5-step Flow Review to Uncover Growth Opportunities
How analyse flows holistically with examples from Dropbox, Canva, Loom, Linear.
In my work, I always wanted to do just one thing: connect "Business Thinking" with "User Centricity".
To uncover growth opportunities, I used to revisit product flows regularly, while keeping these 5 principles in mind:
Connect Problem, Hypothesis, and Prediction to unpack Solutions
Identify and measure WSLL (“What Success Looks Like”)
This is exactly how this 5-step Framework was born. And now, you can use it to:
👉 Review your Growth Flows (e.g. User Onboarding);
👉 Review other flows as references (I added Dropbox as an example);
👉 Facilitate workshops with your team to make this a collaborative exercise.
Recently, I shared this template on Appcues Product Adoption Academy, and now you can find the full version there 🙌
Get a full template on Appcues Product Adoption Academy — the place to help you level up your product adoption for free.
I created this template to help companies uncover meaningful improvements. Find an example of Dropbox Onboarding inside and apply it to review any growth flows: appcues.com/growthmates
I have already tried this framework with some of my clients from Intercom, Manychat, Beautiful.ai, as well as participants in the "Self-serve Onboarding Course" have applied it to their product onboarding. I was impressed by their outcomes, and I hope it can be valuable for you and your team 🙏
If you’d like to get a fresh perspective on your product onboarding from me — I’m happy to share that I’m helping companies with:
End-to-end analysis of the Activation flows using the 5-step Framework;
Analysis of past experiments to uncover new iterations and growth opportunities;
Providing a fresh perspective on improvements and hypotheses for uncovered growth opportunities like “quick wins” and “big bets”.
Book a free intro call if you’d like to explore possible collaboration options 👇
Why it might be useful?
To uncover growth opportunities, you need to revisit your product flows regularly. While doing that, it’s crucial to connect Business thinking with User-centricity.
While designing this framework, I intended to help companies connect Business thinking (Problem, Hypothesis, WSLL) with User-centricity (User Journey, Emotions, Behavioral principles) to uncover meaningful improvements.
Next, we will explore each step of this framework separately, so get ready 💪
To illustrate how this framework works, I took Dropbox Onboarding and collected some observations and nice improvements that they already introduced with “Reverse trials” — kudos to the Dropbox team and
(take a look at her comprehensive article “Growth at Dropbox”).This is a sneak peek of how the desired outcome should look after analyzing your flow holistically 🙌
And now, let’s dive into the framework step-by-step 👇
Step 1. User Journey Steps — map out the end-to-end experience.
First, you need to select a specific journey you’d like to analyze. It can be Registration flow, Cancellation flow, or any other specific use case. To illustrate how this framework works, we will take one of the most critical journeys — User Onboarding.
As a reminder: user onboarding ≠ the first session. Holistic User Onboarding starts when the user starts exploring the solution to their problem and ends when the user has already created a habit of using your product to solve this problem.
Keeping that definition in mind, there are 6 key stages of User Onboarding:
Search
Website
Registration flow
First session
Journey to Aha-moment
Habit forming
You can choose the key stages you’d like to focus on, but to come up with a more holistic picture — map out all of them.
🎯 Add screenshots of your flow — each one is a step in a user journey. Collect steps into bigger “stages” and start collecting your first observations on problems.
🚩 Tip: Highlight 4-5 most critical steps to focus on.
Step 2. Emotional scale — access the flow by putting yourself in a user's shoes.
To produce high-quality solutions, we need to stay extremely empathetic to our end-users. Quality = Empathy to the end user. Quality is what drives your further Product Growth — increasing competition in the market is increasing the need for raising quality.
We need to put ourselves in the user’s shoes and emphasize every single step the user is walking through. Ideally, your perspective should be also informed by qualitative insights that you gathered through In-depth interviews, Moderated and Unmoderated User Testing.
The "Emotional scale" is designed to help you train the user empathy muscle and uncover potential gaps your onboarding might have.
There's a broad spectrum of emotions, and for this expertise, we can rely on the range of 6 emotions:
🤩 Delighted — this is a peak of the experience, meaning the product is exceeding the user's expectations. There are 3 pillars of delight and you can deliver it “viscerally, behaviorally, and reflectively” — so think if there's such a peak moment your new user truly experienced with your product.
