[00:01:20] Andrew Michael: Hey, Ramli. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:22] Ramli John: Hey, Andrew. Super excited to be here.

[00:01:24] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Ramli is the founder of Delight Path and author of Product-Led Onboarding. He also has a new book coming out in June titled Eureka. Prior to Delight Path, Ramli was a Product-Led Growth Coach at ProductLed and the Content Programming Director at Appcues. So my first question for you today is what is a Content Programming Director?

[00:01:48] Ramli John: I knew it. Yes. I was in charge of the marketing education. So market education at Appcues. So talking about onboarding about retention and product adoption, and creating courses, and taught the use of content around that. So it's content programming in a sense that I was managing their content programs like their product adoption academy and their shows.

[00:02:12] Ramli John: So, yeah, that's why it's less about - when people think about content, there could be SEO content that's more, like, focused on trying to rank. I was gonna focus on managing programs that is more focused on thought leadership and education.

[00:02:26] Andrew Michael: Education. Nice. And you've been in sort of the education space a long time. You've also, like, focused quite extensively on product onboarding and adoption and activation. Maybe first question just, like, why have you chosen to focus on product adoption and activation as, like, a big part of your career?

[00:02:45] Ramli John: It's such an impactful lever to work on. Actually, I know you've had Gaurav from Superhuman. He talks a lot about how onboarding is such an impactful place to fix. I started six, seven years ago before I met Wes Bush at ProductLed, and it's often a topic that's ignored. And the backstory is I was working as a growth consultant for a company, bringing on leads, sign ups before ProductLed even existed. And I found out that people that I was bringing, the sign ups I was bringing is not sticking around, and that just bothered me. It's like, cool. They're happy I'm bringing sign ups, but if they're not sticking around, am I bringing meaningful value into the company itself?

[00:03:27] Ramli John: I also find that talking about churn that it's often the biggest drop off. If there's a churn, 60% to 80% of new users, they drop off within that first day. And if you can just, like, lift that area a little bit, then the snowball effect to week 10 or week 12, such a dramatic, you know - ProfitWell did a study that it could be up to two to three times higher retention in the ninth week if you can lift that up in the first week.

[00:03:59] Ramli John: So all that data made me like, man, if there's not a lot of people talking about this, there wasn't a book about it. I mean, there wasn't a book readily available on Amazon back then that people can buy. So I ended up focusing on it, writing a book product line onboarding, and then consulting on it. So the last seven years has been all about product onboarding.

[00:04:19] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. I think we talked about this before the show, but definitely, like, through all the interviews we've had, I think, like, it's definitely in the top three reasons for churn that's most often discussed. And it's like most people, when they first think about churn and retention, it's a little bit counterintuitive because everybody goes to, let me figure out why people are churning. Let's put a churn exit survey and see all the reasons and then try to fix those.

[00:04:41] Andrew Michael: Where in actuality, like, the biggest impact in people come full circle on is realizing, okay, let's just find out who is successful, let's see what they did during onboarding, and let's get more people to that successful state and help them get activated into a product. And that almost always sees, like, significant results on the other end. So you came to that realization, you wrote a book on it, and I'm keen to chat a little bit about that today.

[00:05:02] Andrew Michael: But before we get to that as well, the new book coming out, what motivated you to write a new book? What's this one about? Give us a little bit of context.

[00:05:11] Ramli John: Yes. The first book, Product-Led Onboarding, as you can guess, is probably more focused on self serve experiences. I wrote that book with B2B and B2C in mind. I was working with a lot of B2B companies at that time, but the concepts applied how to create that low touch, almost zero touch onboarding experience. I mean, that's great in the beginning, but especially for B2B as companies scale, that's not often enough. We see this with a lot of quote unquote product led companies like Slack and other companies where they started off as a self serve experience but as they scale up, they're serving diverse types of customers, needs, they go enterprise. At that point, there's other levers that they can approach, that they should approach, particularly human touch or human interaction.

[00:06:02] Ramli John: And secondly, they also often scale up educational resources like academies and knowledge based articles. And so that's the reason why the second book is coming out. It's more catered towards those growing and scaling pains of B2B companies beyond just the initial self serve and kind of how to orchestrate an experience across those three pillars that I mentioned, in product, self serve experience, human interaction, and as well as the educational resources and content to build that experience that kind of cater to any type of customers as they scale up.

