onboarding-activation
Onboarding & Activation
Get new users to the moment the product genuinely works for them — the point after which they're substantially more likely to stay. Everything before that moment is cost; everything after is compounding.
Activation is where most retention problems actually live. When a cohort curve drops steeply in the first weeks and then flattens, that is almost never a price problem or a competitor problem. Those users never reached value, so there was nothing to retain. Discounting them back does nothing, because the product never worked for them in the first place.
Two things make this hard. The activation moment is usually assumed rather than measured — teams pick something plausible like "completed onboarding" that doesn't actually predict retention. And onboarding is designed as a tour of the product rather than a path to one outcome, so users learn what exists without ever getting anything.
When to use
The user is improving product onboarding, first-run experience, or activation rate, or asking why signups don't convert to active users. For diagnosing whether activation is the problem, run lifecycle-and-retention first — its cohort view is what identifies a steep early drop. For the flow before the account exists, use signup-flow-optimizer.
Before you start
- Read the brand/product context (
.agents/product-marketing.md) for the audience and what the product is for. - Get cohort retention if it exists. A steep early drop confirms activation is the problem; a gradual decline points elsewhere and this skill is the wrong tool.
- Ask what retained users did that churned users didn't — in their first week. That's the raw material for defining the activation moment properly.
- Walk the actual first run. From account creation to the first useful outcome, on the real product, as a new user with no data.