our approach is to start by testing the impact of a revamped “Quick Start” sequence that more directly connects each step together and allows the user to get a sense of how PM use cases translate to the various board types, data entities, and action loops that power our user experience.
Breaking down the sequence:
Based on our investigation into Day 0activity signals + solution architect playbooks, we know that a major point of friction for new users is setting up their data foundations. New spaces often have trouble organising their data into a hierarchical/interconnected model that would allow them to effectively manage their entire product operation at scale.
Experimentation plan:
Our goal is to take an iterative approach where we use the “Getting Started” page as the primary hub for testing out onboarding-related experiments + validating our pathing hypotheses
Estimated opportunity:
As mentioned above, less than 10% of current trialists log even 10 onboarding events on Day 0 (see Appendix for event set definition). We have plenty of headroom to move that number.
Why does hitting our Day 0 milestone matter? Spaces that hit the 10 event Day 0 threshold have a trial activation rate of 60%+ and a trial to paid conversion rate of 7%+. In other words, these spaces are 5x more likely to activate and 4x more likely to convert than an average trial space.
If we were able to double the rate of trial spaces that hit our Day 0 milestone (meaning ~20% of trial spaces complete 10+ onboarding actions), we project that we could lift our conversion rate +40% from 1.4% —> 2.0%.*
Project has gone live as of Oct ’25 – Will update with performance in due time