[00:06:35] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. I think it's definitely like a point of conflict for most, like, PLG organizations to get started. The conversation, I think, often goes as well as, like, we don't do sales. We don't want sales team. And there's always, like, this almost like a version to having sales. And then as these companies start to grow and scale, and as you said, they start to, like, move upmarket and into midmarket and then enterprise, like, they realize, okay, like, to make any sort of success in this space, we actually do need to start introducing these things, and we need to have a more handheld touch as well, like human touch, not only like tech touch itself. So interesting sort of like that book's now starting to address that, whereas in the first one, it was really, like, PLG focused in its own right.

[00:07:14] Andrew Michael: What's, like, one takeaway that you really want people to get from the book? If you had to summarize it into, like, one key takeaway, like, what should it be? Like, at the end of reading Eureka, like, what do you hope people, like, understand and take away with them?

[00:07:28] Ramli John: Yes. One takeaway. I would say the greatest takeaway, and I think this is like the mind shift, the paradigm shift that people have to think about for them to get the buyer addresses early on, is that often when people think about friction that causes churn and that friction around preventing that early stage onboarding, they often think about tackling just product friction. They often talk about, like, oh, let's just make it easier. They hire a designer to simplify it. But in B2B, as they scale up, often product friction is not the biggest reason why people companies churn early on.

[00:08:08] Ramli John: I call this the hierarchy of b two b friction. There's a product friction or functional friction. Above that is often social friction. So things like preventing a champion or that initial user to invite the colleague to kind of use that product over and over again, or it could be friction around red tape within the organization that's preventing them to actually adopt the product itself. That's a big problem for B2B companies that isn't often talked about.

[00:08:36] Ramli John: And that's the reason why often humans need to be involved or educational resources to, like, prove the ROI of the product. And the highest friction that we don't talk enough about is called emotional friction. And people are humans. Yeah. People have emotions. They're not just you know, we talk a lot about B2B. This is, like, such a cliche, but you're selling to humans, and humans have emotions. And them purchasing a product that could be very expensive could impact their job, their job could be on the line. If they purchase a $20,000 contract and it doesn't work out, it doesn't bring the ROI that it promises, it's time saving.

[00:09:17] Ramli John: And that is through fear that needs to be tackled there. So the book really talks about how do you define those types of frictions, how do you tackle that with the three pillars that we talked about in product experience, the human interaction, as well as the educational resources to kind of overcome any of those frictions along that B2B journey?

[00:09:38] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. I think the social capital aspect is an interesting one. We've previously discussed it on the show, so I can't remember the guest exactly. But the, like, example he gave, and I think it made so much sense at the time, was that, like, most B2B product led businesses, like, they'll have the "invite your teammates" during the onboarding. And his perspective was, like, I've just signed up for the product. I don't even know if it's good yet. Like, why do I wanna give away my social capital to the business and start inviting team members before I've even experienced the value?

[00:10:05] Andrew Michael: And so, like, his point was like, most companies, like, missed the mark on this. And it's like, yes, you want to get people to invite. Yes, you want to prompt them at some point in their, like, user onboarding journey. But it's not, like, immediately after the sign up form. It's, like, and to me, it's inevitably more effective.

[00:10:05] Andrew Michael: And so, like, his point was like, most companies, like, missed the mark on this. And it's like, yes, you want to get people to invite. Yes, you want to prompt them at some point in their, like, user onboarding journey. But it's not, like, immediately after the sign up form. It's, like, and to me, it's inevitably more effective. Like, once they've got that first point of value or once they've understood obviously, unless your product requires teammates to be functional, like, for the most part, it's really thinking through that and understanding, okay, like, this is a risk somebody is taking, like, vetting for your - vouching for your product and, like, inviting and introducing to the team. So thinking about the right time and, like, relating to that. And that's more so in more -

[00:10:39] Ramli John: That's the whole experience is, like, if I invite you to use a product with me. I'm thinking, like, will Andrew think I'm dumb if this product doesn't work out, or, like, will he think less of me? Like, imagine if you were my boss. Right? I invited Andrew, and then you log in, and it's like, this is the worst product I've ever tried. Like, no. You talk to me during a one-on-one. Like, this is some of the things that is an experience outside of the product that we also need to design for and kind of think through why would Ramli invite Andrew, and what would make him - like, there's this internal motivation. What would make Ramli look good to his boss, Andrew? Because then that's, like - tapping into that is really key. Like, the reason why.

