ONB/PFG-02
ONB/PFG-02
Elevate by Principal
Elevate by Principal
Fintech
Fintech
B2B Onboarding & Activation
The front door, from registration to first savings.
The front door, from registration to first savings.
Earn the right to ask.
Earn the right to ask.
Funnel research
Funnel research
Adaptive forms
Adaptive forms
Activation
Activation
ONB/PFG-02
ONB/PFG-02
Role
Role
Senior Product Designer
Senior Product Designer
Scope
Scope
Two product areas, registration and activation
Two product areas, registration and activation
Deployed
Deployed
2023 to 2025
2023 to 2025
Team
Team
PM, ENG, Data, CS, Marketing
PM, ENG, Data, CS, Marketing
Constraint
Constraint
Fields the sales team depended on
Fields the sales team depended on
Tools
Figma, Salesforce Marketing Cloud
50%
50%
50%
50%
50%
More completed registrations, year over year
More completed registrations, year over year
2% → 10%
2% → 10%
2% → 10%
2% → 10%
2% → 10%
Email engagement, measured in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Email engagement, measured in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
01
01
Earning the right to ask
I found it in the funnel. People were dropping between sign-up and contract activation, in numbers that were hard to look at.
The obvious move was to go fix the form. What stopped me was that the drop did not stop at activation. People who completed onboarding went inactive anyway, which meant a shorter form would have moved somebody from one dead end to a slightly nicer one.
So the problem was not the front door. It was everything between arriving and getting something back, and that spans two surfaces nobody had been treating as one.
Both halves turned out to be the same thing. The product was asking for more than it had earned and handing back less than it promised.
Three classification systems. Same practice underneath all of them.
Every item gets a rule, the rule gets written down, and the rule is the deliverable. Not the screen it produces.
The automated business lookup returns a confidence level based on how many attributes it can validate: location, email, phone, industry, employee count.
That level doesn’t pick between three flows. It decides how many verification steps get inserted into one.
High confidence, five steps, you confirm what we already found and you’re done. Lookup finds nothing, seven steps, with disambiguation and manual entry filled in. Every tier lands on the same confirmation screen and the same finish.
Building it as insertion instead of branching is the only reason it outlived the feature it was built for. Three parallel flows would have been three things to maintain and nobody maintains three things.
The second system was the field classification. Every field in the old flow, one row each, sorted into required-to-qualify-a-lead or nice-to-have, and for the second column, where it went instead.
A field nobody will defend cutting is a field you can move.
Field classification. Every field in the old flow, sorted. A field nobody will defend cutting is a field you can move.
Field | Classification | Where it went |
|---|---|---|
Business name | Required to qualify | Stayed, with the lookup behind it |
Email verification | Not required to qualify | Off the front of the flow |
Password creation | Not required to qualify | Out of onboarding entirely |
Revenue generation | Nice to have | Later, once somebody has a reason to answer |
Ownership structure | Nice to have | Later, once somebody has a reason to answer |
Title | Nice to have | Later, once somebody has a reason to answer |
CONFIDENCE FLOW
Three confidence levels, one flow. The lookup decides how many verification steps get inserted, not which flow you are in. Every tier ends on the same screen.
02
02
Two surfaces, one problem
Two surfaces. The intake, and the page they land on.
Four steps became three. Password creation left onboarding entirely. The email verification gate came off the front. Business name gained a lookup, which is what feeds the confidence tiers.
The ending changed more than the middle did.
Old flow finished on “Almost there, please verify your email.” You’ve just filled out four screens and the reward is in your inbox somewhere, maybe. New one finishes on “Instant savings unlocked,” with something to actually click.
Same funnel. Completely different feeling walking away from it.
Then the dashboard. The first version offered business benchmarks, focus content, a business profile, talk-to-an-owner, a concierge, a library, and strategic partners. Everything was available. Nothing was directed. The second added a value proposition at the top and kept nine cards underneath it.
The third gave one block the top of the page, with one job and one call to action, and moved everything else below the fold.
To show somebody their savings you need their spend data. Spend data is also the last thing they want to hand a product they haven’t seen work yet. Chicken, egg.
So: four ways in, sized to how much they’re willing to give up. Connect QuickBooks. Upload a spreadsheet. Type in a few vendors by hand. Or see instant savings with no data at all.
The manual path isn’t a fallback for people who couldn’t manage the real one. It’s the cheap look around that earns you the integration later.
THREE DASHBOARDS
Two shipped versions before the third one worked. I designed all three. What finally worked was removing, which is not where I started looking.
BOTH ENDINGS
Same funnel, opposite emotional shape. The old flow ended with homework. The new one ended with the thing they came for.
03
03
Cutting fields a sales team depended on
Requirements came from concierge and sales. They had the relationships, they knew what the business actually needed answered, which also meant they owned every field I was about to propose cutting.
So I talked to SMB owners first. Not as a formality. Without that, removing fields is a designer’s opinion against a sales team’s requirements, and I know how that one ends.
Three groups, three different definitions of a qualified lead: business owners, customer managers, and marketing. Requirements from concierge and sales, delivery with PM, engineering, data, customer success and marketing.
Roles, not names. That is the rule everywhere on this site.
04
04
What I didn’t get to do
I wanted those questions gone.
What I got was a classification. Required to qualify a lead, or nice to have. And the nice-to-haves didn’t disappear. Revenue, ownership structure, title, they all still get collected. Just later, once somebody has a reason to answer.
Smaller win than deleting them. It was also the one on the table. Ask a sales team to give up data they rely on and you’re not having a conversation about the user anymore, you’re having one about whose requirements count. Moving a field is a scheduling question. Deleting it is a territory question. I’d rather win the scheduling one.
The classification outlived the flow. Required-to-qualify versus nice-to-have became the way new fields got argued about after that, which was never the plan. I built it to win one argument and it turned into the way that argument gets had.
The dashboard cost me more. Two versions shipped before the third one worked, and I designed both of the ones that didn’t. Both went live. Both failed to point anybody at savings.
What finally fixed it was taking things away. That’s not where I’d been looking.
It took two shipped versions to learn the page needed one job.
05
05
What shipped
It was the first time a business owner said, “I didn’t know I could save this much, where do I sign?”
Usability session, small business owner
Completed registrations went up 50% year over year.
Email engagement went from 2% to 10%, measured in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. That is not a marketing result. Those emails carried savings alert updates, so engagement rising is the clearest evidence that the second half of the problem got fixed. The product had been handing back less than it promised. Once it had something worth telling somebody about, they opened it.
The contract activation and dashboard engagement figures I have seen quoted for this project I am leaving off, because I cannot tell you how they were measured, and a number I cannot defend is worth less than no number at all.
06
What I wanted to show you
Most onboarding work is about removing steps. This was about asking fewer questions.
Which is harder, because someone has to decide what you’re confident enough not to ask, and then go defend it to the people who wanted the answers.
ケビン・チャップマン
No. 26 / Lot 01 / SS26