Warning: I spent 6 months fixing an onboarding flow that wasn't even broken

I was working on a SaaS onboarding sequence for a client in Austin and kept tweaking the emails and in-app tooltips based on what I thought users needed. After 6 months of A/B testing and dropping open rates by 12%, I finally sat in on a user interview. Turns out people were churning because our pricing page was confusing, not because the onboarding steps were bad. The whole time I was optimizing the wrong thing. Has anyone else realized they were optimizing a part of the funnel that wasn't the real problem?

2 comments

2 Comments

park.miles14d ago

I heard a product manager say "make sure you're solving the right problem before you solve any problem at all.

vera19514d agoTop Commenter

Totally applies to way too many things in day to day life lol. Like half the arguments I see online could be avoided if people just stopped and asked what they're actually trying to fix first.