[00:11:27] Ramli John: Like, okay. You've seen the value. Is he asking Andrew to give him feedback on something or to collaborate on something or to build something? And I think that's something that needs to be really part of the onboarding or the design that for that particular experience.

[00:11:42] Andrew Michael: Yeah. What would make me look good, like, introducing a product to service? Like, what are some of the things that you've seen companies do well where it say, okay. Like, they get it?

[00:11:52] Ramli John: Yeah. I would say Figma and Miro and Mural, they do a good job of it. It's all about collaboration and kind of identifying the use case for that. So if somebody signifies and really, this is where personalization comes in. If somebody comes in, you ask them, you know, what are the reasons why you're signing up for Miro or Mural, and they signify that they're in the product team and they're trying to collaborate better. Kind of tapping into, like, well, this would help you kinda design features in a more collaborative way, save time in that way. So I think that this like, really tapping on how it's gonna help you, that particular user with that use case make their job easier than it is. Particularly kinda really tapping into that.

[00:12:38] Ramli John: I think that Miro does a good job with this. Of course, you probably heard people call them out. They really thought that out. Shout out to Kate Syuma who used to run the growth design team as well. And, of course, I gotta give a shout out to Figma, which is, like, you know, my design tool of choice when collaborating. They've really thought that out as well around the focus on collaboration rather than just a design tool.

[00:13:01] Andrew Michael: Design tool. Yeah. And I think it's an interesting, like, viewpoint to see sort of this, like, inviting team members from as well, like, from that perspective. It's like, how can you make the user, like your champion that signed up for this product look as good as possible in the light of the team members versus, like, how do we get more people into our product? And I think if, like, you view it from that lens as well, like, the type of onboarding experiences and content you can help and provide to them, like, will only further, like, enable them to want to introduce the product or service to things.

[00:13:33] Andrew Michael: And I think it's similarly as well, like with social sharing and these sort of motivations as well. Instead of thinking about how do I onboard users to these features, like, how do I make my user look as professional as possible? Like, how do I, like, win them those, like, brownie points within the office and within the team or whatever it is? But yeah. Nice.

[00:13:53] Andrew Michael: So let's go back to ProductLed Growth. So obviously, like, you wrote the original book, Product-Led Onboarding. And what were the original motivations there? You said, sort of, there's, like, no real book at the time, but what was the inspiration then? And, like, give us a little bit of an overview of what people could expect if they haven't read the book yet.

[00:14:10] Ramli John: Yeah. The book itself, I would say the inspiration for it, you mentioned, [inaudible], there wasn't a book about that, but, like, it was understanding and, like, designing this whole experience and tackling and identifying any kind of friction within the product itself so it was more product centric itself and designing that. For people who have not read it, I really go into depth as to, like, defining what success look like for users, and it kinda ties to the friction. So what are the functional success, social success, and emotional success required for that and building that bridge.

[00:14:45] Ramli John: So, like, the way that I think about it is onboarding is like this chasm. Like, there's this gap between where users are and where they wanna be. And this is a classic example with, like, jobs to be done if people are familiar with that where people hire products to complete a specific job. And the onboarding is this bridge across, and under that is like sharks and crocodiles. And that's like that product friction, emotional friction, the fear, and the budget. And how do you make the user feel secure enough to cross across to go over the bridge to their promised land, essentially?

