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Designing first-run product onboarding wizards that get users to the ah-ha moment without overwhelming them. Step architecture, progressive disclosure, escape hatches, completion incentives, drop-off measurement. Honest about tutorial-overload (dump everything upfront), skip-friendly-empty (skipped onboarding leads to abandoned product), and earned-progressive-disclosure (right things at the right moments) patterns.
Passed 22 of 23 test cases with the skill, and 20 of 23 without it.
and 3 more in the full report
3 fixed19 passed either way0 still failing1 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 3 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
Our product team is designing the post-signup experience for a collaborative project management tool that serves both workspace admins and invited team members. I need a comprehensive onboarding design blueprint. Please deliver a proposal that maps out the ideal sequence architecture, outlines a progressive disclosure pattern for advanced configurations, details how to branch the flow by user role, and specifies a per-step metrics plan to measure where users fall off.
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Evaluates whether an upfront wizard is justified vs contextual in-app guidance for each user role. | Missed | Passed |
| Specifies explicit skip patterns (such as soft skip with context) and resume patterns (such as auto-resume or manual resume) to prevent unconfigured empty states. | Missed | Passed |
| Applies named progressive disclosure patterns such as default-heavy or required-now optional-later for setup configurations. | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
A senior product marketing director's playbook for designing first-run product onboarding wizards that get users to the ah-ha moment without overwhelming them. Step architecture, progressive disclosure, escape hatches, completion incentives, drop-off measurement. The discipline of building an onboarding sequence the user actually completes.
Most product onboarding wizards fail in one of two ways. They cram every feature into a 12-step intro the user has not earned the patience for. Or they offer a "skip onboarding" button so prominent that users skip into an empty product with no context, and then churn the next day because they never found the value. The activation rate is the metric that matters, and most wizards are optimizing for the wrong thing.
The wizards that work do something different. Each step earns the user one step closer to value. The wizard surfaces the right thing at the right moment, not everything upfront. Skip exists but is balanced against staying engaged. The user reaches the ah-ha moment with a sense that the product respected their time.
The voice is the senior product marketing director who has watched activation rates double when wizards were redesigned and watched them collapse when "more onboarding" was added without discipline. Practical, opinionated about the design choices that distinguish completed wizards from skipped ones, willing to call out when no wizard at all is the right answer.
When to use this skill: scoping a first-run onboarding wizard for the first time, auditing a wizard with poor completion or activation, deciding which features warrant inclusion in onboarding vs deferred to in-product help, or designing the ah-ha moment the wizard is engineering toward.
This skill spans first-run product onboarding wizards. The growth-tooling distinctions:
multi-step-form-design is pre-signup data capture (forms before the user has access). This skill is post-signup product onboarding. Different phase, different audience state.interactive-product-tour is contextual help WITHIN the product, surfacing across the lifecycle. This skill is the sequential first-run experience.chatbot-flow-design is conversational help. This skill is non-conversational sequential setup.onboarding-wizard-design (this skill) is the post-signup wizard's structure, ah-ha moment design, progressive disclosure, skip mechanics, drop-off measurement.pm-spec-writing is the spec for engineers building the wizard. This skill is about WHAT to build; pm-spec-writing is about communicating it.The audience: product marketers, growth marketers, in-house product teams designing activation flows, agencies running activation work for SaaS clients.
Out of scope: pre-signup forms (covered by multi-step-form-design); in-product contextual tours (covered by interactive-product-tour); the engineering implementation; specific Userpilot/Userflow/Pendo/Appcues platform configurations (those stay implementation-side).
Before designing the wizard, decide whether a wizard is the right tool.
Wizards earn investment when:
test cases passed, vs 20 / 23 without
More skills from the same source and nearby in the registry, with their headline benchmark lift.