CHAPTER 6: Understand Your New Users

Make the customer the hero of your story.

- Ann Handley

There’s a saying that “hope is not a strategy.”

It’s actually unclear where this phrase originated, but it’s been popularly exclaimed by leaders such as Barack Obama, James Cameron, Vince Lombardi, and many others.

Regardless, if you’re like me, then this feels pretty intuitive. Well-planned and thought-out action is often the best strategy… not hope.

When you hope for something, it feels like unfounded wishful thinking, with no action or a plan to back it up. Any of the following sound familiar?

• “I hope my teacher gives me a better grade this semester.”


• “I hope my boss won’t get mad at me for coming late again.”


• “I hope traffic won’t be bad this morning.”

Hope is not a strategy.

But, it’s such a powerful force to bring about change. Hope is a belief that your current situation can get better, no matter how big or small.

This is the reason why signing up for a new product is an expression of hope. When users sign up, they’re opening themselves up to the possibility that things could be better.

Whether that hope ends in disappointment or excitement ultimately boils down to how well you understand what exactly they’re hoping for: what is it about their current situation that motivated them to sign up for your product? What were they hoping to achieve with your product that they couldn’t already do? 

If you fail to realize this, that sense of hope can result in disappointment. You’ve lost a potential user. With each churned signup, your overall CAC increases. And for users, they’ve just wasted their time and effort trying out your product. 

For this reason, it’s critical your onboarding team has a crystal-clear picture of what exactly your users’ desired outcomes are. This is the second step in the EUREKA framework.

If you get this step wrong, everything else will fail. Because once you’re able to fully understand what users truly want, you can design a reliable onboarding flow that turns hope into excitement.

Before you think about an onboarding redesign by adding another product tour or rewriting your onboarding emails, you need to first understand your users.

A Better Life

When you boil it down, onboarding is really about changing someone's behavior so that they can experience a better life. Users are frustrated or annoyed with something, and they sign up for a product to make their lives easier.

Remember, the primary goal of user onboarding is to help users become better versions of themselves. If we go back to the Super Mario analogy, onboarding shouldn’t focus on the product (the fire flower) or its characteristics (green stem and easy to pick up), even though they are important. It should focus on creating a better life.

It doesn’t matter if you sell lip gloss, copywriting services, or software; people are buying a better version of themselves. 

Let’s say your phone is a distraction during the day, to the point work is placed on the back-burner. To combat the intrusion on your productivity, you buy a timed lockbox to keep the phone hidden. What you’re really buying is a better way to avoid distractions from your mobile phone during work hours.

Another way to put it:

Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras – build better photographers.

- Kathy Sierra

Your Product’s “Job Interview”

The idea of “upgrading” a user’s life is at the core of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory by Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. JTBD is the process consumers go through whenever they aim to transform their existing life-situation. To enable a life transformation, customers “hire” products to solve a problem or to satisfy a need. This is known as a Customer Job.

For example, a Customer Job could be: “When I’m hungry, I want to cook raw chicken so I can eat it and satisfy my hunger.” So, you could “hire” a stove to make fried chicken or a grill to barbecue it. Or you could “hire” an oven to bake it. 

There are three implications of the JTBD framework.

1. Customer Jobs are solution agnostic. 

Notice how with cooking raw chicken, the Customer Job is independent of the solution (the stove, grill, or oven). 

When thinking about a product’s Customer Job, make sure it focuses on users’ needs and problems instead of the solution. You can’t start by looking at the product or what they’re currently using. You have to dig to the root of the problem that caused them to start looking for a solution in the first place. 

What were the circumstances around a person’s life that led them to start looking for a solution?

2. The circumstances in people’s lives lead to “job openings.”

In the JTBD framework, understanding the circumstances and pain points in users’ lives are more important than the product features and customer characteristics.

For example, after several comments from my wife that I looked like a high school student with my current laptop bag, it was time for an upgrade. So, I bought a professional bag to bring to conferences and client meetings. 

You could say the reason I started looking for one was to impress clients and people at conferences. But in actuality, I started to think about leveling up my wardrobe soon after I received a promotion.

While out shopping for it, a lot of information was thrown at me, ranging from the durability of the materials to the ergonomic qualities and features of the bag itself. But what actually sold me was the marketing message. This bag was made for “my grown-up work self.”

So what’s the point here? 

To build a great user onboarding experience, it’s important to know:

• What are the circumstances in users' lives that triggered them to start looking for a solution like yours?


• What is their desired outcome?


• What does success look like?


• What’s holding users back from achieving their desired outcome?


• What else did they consider or try, and why didn’t it work for them?

In other words, people try out products because there is a gap between their current circumstances and their final aspiration. Successful onboarding experiences are like a sturdy bridge between that gap so users can safely cross over to their desired outcome.

3. User onboarding is the Customer Job “interview.”

If users are hiring a product to do a Customer Job, then the user onboarding is the “interview” process. To nail the job interview, you have to first know what job you’re being interviewed to do. Do you think you’d be successful if you prepared yourself for a product management job interview if the job posting was actually for a sales development representative? I think not! 

To nail the job interview with users, you must first know what job a product is being hired to do. For that, it’s essential to understand the three interconnected reasons users could be signing up for a product. 

The Three Components of Customer Jobs

1. Functional 

When someone talks about Customer Jobs, they’re usually referring to the functional component of JTBD. Functional jobs involve specific outcomes the users experience after working with a product. 

Back to the example with Super Mario: the functional job of a fire flower is to make it easier for Super Mario to destroy barriers by using a new fire-spitting ability.

Another famous example is from Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” The quarter-inch hole is the functional job the drill must do.

We can take that analogy even further by describing the purpose of the quarter-inch hole. Maybe it’s to hang a photo or build a shelf. That would be the true functional job of the quarter-inch hole. 

It’s important to look further than what appears on the surface.

Here’s another example with a SaaS business, Canva, a graphic design platform that's great for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, and more. At the surface level, Canva’s functional job is to help people easily create custom designs. At a deeper level, it depends on who is using the product:

• For a paid ads marketer, Canva’s functional job is to quickly create high-converting, on-brand visual assets for a social ad campaign.


• For a teacher, Canva’s functional job is to create engaging visual aids that help teach abstract concepts to students.


• For a local coffee shop business owner, Canva’s functional job is to create, download, and print flyers to help drive foot traffic.

Functional jobs are as complex as the number of market segments served. Segmenting and personalizing the user onboarding experience for different customer jobs is one of the low-hanging fruits of improving onboarding. This is exactly why Canva asks new users what they’ll be using the app for during the user onboarding:

Segmentation is an important concept for the remainder of the EUREKA framework. But for now, think about the desired outcomes that users want to receive when they sign up for your product.

2. Emotional 

The second component of a Customer Job i