[00:15:22] Ramli John: And, you know, there's a lot of things that you need to kinda design, kinda paint a picture of the promised land, make the bridge feel as secure as possible, and make sure that each of their steps are baby steps so they don't make leaps and fall off the bridge. So I think that's what product-led onboarding is, if it was an analogy, kind of help design that sturdy bridge across their journey from their struggling circumstance to where they wanna be their promised land, that better tomorrow or the better future that they have

[00:15:55] Andrew Michael: So, basically, like, how do you, like, tie in the promise of marketing and the delivery of product so that you're bridging that gap between what marketing is telling you the product does versus what it actually does? Sometimes I think those two can, like, diverge quite a bit. And then in those cases, like, how do you see onboarding playing a role and what is the role then?

[00:16:13] Ramli John: That's a really good point and that's the reason why I think often onboarding fails because people don't think enough about how onboarding often starts before somebody signs up for the product. And the reason why is there's milestones or stages when somebody's being onboarded. One of the milestones before the product is you're onboarding them to an idea, a promise that marketing and often sales or even product marketing team is defining in their positioning and messaging.

[00:16:44] Ramli John: And if that is not, you know, if there's an overpromise there or like, oh, we can make you lose weight in thirty seconds. Something so absurd. I'm making it totally extreme now. Then when they get into the product, they're like, this is a disappointment. So I think that's the reason why I'm a big proponent of taking a cross functional approach. And there's multiple ways to do this.

[00:17:08] Ramli John: At Appcues, we built a growth squad or pods. I know some companies work in this way, where it's a cross functional team tackling a specific problem, and that problem could be activation or onboarding. I know in places like Amplitude or even Facebook, they actually have permanent pods, you know, where there's a cross functional growth squad or team focused on that particularly. For our team at Appcues, when I was part of it, it was temporary. We worked for six months doing sprints, two week cycles of how do we improve our churn rate and reduce our churn rate and improve our activation versus I think some teams have that altogether.

[00:17:49] Ramli John: So I think tackling to your question around how do you avoid that perception gap, it's working together, which is sounds easy. It's like, no duh, right, but, like, it's actually counterintuitive for a lot of teams because, you know, product has their product job, marketing has their marketing metrics, and sales, they have their leads and closing they need to deal with. And this function or this approach often requires them to put that on pause to work on a common goal, which, you know, silos needs to be broken and often is a challenge to do that.

[00:18:27] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Absolutely. But, yeah, I think, as you mentioned, like, a lot of the successful teams, I think they have, like, these dedicated squads that focus purely on activation. They can then sort of see and be that bridge, make sure that things are communicating. Hotjar Assembly, we had, like, we had an acquisition and an activation squad, and they ended up sort of working together. And it's a full time thing.

[00:18:47] Andrew Michael: I think, like, to your point earlier as well, like, most in most startups, like, it's an afterthought. And, like, in the early days, it is because everything's just like feature. But then there comes a time where, like, you've ended up building this feature factory that nobody knows how to use anymore. And you need to start killing features, and you need to start focusing on, like, engagements and adoption. And, like, adding a new feature to the product is not gonna, like, increase, sort of, a new engagement. It really comes down then to a deep focus on crafting and creating that experience.

[00:19:13] Ramli John: 100%.

[00:19:14] Andrew Michael: You come into a lot of startups, obviously, because you do your consulting as well, and you've seen the inside of onboarding from many different perspectives. What does your process look like going into a startup? What are the first, like, one, two, or three things that you're looking at to try and evaluate the current, like, state of their onboarding experience?

[00:19:33] Ramli John: Yeah. I would say if once I come in, I'm working with the team. I think the first thing, obviously, is looking at what's the current state, what's happening right now. And often I look at analytics, but often what I people don't realize is, particularly working with B2B companies that I work with, often they have onboarding call recordings. And that is such a gold mine for insights where when a customer onboarding team or customer success, they're onboarding their company or a new customer, there's a ton that I can gather from those calls.

[00:20:07] Ramli John: Things like, what kind of questions does the new customer ask? Where do they get confused? Like, oh the second thing is not just where they're getting stuck, but where are they having moments of delight where they lean in and their eyes brighten up and they say, Oh, that's amazing. Things like that. And figuring out how their team is onboarding that new customer, figuring out who's involved, what kind of questions, where are the opportunities there. So I think that's often where, for companies and particularly startups, I often suggest early on, if they're very early stage, would be to onboard their customers one on one, actually not product-led.

