Karbon is a feature-rich global operating platform for accounting firms that needed better solutions to onboard new users.

An accounting firm manager who lacks adequate visibility over their team’s work has a hindered ability to ensure they will meet client expectations. Above all else, they're desperate for visibility and rightfully look to Karbon to address this.

I'd heard time and time again that customers choose Karbon for its solution to work management, only then to discover what our email integration feature can do for their collaboration and communication—our stickiest feature. But I didn't have a definitive answer to what the golden moment is in a free trial that convinces a firm that Karbon is right for them. Does that even exist? I observed and spoke to users in their 14 day free trial to better understand their motivations and expectations.

It became clear that Karbon's first-use experience poses challenges as it is a complex product that requires a lot of set up before a firm fully realises its value.

For example, to experience work visibility and reporting—a critical "aha!" moment—an operational leader would need to:

• Build efficient workflows: Setup automated workflows in bulk, assign things like budgets, team roles, and deadlines, before inviting the wider team to experience workflow in Karbon.

• Import client contact data: Client workflows are connected to hundreds if not thousands of client contacts. So detailed contact data needs to be imported in bulk before workflows can even be created.

• Make individual contributors love and use Karbon: Only once client work and contacts are set up can individual contributors in the team use Karbon and find value in completing daily tasks and keeping their assigned projects up-to-date—this is required in order for the manager to benefit from that visibility and know work is being delivered on time.

Historically, these things all required hands-on assistance from Karbon’s implementation teams. We needed a better way.

The key to successfully converting a new trial user into a paid customer would be for the product to effectively guide them toward realising the value of Karbon during their initial session. While simplifying some non-negotiable set up activities. My goals were to:

• Clarify that Karbon enhances workflow and team visibility.

• Visualise the team's real projects on a Kanban board.

• Invite the first team (3–5 members).

• Guide them to reporting features to drill down on team progress.

To achieve a populated dashboard of client projects, users need to jump through a series of steps that happen in different areas across the app. So I chose to isolate these steps in a guided wizard to keep users focussed on only the actions they need to take, and let the tech to do the heavy lifting in the background.

This early on in their buying journey, I was very conscious of the user’s mental load and eagerness to get into the app. My focus was on crafting and iterating the right copy and story that would demonstrate value and boost their psych to helping them feel a sense of progress and remain compelled to continue. Every little detail had to count.

At the time we didn't have a reliable metric or mechanism for AB testing to compare conversion impact against. Our team was okay with this trade-off given the majority of users (and likely higher quality leads) successfully completed the set up steps and we had a new baseline to improve upon.

Up until this point, we had the signup and some basic getting started implemented. I needed to level this up. I decided mapping what the user journey looks like for our target persona (Managers/Admin in a 1-3 seat firm) is fundamental and might uncover points of friction.

I ran a few workshops with customer implementation folks to understand the minimal steps a manager in a 1-3 seat firm needed to take to get setup and learn the fundamentals. Then narrowed in on non-negotiable steps such as importing client contact records and creating client projects from pre-loaded workflow templates.

We knew from past research that users who engage Karbon’s support team to manually import their client contact list convert at greater than 70%, and this is one of the stickiest activation activities a new user can take.

In a 3 week sprint, I worked with one product manager and two engineers to build a wizard aimed at delivering the shortest route for a new user to achieve a populated client list on their own. By reducing the required contact data fields down to the minimum, we were able to cut the import time of thousands of rows of contact data from 48 hours to mere seconds.

Without a dedicated Growth team or resourcing, I needed to work with patterns that would allow me to be nimble and try things quickly without breaking the bank. I pitched some new patterns to my product and design team to implement in our design system, as a starting point for more experimentation.

At the time, Karbon lacked the necessary infrastructure to measure product-led growth. We knew a firm sticks at the 90 day mark but we didn't have a reliable indicator of retention (beyond daily or monthly active use) to focus our efforts. To truly engage and retain users, users need to develop rewarding habits in the product that align with real value. We hypothesised these to be:

• Weekly inspecting work progress (Managers)

• Daily completing tasks (Individual Contributors)

• Daily team communication (Everyone)