Redesigning Onboarding for Multiproduct Conversion

The onboarding redesign that drives multiproduct adoption represents a high-impact approach to user conversion that many product teams overlook in favor of easier, lower-impact work.

In Matt LeMay's example, a product team was tasked with converting single-product users to multiproduct users, with a specific numerical target tied directly to business value. When prioritizing their work, they initially focused on smaller, more manageable initiatives like landing page improvements that would only reach a few hundred users.

However, the highest-impact option was to completely redesign the onboarding experience. Instead of retroactively trying to convert users after they had already established single-product usage patterns, they could understand users right from the start and guide them into the appropriate multiproduct category immediately.

The team initially hesitated to pursue this approach because it required cross-functional collaboration with marketing and other teams, creating dependencies outside their immediate control. It was higher effort and had more uncertainty than the smaller initiatives they were considering.

But when they estimated impact in the same unit as their goal (number of users converted), they realized this redesign could potentially get them "all the way there" to their conversion target, while the smaller initiatives would barely move the needle.

This exemplifies the "impact first" mindset - being willing to tackle more complex, cross-functional work when the potential impact justifies it. Rather than staying in their comfort zone with incremental improvements, the team recognized that fundamentally changing how users entered the product ecosystem could deliver transformative results.

The key insight is that sometimes the highest-impact work requires stepping outside team boundaries, building new relationships, and tackling systemic issues rather than symptoms. By focusing on the moment users first encounter the product, the team could shape behavior from the beginning rather than trying to change established patterns later.

For teams facing similar conversion challenges, this approach suggests examining the earliest touchpoints in the user journey as potential leverage points for achieving business goals, even when it means venturing beyond comfortable, controlled work.