[00:20:49] Ramli John: Because you're maximizing and trying to optimize for learning, and there's so much learning when you onboard a new customer virtually on a call because then you can see their visceral reaction to your moment. But as well, you can see moments of confusion that could be like, oh, okay. They keep confusing it. Is it the way I'm explaining it, or is it the process to do that thing? How do we address this? Should I have some educational resources? Should I have more self serve experience here? Whatever that is. So I think that's often the very first thing that I would come across and start diagnosing the problem around their onboarding.

[00:21:29] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I like sort of that focus on their visceral reactions. Those light bulb moments that you don't really see and you're not really ever gonna get as well from, like, a survey or from - it's a thing you need to actually see the self to believe it. And I think this you mentioned Gaurav Vohra earlier. I think this is something that Superhuman did incredibly well in the early days, which was, like, they literally forced everybody through a handheld onboarding experience, like jumping on calls and showing them how they use the tool. And this then, like, they started building in those experiences into products and realizing, like, what the light bulb moments were for the users, where they were getting stuck. So they could then essentially, like, craft and cater and create this PLG motion that became so powerful for them. Nice. Next step, what are you doing?

[00:22:11] Ramli John: Yeah. So once I figured that out, I also talked to their team members. So this is where, you know, cross functional thing is, where I'm trying to understand how the sales is defining the product, how the marketing team is describing the product. If I can get them, especially for, like, a mid scale or a scaling startup where they're probably, like, 50 to 100 people where they don't talk to each other anymore, or they do talk to each other, but in not in this sense, I usually run, like, a workshop where I walk them through, like, some exercises on Miro, and then I start building.

[00:22:45] Ramli John: I think I start creating the design, what it would look like. Often, I have not yet come across where part of the design involves asking what their primary use cases for the product because that's often a big opportunity. Especially as you have enough customers, you should have some idea of, like, okay, the top three reasons or the top three use cases or the top three jobs to be done for my product is this and kind of crafting an experience depending on that particular path that they've chosen itself. So that's part of the design, and then the output is kind of, like, showing that to the team and helping them figure out the next steps into building it out, whether they have a tool like Pendo or Appcues, or do you want me to create some product requirements documents for their engineering and product team to kind of start building that?

[00:23:33] Andrew Michael: Oh, yeah. And so you mentioned sort of, like, the focusing would go to more like this in-app onboarding experience from that perspective. You obviously spend a lot of time in this space. I'm keen to hear from you, like, what is the most interesting use of one of these tools like Appcues or Pendo that you've seen from an onboarding perspective?

[00:23:53] Ramli John: I would say and this is something that I try to - a principle I try to apply as much as possible, especially for more advanced B2B products where it could be very complex. I think the approach of something called progressive overload, things like Pendo, Appcues, they have this feature where if they complete a checklist, it actually shows you can get them to show another checklist. And the way that I approach this is like a video game, where if you play any video game, Super Mario or any other kind of game, usually you start off in level one where it's like the easiest. You got the easiest bad guys. And then once you're done with that, they get you to level two, which it gets progressively harder.

[00:24:32] Ramli John: That's often the approach I take where, okay, what is the easiest momentum builder that I can think about for users to do so that they can move on to level two? And that would be usually the first checklist or maybe I have one or two items for them to just check off. And then the first item's already checked off. It's like, create your account where, like, obviously, they've signed up. That's already created. And then I moved them on to a level two that's a little bit more advanced then there's a level three. If it's a really complex product, it can go up to level five. So that's often been my principal approach for more complex products where getting them to build momentum with smaller progressive items kinda helps kind of get the user going towards the right direction rather than getting them to do a hard task or get them overwhelmed with too many things to do at the same time.

[00:25:26] Andrew Michael: That's nice. I like that. Yeah. Because I think there's two ways of doing this. Like, you can go too shallow and just, like, focus on two or three things, and then never really get to experience, like, maybe the real core retention drivers. Or too complex, and people are just like, there's no way I'm doing all of this. So I like sort of that way of, like, phrasing in different phases.

[00:25:45] Andrew Michael: But I think the tricky thing for people is, like, figuring out, like, what should those phases look like? How do I know which features I want to be driving people at different stages? And do you have any advice or any processes that you like to follow for figuring out what this should look like and what should go into this?

