Segment by Learning and Building Style
Personalize onboarding by how someone builds and learns, not by their job title
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Classic onboarding personalization asks 'do you work in marketing, product, or ops?' and serves a matching template. Isford found that at Airtable this segmentation underperformed. What actually predicted onboarding needs was how someone learns and builds — database-familiar vs database-naive, visual learner vs data-forward learner — because that determines the support they need, not the artefact they want at the end.
Origin
Developed by Lauryn Isford and Airtable's activation and research teams while layering personalization on top of the generic guided onboarding wizard.
Core principles
- 01Ship the generic one-size-fits-most flow first; personalize second.
- 02How someone will go about building predicts their onboarding need better than what they want to build.
- 03A template shows an outcome but does not teach the mechanics of the product.
- 04Personas should come from research done away from the production experience, then be confirmed by in-flow signup questions.
- 05The role a person plays (builder vs invited teammate) may deserve a fully different onboarding route, not just a different template.
How to run it
- 1
Research before you segment
Have a research team run surveys and customer conversations away from the production experience and away from individual projects, and separately watch new users get started, looking for behavioural patterns and clusters.
Pro tip You want a robust read on who the personas are before you go anywhere near the flow.
- 2
Ship the generic flow first
Launch a single one-size-fits-all onboarding that solves the scaffolding need for the large majority (Airtable: 90%+), with escape hatches. Only then start layering personalization.
Watch out Escape hatches are good, but they are not a substitute for a flow that works for most people.
- 3
Bucket by learning and building style, not job function
Replace 'marketing / product / operations' segmentation with axes like: familiarity with databases, technical comfort, prior experience building things, and visual vs data-forward learning preference.
Pro tip Sophisticated-for-work, simple-for-work, hobby and consulting use cases all cut across job titles — building style does not.
Watch out Templates keyed to job function inspire but do not teach. They can leave a user impressed and still incompetent.
- 4
Ask targeted signup questions to route
Ask a small number of questions at signup, varying which ones you ask based on what you already know or want to know about the person, purely in service of helping them get started.
Pro tip Keep the questions in service of the user's onboarding, not in service of your sales enrichment.
- 5
Route non-builders to a different experience entirely
Detect users who arrive as invited teammates rather than builders — they were asked to update a sprint, not to design a workflow — and route them to a fully different experience rather than a variant of the builder flow.
Pro tip This is where most products still have obvious low-hanging fruit.
In the wild
Airtable initially rolled out one generic guided onboarding for everyone, then began personalizing. Testing bucketing by classic job-function segments against bucketing by learning and building style, the team found the latter more predictive: a database-familiar technical builder needs something quite different from someone exploring a tool a colleague recommended for project management, even if both say 'project management'.
→ Segmenting by building and learning style yielded better results on activation than the traditional job-function segments.
Common mistakes
Personalizing before the generic flow works
Personalization multiplies the surface area you must maintain. Without a proven generic flow serving most users, you are optimizing variants of something that does not yet work.
Confusing a template with teaching
A project-management template shows an example of how a use case can be built. It is useful for inspiration but is often the wrong mechanism for teaching someone how the product actually works.
Segmenting on the data you have rather than the data that predicts
Job function is easy to ask for and easy to store, which is why teams use it. It is not what determines whether this person can get to value.
Is it for you?
Best for
Activation teams on flexible, horizontal products where the same job title covers wildly different levels of technical skill
Not ideal for
Narrow vertical products where job role genuinely determines the workflow, or products too early to have a working generic onboarding
From the transcript
“when we rolled out the guided onboarding wizard it was actually just one generic onboarding that was one size fits all”
“we found bucketing customers by their learning and their building style was more effective than more classic segmentation like do you work in marketing do…”
“so we tried to segment the experience that way and found that that yielded better results on activation than some of the more traditional segments”
From the episode
Mastering onboarding
Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)