Product
Hatch Labs
·
2025
Onboarding that gets teams to value in a day
Rebuilding the first-week experience of a B2B analytics product so that new workspaces reach their first dashboard before the trial's second day.
Role
Product designer
Duration
4 months
Team
1 designer, 4 engineers, 1 PM, 1 data analyst
Outcome
Trial-to-paid conversion up from 9% to 14%
Hatch Labs sells product analytics to mid-sized SaaS companies. Trials were plentiful; activation was not. Only 31% of new workspaces created a dashboard in their first week, and almost nobody who skipped that step converted.
Finding the moment
We mapped the first seven days of 60 trials with session recordings and short interviews. Two things stood out. People signed up to answer one specific question ("why did retention drop in March?"), and the product made them set up everything before it would answer anything.
The redesign
The new onboarding starts from the question. You pick what you want to know, connect one data source, and Hatch builds a dashboard draft with real numbers before asking about teammates, goals or billing.
Question first. Six starting questions, written in the words customers used in interviews.
One source, then value. A single integration is enough to render the first chart; the rest can wait.
Progressive setup. Invites, alerts and goals appear as suggestions on the dashboard itself, not as a checklist.
Measuring
We ran the new flow as an A/B test for six weeks. Dashboard creation in week one went from 31% to 58%, and trial-to-paid from 9% to 14%. Time to first chart fell from a median of 2 days to 41 minutes.
What I would do differently
The data-source step still loses people who need an engineer. The next iteration should let them invite that engineer with one click and keep exploring on sample data meanwhile.