[00:26:01] Ramli John: Yeah. I would say, I think figuring out kind of organizing what are the, let's say, hard tasks. Like, it could be the number of steps in terms of complexity or just how they build on top of each other. For example, at Appcues, like, we implemented this as well. So one of the very first level one checklists that we had to do because it's dependent on everything else is getting them to install the builder. So our first checklist, actually, our level one checklist, had create an account and then just one item, install builder. Right?

[00:26:36] Ramli John: Once that's installed, the next level two checklist is, you know, start building. So build your first flow, brand your flow, so if you have any colors, things like that, and then launch your flow, essentially. So three items, and then the first items already checked off. We did this a couple years ago, actually. I'm taking credit for it, but it was Lyla Rozelle. She was the director of customer engagement at that point, and we launched this - she launched this, and we found, like, a 30% increase in terms of our activation rate just because of that.

[00:27:10] Ramli John: So to make to journalize this advice, I would say, first of all, can you organize your steps into a logical flow where, like, there are some prerequisites that needed to build on top of each other? And then secondly, try to make the easiest things they need to do first and kind of organize it along that point.

[00:27:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think there's definitely products where, like, there is a clear path of actions that need to be taken, and then there's other products, like, where it's not as clear. But then, like, in that framework, you can really then just focus on one of the easiest actions for them to start taking. Do you, like, consider as well sort of data analysis on the end and try to look and understand what is, like, the correlation between feature usage and retention? Is this something that, like, comes into play as well in the process?

[00:27:54] Ramli John: Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that would be part of the analysis in terms of, like, seeing that in Amplitude. And mind you, there's one other thing. Depending on their persona or use case, you can design a different checklist for them because, like, somebody who is trying to do something, for example, going back to the example with Appcues, people might be using it to onboard users or to announce features. Let's say they're using in-app messaging to announce features. Those would be two different use cases. And, obviously, the first checklist would be level one, install the builder, but level two can be we started exploring this. We could be more specifically focused to that specific use cases as well.

[00:28:35] Andrew Michael: Nice. Cool. And so, obviously, a lot of people out there listening, like, we've discussed that, obviously, activation is the best place to get started when thinking about trying to reduce churn and retention. Before we wrap up today, like, is there any other sort of, like, key things you would say to people, like, you absolutely need to look at these one to two things if you're thinking about, like, taking on the activation and onboarding experience in your product? Like, any final words, advice on this topic?

[00:29:01] Ramli John: I would say, I think often what's missed in terms of improving their activation is really deeply knowing what the user motivation is. We talk a lot about, like, what makes them look good, you know, to get them to invite their user and understanding those things that we talked about, the product friction and social friction and emotional friction. And we talked about watching those onboarding calls for moments of confusion and visceral moments of delight, moments of delight and aha moments.

[00:29:33] Ramli John: And I think that's often the best place to start because the tendency, and this is me as well, where my initial reaction is I'm trying to improve my activation onboarding. Let's start building. Let's start designing. Let's start - like, okay. This looks confusing. Let me design this and that. But, like, going from the place of where understanding the user and where they're struggling and how they're struggling is always the best place to start because you're designing it for them, and starting there is really key. And the reason why I bring this up is often the thing that's missed by a lot of teams. I think it's often missed by a lot of teams where they jump right into the building part. That would be my first advice.

[00:30:17] Ramli John: Second advice is take a cross functional approach, especially if you're serving other businesses. Because really, like, the onboarding is - the activation area is, like, the intersection of the early, I mean, marketing and sales. And it has, like, this downward effect to product and churn and retention and customer success and, like, getting everybody together to work on this, like, meeting point, this intersection point is gonna be critical to make sure that you design an experience that's great from the beginning all the way until the full life cycle because it is so critical. So I would definitely take that approach where whether that's just starting to talk to people within other functions or hosting workshops or even discussions.

[00:31:05] Ramli John: What does our activation moment look like? Even that, I think often is missed where even at Appcues, different themes have different definitions of moments. So I would ask a product - one time I asked a product manager, what is our aha moment? And then I asked the customer success team, what is our aha moment? And they asked somebody from marketing, what is our aha moment? And I got like three different responses. So I think that's like - if you were gonna start, like, I would say getting on the same page of what is that moment for you and just define it.

