The Problem
N-able's onboarding was handled manually by phone, consuming significant support hours per new customer. The business needed to shift new trial users onto self-serve guides that could teach them the product's core building blocks — without losing the activation that the high-touch phone process had been providing.

My Role & Constraints
The business had already identified the cost problem and completed initial research. The info-dev and educational teams narrowed this down to ten walkthroughs identified as the most valuable starting point. I owned turning that into an actual guide experience — structure, design, prototyping, and testing.

Process & a Key Decision
I owned the sequencing of the ten guides and how they surfaced — triggering on a new user's first login rather than requiring them to go looking, while giving users control to dismiss or hide any guide they didn't need. Internal usability testing with team members unfamiliar with the product surfaced a recurring problem: testers hit points of uncertainty about what to do next. I reframed how the tooltips were presented and reworded the copy to clearly signal where to go, rather than just what a feature did. External testing after launch validated the fix — testers specifically valued having the guides in-product at all, seeing it as a way to get new recruits up to speed faster.

The Solution
The team already had static help docs, walkthrough videos, and checklists — none of which actively guided a user through the setup workflow itself as they worked. The digital onboarding guides were designed to sit inside the product and walk users step-by-step through actually completing setup, rather than sending them off to read separate documentation.