Four weeks, two designers, and 22 user interviews. Here's every decision we made in our biggest onboarding overhaul yet.
Our activation rate was stuck at 34%. Industry average for B2B SaaS is around 40–50%. We knew onboarding was the problem. We just didn't know exactly what to fix.
So we talked to users. 22 of them, over four weeks. Here's what we learned and what we built.
The core problem
Our old onboarding showed people everything PMT could do. Every feature. Every setting. Users felt overwhelmed and disengaged before they'd done anything meaningful.
The insight from the interviews: people don't want to learn a tool. They want to solve a problem. We were giving them a tutorial when they wanted a solution.
What we built instead
Use-case onboarding. Instead of a generic "welcome to PMT" flow, users now choose their primary use case: Sprint planning, Bug tracking, or Content calendar. Everything in onboarding — the example project, the default views, the suggested integrations — is tailored to their answer.
The first win moment. We redesigned the flow so every user creates their first real task within 90 seconds. Not a tutorial task — a real task in their actual project. That moment of "this is mine, this is working" is what we optimised for.
The result
Activation rose from 34% to 48% in the six weeks post-launch. That's 40% relative improvement. Our NPS among newly activated users is the highest it's ever been.