Tooltips · 4 min read
Who Owns User Onboarding (hint: there is no user onboarding specialist)
No single team owns user onboarding; product, growth, marketing, sales and customer success each own a part of it. What works is one accountable champion for the activation metric, usually product or growth in a product-led company and customer success or sales in a sales-led one, with the other teams owning the pieces they already run.
By Hilal Yıldırım
In short
User onboarding has no single owner and no dedicated job title, because every customer-facing team runs part of it: product the in-app flows, marketing the emails, sales the demos, customer success the setup. Split the work by those parts, then name one team as the champion accountable for activation. Which team that should be depends on your business model, set out in the table below.
If you're asking who owns onboarding for new employees, the answer is HR and the hiring manager. For user onboarding, the way a software product brings its customers to value, the honest answer is no one and everyone. That's true but not much use, so this post adds what most answers leave out: which part each team owns, and who should be accountable for the result.
There isn't even a job title for it. When this post was first written in 2022, a LinkedIn search for people in the United States calling themselves user onboarding specialists turned up close to none. Customer onboarding specialists do exist, as a customer success role covered in who is an onboarding specialist, but that role runs the human side of onboarding (calls, training, account setup), not the experience inside the product.
What is user onboarding?
User onboarding is the continuous process of getting users familiar with a product until they can use it to its full extent. It has no real end, because almost every SaaS product keeps shipping new features and changes.
In smaller and mid-sized companies, onboarding often gets just enough attention to keep customers. That's a problem when the main job of onboarding is retaining the users you've acquired, new and old alike. It raises the obvious question: if onboarding matters this much, why are there no dedicated user onboarding teams? The short answer is that user onboarding can't be handled by one team or one person.
Why does user onboarding matter so much?
User onboarding is how a product keeps the users it acquires. In a Wyzowl survey of 216 people in early 2020, 86% said they'd be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them after they've bought, and 8 in 10 said they'd deleted an app because they didn't know how to use it.
It's not only about retention. Good onboarding shows users that you care, and users who feel that find value faster. Value leads to loyalty, loyalty to retention, and retention to growth. Effective user onboarding is a growth lever when it's done right.
Who owns user onboarding?
Everyone, and no one. Each customer-facing team touches user onboarding, and none of them owns it from end to end.
You've met user onboarding yourself, whether in Facebook's product tour or in Notion's feature announcements. Think about who built those, and you'll find a different team behind each part:
| Part of user onboarding | Usually led by | What that team brings |
|---|---|---|
| In-product flows: tours, checklists, tooltips | Product or growth | Control of the product and its analytics |
| Signup, onboarding emails and in-app messaging | Marketing | Copy, branding and lifecycle email |
| Demos and segmentation for larger accounts | Sales | Why each customer bought the product |
| Account setup, training and support for new customers | Customer success and support | Knowledge of where customers get stuck |
| The activation metric and the onboarding roadmap | One named champion | Accountability for the result |
Every team has a stake, but none of them tries to own the whole thing. And there lies the irony.
Why is there no user onboarding specialist?
Because a specialist wouldn't help. User onboarding needs collaboration between teams, yet a specialist sitting between them would add a layer of decisions rather than remove one. Someone overseeing onboarding work across sales, product, customer success and support would have to report directly to the CEO, and every decision would slow down.
Ramli John, author of Product-Led Onboarding, describes three ways to onboard: product-led, sales-led and hybrid onboarding. These put product managers and salespeople at the centre, but they're not the only people on an onboarding team. The first step of the EUREKA framework in his book is to establish an onboarding team, not to hire an onboarding person.
Asked who owns user onboarding, John's answer is that user onboarding shouldn't be owned but championed. In different companies, different teams take that role.
Which team should champion user onboarding?
The champion depends on how you sell and who your users are. Whichever team it is, give it the activation metric (the share of new users who reach their aha moment) and the onboarding roadmap; the other teams keep the parts in the table above.
| If your business... | Champion | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Is small or mid-sized and wins on the value of its product | Product team | It suits product-led growth: the product itself makes loyal customers |
| Closes large deals with enterprise customers | Sales team | These customers want to be told the value rather than find it alone, so sales drives retention as well as conversion |
| Has very particular users, or puts their feelings about the product first | Customer success team | It knows users' mistakes, feedback and experience better than anyone |
| Benefits most from marketing and a strong brand voice | Marketing team | It runs signup and email campaigns, and it's best at showing the product's value |
| Has an established product without proper onboarding | Growth team | It can pick up what the other teams haven't, at any company size |
| Needs a balance of the above | A cross-team onboarding team | Hybrid or sales-assisted onboarding, another of John's concepts, mixes product-led and human help |
Then measure the result: the user onboarding metrics worth tracking start with activation and time to value.
Whatever your case, remember why there are no user onboarding specialists: no single team or person can own good user onboarding. It needs the attention of more than one team, and it gives back more than it takes.
About the author
Hilal YıldırımHilal is a creative content writer highly focused on growth, occasionally product, and always onboarding.
