Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

February 12, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Lauryn Isford, former head of growth at Airtable, discusses onboarding as a high-impact, undervalued lever for retention and growth, drawing from her work redesigning Airtable's flows and experiences at Facebook and elsewhere. She shares practical tactics for activation metrics, personalization, and avoiding common traps, grounded in customer research and behavioral patterns.

Rethinking Experimentation in Growth

Isford argues growth teams over-rely on A/B tests, which are costly in engineering and analysis time and often provide marginal precision like a 6% versus 7% lift in activation. Reserve experiments for risk mitigation on dramatic changes; prioritize customer interviews, prototypes, and rigorous problem definition to build conviction for shipping broadly. This requires a culture focused on business results and customer impact—measured via qualitative feedback or deals closed—rather than test win rates, to motivate teams without biasing toward exploitable experiments. Example: Airtable launched a form submission feature without testing, based on customer data showing demand, yielding observable metric lifts post-launch.

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What you'll learn

1 *(03:28) Experimentation philosophy**
2 *(12:22) Onboarding as key growth lever**
3 *(17:05) Guided onboarding wizard**
4 *(20:06) Personalization by learning/building style**
5 *(24:37) Defining activation metric**
6 *(38:05) Reverse trial: Freemium + trial**
7 *(46:26) Onboarding pitfalls & advice**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Brought to you by Public—Invest in stocks, treasuries, crypto, and more: https://public.com/lenny | Miro—A collaborative visual platform where your best work comes to life: https://miro.com/lenny | Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/

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Lauryn Isford is a product growth leader and practitioner, who most recently led Growth at Airtable, and is about to start something new 🤫. In today’s episode, we get into the many tactics Lauryn has learned about optimizing onboarding flows. Lauryn describes how overhauling Airtable’s onboarding led to a 20% increase in activation rate, the company’s unique segmentation process, and why North Star metrics are so vital. Lauryn also shares her framework for a PLG growth funnel, and how to use a reverse trial to leverage the benefits of both freemium products and trials. If you’re looking to find growth opportunities within your funnel, this episode is for you.

Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/mastering-onboarding-lauryn-isford

Where to find Lauryn Isford:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurynisford

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurynisford/

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

Referenced:

• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days: https://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/1442397683

• Blue Bottle coffee: https://bluebottlecoffee.com/

• Airtable: https://www.airtable.com/

• How to determine your activation metric: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-determine-your-activation

• Elena Verna on Lenny’s Podcast: