project snapshot
Product-led growth patterns
I was brought into the Growth team to lead tactical research and experiments— small-scale tests aimed at improving feature activation for trialists. What started as design solutions for focused experiments grew into the foundation of strategic patterns and a reusable framework for adoption.
Role
Design lead
Partners
Product, research, content, engineering
Timeline
6 months
Results
+$1.1M ARR over 2 quarters, ↑25% increase in trial conversion, activation and adoption lifts across core features up to ↑750%
it started with a two-sided problem
Users couldn't experience the value of core features without dealing with complexity and fragmented flows.
Meanwhile, respective feature teams were solving these challenges in silos, each building their own approaches without coordination.
how i approached it
Invalidating assumptions about goal oriented discovery
I partnered with a UX Researcher and Distinguished Designer to validate concepts defined from a previous workshop. We tested a key hypothesis that framing activation as a user goal would drive engagement, but our research quickly invalidated it. In fact, just seeing the word "goal" during the first moments of a trial experience brought confusion to participants.
Setting goals was premature since trialists didn't know yet what we had to offer and haven't formulated opinions on whether they'll continue with the platform or not.
Honing on what actually resonated: contextual, value-first experiences
Despite invalidating the initial hypothesis, we observed positive signals on design concepts that aimed to give structure to trial exploration. The research also surfaced clear principles for maintaining engagement:
1. Be clear and concise when guiding users
2. Let users explore freely while providing contextual help at natural moments
3. Make next steps obvious. Avoid dead ends.
4. Build in delight where possible.
strategically scaled experimentation
Positive signals prompted the Growth team to experiment at scale
Three teams ran experiments to validate the design concepts across different use cases. The scaled testing revealed consistent patterns that held across contexts: contextual prompts that lead to simple setup flows, preview-before-commit flows, and structured progress tracking.
snippet of my team's simple setup experiment that led to a 750% stat sig lift in feature adoption
a codified framework was born
The Adoption Framework
I documented the validated patterns into a comprehensive design kit with core components, design principles, and usage guidelines. This created design infrastructure that enabled other teams to ship adoption experiences faster while maintaining consistency. Components were also built in a shared code repository for a streamlined execution from design to implementation.
teams adopted framework
↑1,232%
ai agent activation lift
↑750%
custom fields adoption lift
↑167%
automations adoption lift
↑80%
macros adoption lift
↑12%
view adoption lift
next
Multi-year vision, strategy, and design execution to enhance platform-wide security that led to +$25M ARR and $100M+ enterprise ARR retention.