🙂 Engaged — this is the most desirable state to keep continuously, as the user is motivated to continue exploring the product further. The indicator of this can be curiosity and understanding of what's happening in the product, and what action to perform next.
🙂 Neutral — this is a less desirable state but can be fine in some steps of the flow. For example, a user is exploring product settings and there's just a very concrete "job to be done". In that case, it's better to provide a clear and intuitive experience to keep a neutral emotional state without unnecessary distractions.
🤔 Confused — this is a state we should avoid for end-users. However, during the first experience with the product, some less tech-savvy users will struggle anyway. So we need to uncover these moments and focus deeper on them to simplify these steps or provide some guidance.
🤯 Overwhelmed — this state can also indicate a potential area for improvement, and a lot of B2B SaaS products make the mistake of facing users with the whole complexity of the product from the first session.
😠 Angry — this is a red flag for the product experience and the most disengaged state for the end user. It can also indicate a "buggy" experience that should be fixed immediately.
🎯 Assess each step of the flow with this emotional scale — try to inform this assessment with real user feedback and put yourself in the shoes of a user 🙏
🚩 Tip: Explore books “Hooked” by
and “Engaged” by Amy Bucher to learn more about Behavioural Design and how to create engaging experiences relying on a user-centric approach.
Step 3. Behavioral principles — rationalize emotional observations.
After you put yourself in the shoes of a user and access the flow from an emotional perspective, it's important to turn your observations into a more rational form.
Behavioral principles should help to explain both peak delightful moments and overwhelmed moments. These behavioral principles can be divided into 2 categories — let’s look at some examples.
🔴 Behavioural problems — inform your observations about problems:
Attention Span 🧐 Users have a limited attention span. If the product shows several triggers / CTAs simultaneously, there are higher chance that the user gets overwhelmed and closes the window.
Cognitive load 🤯 There's a high amount of cognitive effort that is required to complete a simple "invitation" task.
Decision Paralysis 😮 Potential user has to choose one of 3 trials and make a comparison between 3 similar pricing options. Is a credit card required? Why professional is more expensive?
🟢 Opportunities for improvements — inform ideas for solutions:
Visceral Delight - showing product value 🤩 Studies show that "aesthetics and visual design play a role in positive perception and delight." For B2B SaaS it's important to show the product value intuitively clear way, showing the product interface and examples of use cases.
Investment loops 🔁 If users have more storage, they can upload more files, and invite more people → hence, getting more sticky to the product.
Labour Illusion 👣 The product can simulate the sense of progress and use it to show valuable tips to keep users engaged during the flow.
Let’s look at one particular example illustrating the “Attention Span”. Complex B2B SaaS products sometimes face that problem by actually trying to deliver more value and explaining various possibilities of the product by showing several tooltips or triggers at once. During the first session with the product, it can cause a “Decision Paralysis” and users might not interact with that feature.
🎯 Choose 1 behavioral principle for each of the observed problems. Later on, it can be connected to inform the root cause of the problem or the potential solution.
🚩 Tip: Use Psychology of Design or Coglode collections to leverage a bigger collection of behavioral principles.
Step 4. Connect Problem + Hypothesis + Prediction.
Finally, we got to one of the most complex and important steps — defining the Problem, formulating the Hypothesis, and coming up with Predition that should inform the Solution.
One of the mistakes that I usually observe in product work is that people confuse Hypothesis and Prediction. To avoid that mistake, there’s a simple format from the article “This is not a hypothesis” to differentiate these two terms:
📌 “Hypothesis” connects the problem + reason behind it:
We believe [problem], because [data/feedback];
We believe that [creators don't publish their content] because [they fear disclosing confidential company materials].
📌 “Prediction” describes potential solution + desired impact from it:
If we [change], it can improve [impact];
If we change [the preview of the published content and avoid confidential info], it can [increase the total number of new submissions].
It can require some practice to start formulating the hypothesis and following this approach. Let’s practice together and look at a couple of examples.
