Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)

... an activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies 5 to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range, because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention, and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Lauren Isford. Lauren was most recently head of growth at Airtable. Before that, she was a product growth lead at Facebook, working on user growth, Internet.org, and growth of Facebook in India. Before that, interestingly, she led growth for Blue Bottle's e-commerce business. In our conversation, we dive deep into Lauren's favorite topic: onboarding. Why it's one of the biggest and most undervalued growth levers, what she's learned about optimizing onboarding flows through her work redoing Airtable's onboarding flow, what she's seen work and common pitfalls around onboarding, plus a ton of advice around figuring out your activation metric. I could talk all day with Lauren about growth, but we had to cut this off to keep this to a reasonable length. Enjoy my conversation with Lauren Isford after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by public.com, who want to tell you about their new Treasury accounts, which earn a 4.8% yield on your cash. That is higher than a high-yield savings account, while still being backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Treasury yields are at a 15-year high, but buying U.S. Treasuries is super complicated if you go to a bank or navigate an ancient government website, or at least that was the case. Now you can move your cash into U.S. Treasuries with the flexibility of a bank account. You can access your cash whenever you want, even before your Treasury bills hit maturity. There are no hold periods, no settlement days, just a safe place to park your cash and earn a reliable yield. Public will automatically reinvest your Treasury bills at maturity, so you don't have to do anything to continue growing your yield. And you can manage your Treasuries alongside stocks, ETFs, crypto, and any alternative assets. Do all your investing in one place and earn 4.8%, a higher yield than a high-yield savings account. Only with a Treasury account at public.com/lenny. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online visual whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours and mine. I have a quick request: head on over to my board at miro.com/lenny and let me know which guests you'd love for me to have on in 2023. And while you're on the Miro board, feel free to play around with the tool. It's a great shared space to work closely with your colleagues to capture ideas, get feedback, and iterate quickly and easily on anything you're working on. For example, in Miro, you can build out your product strategy by brainstorming with sticky notes, comments, live reactions, voting tool, even an estimation app to scope out your team sprints. Your whole distributed team can come together around a wireframe and draw ideas with the pen tool or even put marks right into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made template, you can go from discovery and research to product roadmap to customer journey flows, final marks, you get the picture. Head on over to miro.com/lenny to leave your suggestions. That's M-I-R-o.com/lenny. Lauren, welcome to the podcast.