Forget Best Practices: How to add profitable friction to your product onboarding

The Forget The Funnel Podcast

If you’re building a racecar, friction is bad news. But when you’re building an onboarding experience for your software product, things are a little more nuanced.
This week, we’re dialing into why the pervasive push for a frictionless user experience in your product onboarding isn’t just overrated—it might be undermining your growth potential.

At some point, SaaS founders and product managers started taking for granted that friction in the user journey was always a bad thing. But that so-called “best practice” isn’t always the best because it doesn’t account for your potential customer’s context. And as we know, context is everything when it comes to their decision-making process.

In fact, your customers often *need* friction to convince them to keep using your product.

How can you tell good friction from bad to make sure your users get to key moments of value, educate your potential customers, and unveil what really matters to them?

On this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast, Ramli John shares why “remove all friction” is a best practice we should forget. Georgiana and Claire also share why friction gets a bad rap, when to add it in or remove it, and how customer insight unlocks how to add profitable friction for your SaaS.

Discussed:

• Why “remove all friction from your product onboarding” became a best practice and why it’s not actually helpful advice.
  
• The difference between unnecessary friction and useful friction and how good friction can help users keep going in your product, including real-life examples.
  
• Why customer intel is essential to getting new users to moments of value when you’re adding and removing friction.

Key moments:

1:56 - Ramli John shares his favorite flawed best practice: “You have to remove all friction from the user journey.” This advice isn’t universal — friction can be helpful and add value to the user experience.

5:31 - Georgiana and Claire second Ramli’s take and break down what friction is, why it gets a bad rap, and why it shouldn’t (at least, not always).

8:29 - Claire describes “Exhibit A” of unnecessary friction: a lengthy demo form where sales don’t actually use all the information gathered. The questions may be intended to create a better experience, but it’s a chore to fill out — and the friction’s unhelpful.

11:47 - Georgiana walks through examples of products where friction is good, like Canva’s approach to catering the product experience and Wave asking for the user’s logo to show what an invoice would look like.

15:26 - Sometimes “best practices” are in direct conflict with what customers want, which is why customer knowledge is critical. Georgiana shares an example of how Bitly introduced friction to educate customers based on Jobs to Be Done research and the resulting use cases.

20:27 - Claire shares how it can hurt you to remove friction when you shouldn't, using an analogy from IKEA. If it’s the user’s first time using your product, you need friction to show them the steps to take based on what’s valuable to them.

24:58 - The key to avoiding bad friction is to get clear on what parts of your product matter to your best-fit customers. You have to validate that for them when they get in for the first time and keep the good friction that gets them to moments of value.

29:30 - The pair wrap up the episode by sharing how you might implement knowledge about you

As always, you can learn more about Forget The Funnel here:

• Read the Forget The Funnel Book
• The AI book companion that comes free with the book
• Check out Forget the Funnel’s website