Looking at the Invitation experience from Dropbox we can assume, that users drop off and don’t extend invitations due to the complexity of that window.
Problem (assumption): Users drop off on the invitation screen;
Hypothesis: We believe users drop off on the invitation screen because there are additional options and controls that they don’t know how to use;
Prediction / Solution: If we simplify the invitation experience by adding the ”Invite link” as a default option, it can increase the # of invited users / K-factor.
To inform and inspire the solution, we can leverage some best practices and other references from the market. I shared Linear examples and more in “High-quality principles to support your Product-Led-Growth”.
Another example is connected to a common problem with Dead Ends ❌ — it’s hard for first-time users to develop a habit around the product if not suggested what can be done next in the product.
Problem: Users don't continue exploring the product on their own;
Hypothesis: We believe users don't continue exploring product on their own, because they don't know what they can do next (or get lost by trying to do random things in the product);
Prediction / Solution: If we tell users what might be the next steps with the product, it can improve W1 retention and further Retention.
Canva is showing an entry point to further education and building a Growth Loop. In "Learn and Play" users can find more relevant examples, unlock new use cases, and deepen the adoption of the product.
🎯 Formulate the Problem, Hypothesis, and Prediction for each of the critical steps that you identified for the entire flow.
🚩 Tip: Collect references to inspire your potential solutions. Use best practices, bar-raising competitors in your product category, or leverage some examples from “High-quality principles to support your Product-Led-Growth”.
Step 5. WSLL / Key Metrics — connect solutions with predictable impact.
We definitely should start with defining “What Success Looks Like” when we just start addressing the problem. In the last step, we need to get back to the original business goal and connect all our predictions with the key metrics we need to drive. It will also help to prioritize all the ideas that you collecting as a result of this review.
Let’s look at a couple of examples. One of the surprising side-effects of User Onboarding is that it has a close connection to the CR to Paid. Some companies uncovered a deep correlation between Activation metrics and CR rate, and on average the benchmark for B2B SaaS shows that Activated users have ≈5 times bigger CR to Paid.
Assuming that the CR to Paid plan is the WSLL we’d like to optimize for, we can build that case:
Problem: Users don't convert from trial to paid plan;
Hypothesis: We believe users don't convert from a trial to a paid plan, because they don't understand the value and full capabilities of a Paid option;
Prediction / Solution: If we show the value and capabilities of the Paid plan, it can improve CR to Paid from trial.
WSLL: ↑ CR to Paid.
Loom is showing an interactive modal with the capabilities of a paid plan in an engaging visual format. To achieve a real impact with CR to Paid, these triggers should be approached as a system, appear contextually, and be tightly connected to relevant value you can show in specific user journeys.
Another example can be connected to the Invitation experience where we used the “K-factor” as WSLL for the prediction:
K-factor = # invitations sent out for your product / # of new users acquired through those invitations.
🎯 Choose 1 WSLL metric and connect it with Prediction.
🚩 Tip: Use Primary or Leading KPIs for some specific opportunities to make it easier for you to prioritize them for the product roadmap.
What’s next?
As a result of this diverging exercise, you will have a holistic assessment of your product flow and be able to uncover growth opportunities. You can find a blank version of the 5-step Flow Review template to try it out for your product.
By conducting these 5 steps, your team should be able to:
Understand end-to-end User Journeys;
Uncover user emotions and be empathetic;
Leverage key Behavioural principles;
Connect Problem, Hypothesis, and Prediction to unpack Solutions
Identify and measure WSLL (“What Success Looks Like”)
Next → you can prioritize your ideas to collect “quick wins” and “big bets” and develop a holistic roadmap. If you need help with that, here’s what I can help with 👇
———
Developing this framework reminded me how much I enjoy analyzing deep user journeys, turning thoughts into actionable insights, and packaging ways of working into tangible frameworks ✨
If you’d like to:
Get a fresh perspective on your product flows and uncover growth opportunities
Have an AMA or Workshop with the team to deepen your knowledge
Level up your quality bar for Product Growth
👉 Book a free intro call and I’d be happy to explore how I can help 🙌
This is excellent! Thank you so much!
This is awesome Kate!