Onboarding journey

An onboarding journey is the structured path a new user follows to reach activation in your product.

It usually combines in-product prompts, checklists, and contextual help to guide users through critical setup and first-use steps.

Welcome flow: Initial screens that set expectations and collect context for personalization.

Setup steps: Required configuration like connecting data sources, inviting teammates, or setting preferences.

Guided actions: In-product prompts that walk users through their first key workflow.

Progress indicators: Checklists or progress bars that show users how close they are to completion.

Effective onboarding journeys are opinionated, short, and aligned to clear activation milestones.

They avoid overwhelming users with every feature and instead focus on leading them to the first meaningful outcome.

Great journeys are personalized—different roles, use cases, or plans may need different paths to value.

Collect minimal context upfront (role, use case, team size) and use it to customize the journey.

Show different starting points based on how users arrived—a developer clicking from docs may skip the product tour.

Adapt the journey based on behavior: skip steps users have already completed, offer help for steps where they stall.

Track completion rate for each step to identify where users drop off.

Measure time-to-completion for the full journey and individual steps.

Correlate journey completion with activation rate and retention to validate that your journey leads to the right outcomes.

Skene builds onboarding journeys directly from your codebase, creating guided paths for each role or use case and tying them to analytics.

This helps you keep journeys up to date as the product evolves, without manually editing tours every time you ship a change.