Lean Back Onboarding

December 9th, 2025

You either get acquired or grow for long enough to see yourself become an enterprise solution. - Harvey Dent, developer tool CEO/founder.

Tools have a tendency to grow. Blame capitalism, blame developers, blame whoever you want, but it happens. You keep building features to acquire more customers or create higher tiers. The problem is that feature adoption is usually minuscule. It’s because users come into a product “leaning forward” into accomplishing a task. The formalities of sign up, setup, billing are all barely tolerated: you really just want to get back to work. In “lean forward” mode, users don’t have patience for extended getting started flows.

Product onboarding and feature adoption have to be treated like lean backwards media: intriguing in their own right. Stripe’s feature marketing were a great example of that: you were dazzled by the visuals enough to read along. Getting started guides seem lean back, but it’s usually a one-and-done: a user usually read them on day one for setup, but you’re basically done after that.

Most social media, influencer work is “top of funnel”. Because most of the world has never used your product, statistically all media is for driving product adoption, not feature adoption.

Support emails are lean back. They are probably the ultimate lean back: you can’t get something to work, so you lean back, defeated, and fire off an email to support, “I’m stuck!”

Can support flows become “teaching moments”? Can you leave enticing breadcrumbs to nudge users to trying out new features, maybe ones adjacent to their original problem? How much of teaching is trust and relationship? “Eric understood my problem and helped me, so maybe I can trust them when he says, “You should try this out!”

Maybe support drives people to “sessions” (aka webinars) or different guides.

I wonder if driving adoption can be the support team’s goal. Like how baristas at Starbucks were always sampling coffees and baked goods: giving away free stuff to customers who were already in the store. Baristas usually initially did it, but mostly got jaded and stopped.

Customer service is usually measured by CSAT, response times, ticket volume. They’re cost centers, so it’s all about efficiency. It’s also not about revenue: a small account might not have the usage to pay you more. Product depth might be the answer.