[00:31:37] Ramli John: I think you obviously you can look at analytics, look at correlation, but just getting on the same page of what that is already - you're already, like, have a leg up because now you can start thinking about how to design the on product experience towards that, design and write marketing or onboarding emails to cater towards that, and you can have sales discussions that more cater and kind of focus towards that as well. So I think that would be my second advice to where to start.

[00:32:07] Andrew Michael: Yeah. No. I think it's definitely, like, to your first point, it is a point that's often overlooked, but just, like, going out and speaking to customers and really understanding their pain points and problems and then getting that alignment as well. So, like, as you said, like, I've also been in situations where there's different definitions across the org and nobody really knows. Everyone's making their own assumptions, introducing their own personal biases as well of, like, how they see the product. But a lot of times, like, you're just not the customer either as well. And so I think that's why I like going and putting yourself in your customer's shoes, like, speaking to them, hearing their voices, hearing their pain points, and getting there.

[00:32:39] Andrew Michael: Nice. So I want to ask you a couple of questions that I'll ask every guest before we wrap up today. First is, like, what's one thing you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:32:50] Ramli John: What is one thing that I wish I knew now about churn and retention? I would say if it's more about my career, I would say to get out of my job. And what I mean by that is often churn and retention is it needs other people involved. And my tendency as an introverted person is to just do my thing.

[00:33:14] Ramli John: And I've come to realize in working as a consultant now and while working at Appcues is I need to build partnership with other teams, with product, with sales, with customer success to get all that information and to really fix that because - you probably had other guest say this, and I'm gonna repeat it again. Churn and retention is not a customer success problem or a product problem or a sales problem. It is a business problem that involves everyone. And if I was gonna do it myself, it's not gonna work. I need to have build partnership across the org to make sure that is tackled.

[00:33:52] Andrew Michael: 100%. I think, like, this is like if you're building a software business that's based on subscriptions and people are canceling subscriptions, like, you don't have a business. This is the business problem then. You know? Like, so it's everybody's problem. I like that. Then maybe, like, when it comes to onboarding specifically, this last question is, like, what's one thing that you wish more people would ask you but they don't?

[00:34:12] Ramli John: I think getting to know their users a little bit more. How do we do that? I think often their questions revolve around, how do we fix our experience? What is friction about? And I think going back to our previous discussion around social friction and emotional friction, that's often overlooked and I think that is a place, going back to that, that it is often where B2B customers drop off because they struggle emotionally, fear around it, as well as they struggle in terms of getting their team onboard to that particular product.

[00:34:50] Andrew Michael: Yep. And then I think as well, like, the problem comes as most teams end up making assumptions about what their customers' problems are, and that's where things end up failing. So just, like, really being in, going back, and understanding who they are, what their pain points are, their problems, and being able to deliver that experience is the only way, I think, to really, like, deliver a powerful onboarding experience.

[00:35:08] Ramli John: 100%.

[00:35:09] Andrew Michael: Ramli, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. Is there any sort of final thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with? Anything they should be aware of to keep you up to speed with your work?

[00:35:18] Ramli John: Yeah. Of course. If people wanna jam about onboarding and retention, happy to chat with them. They can find me on LinkedIn. The new book you mentioned is coming in June 2025. They can check that out at eurekabook.co. And, yeah, if I had one final thoughts, really, like, early stage churn is a big problem. And if you can, like, identify that, it does make big wonders in terms of longer mid stage and, like, longer stage churn. And it starts in onboarding. It's that first impression. Right? And it's often hard to separate that and remove that once they've formed that impression about your product.

[00:35:59] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you today, Ramli. Thanks so much for joining. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes so you can catch those there. And I wish you best of luck now going forward and with the book launch. I'm looking forward to reading it.

[00:36:13] Ramli John: Thanks, Andrew.

[00:36:14] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:36:21] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you're able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts, and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm.

[00:36:41] Andrew Michael: Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you, and you can provide your blunt direct feedback by sending it to andrew@churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.