Onboarding DX Audit (Beta Clients Only)

Is developer adoption lagging behind your growth?

You have a non-trivial onboarding flow that might involve downloading software, introducing new concepts or mental models, signing up for your service, configuring different kinds of client-side SDKs, and deploying to your own cloud or another provider. In short, your DevTool has a lot of moving parts and might have a higher learning curve than you want.

That’s why you’ve invested in good documentation. That’s table stakes. You think your getting started guide is pretty good, or at least, your team says, “It’s fine.” But you’re not sure. There still might be gaps no one’s uncovered yet. You might be investing in more content marketing to spread awareness to drive new developers to your product – but are those developers actually reporting issues they face or are they just silently abandoning your onboarding and going with a competitor?

Imagine that learning your DevTool was frictionless.

Imagine them getting to Hello World in 5 minutes or less. Imagine optimizing for “Aha!” moments (instead of “Ah hell! (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻”). Imagine them finishing that getting started guide and moving on to building their MVP sooner. Imagine feeling confident that your content marketing spend was not only attracting developers but keeping them engaged so they don’t bounce out of your funnel. Imagine your tool being the one developers flock to when they get frustrated with your competitors.

Get a friction audit from a seasoned developer experience engineer and educator.

Did you know the industry benchmark for Time to Hello World is 5 minutes? With my onboarding friction audit, you’ll know exactly where developers might be getting stuck in your Hello World onboarding flow and get tailored advice for how to remove roadblocks to get you under that coveted 5-minute mark (and sometimes half that).

Often all it takes is fresh eyes and an outside perspective to see gaps in your onboarding flow. If you don’t follow a standard process for performing friction audits, there are probably gaps you don’t see – especially if you are continually adding new features that increase complexity. Book a friction audit from me now. Why?

• I was a lead engineer on a developer enablement team whose efforts doubled the speed-to-market for new Target.com experiences and more than doubled cart & checkout web performance, contributing to record sales that year
• I’ve worked on enterprise DevTools for over 12 years across multiple stacks and roles including frontend, backend, and infra
• I've personally designed, facilitated, and performed usability tests and UX audits for Fortune 500 apps
• I’ve upskilled over 12,000+ professional developers on different DevTools through my Pluralsight courses
• I have a business background that helps me bridge the gap between business and engineering teams

Onboarding for DevTools is uniquely challenging in that a developer crosses between your API & SDK developer experiences and your product's user experience. It requires two disciplines to fully evaluate. I've not only designed platform APIs, but I've also designed frontend UX, allowing me to assess both aspects of your onboarding holistically.

Here’s how it works:

We book a kick-off meeting with you and select members of your team. Before our kick-off meeting, I’ll ask you to answer some questions about the onboarding experience you want me to test. These questions will gather inputs to the test like the specific SDK or stack to use, who your personas are, and where the entrypoint to the getting started experience is.

At the kickoff meeting, first we’ll discuss the gaps you are seeing. Then we’ll go over how you’ve addressed them or are currently addressing them. Finally, we’ll get aligned on the approach and how I’ll measure the audit. The meeting usually takes about 60-90 minutes but it will be booked for 2 hours just in case.

Within 2 weeks, you will have a report with specific, actionable recommendations to close any onboarding gaps. We’ll schedule a Q&A where I’ll present the key findings and summarize the report. Once that’s done, I’ll hand over the report so your engineering team can close any gaps that will help you increase your developer adoption rate.

The onboarding friction audit includes:

• Multiple Hello World profiling sessions for one (1) SDK or tech stack (e.g. .NET, Node.js, Go, Ruby, Python, etc.)
• A developer journey map and timeline that visualizes the “hot path” during the onboarding flow
• Recordings of the profiling sessions with annotations you can keep forever
• Audit report with detailed findings and tailored recommendations
• 1-hour leadership summary with Q&A

Beta Test Offer

Are you ready to make your onboarding easy? Awesome!

If I sent you this page, I'm offering you this service pro bono for doing a beta test run. In exchange:

• You agree to provide feedback on the design and process of the audit. Tell me what works/what doesn't work. I will likely be asking more questions and refining the process as I go.
• You agree to work with me to provide some numbers and measure before/after results (e.g. we saw 10% more signups).
• If you're satisfied with my work, you agree to produce a testimonial I can display on my website showcasing how I helped.
• If you're unsatisfied at any point, you can back out as long as you let me know so I can improve the service for next time.

I'm confident I can make your onboarding easier – but during a beta, I anticipate there will be issues. I am aiming to deliver the entire service within 2 weeks.

Sound good? You can get this party started by replying to the email I sent you. I will send a personalized booking link if you're ready to start or we can have a call to discuss any of these details before you commit.

My Guarantee

I guarantee I can provide recommendations that will lower your Time to Hello World to 5 minutes or less. Heck, if it's already 5 minutes or less, I bet I can save you another 20%.

“As a database company, content was a big void for us. Our product is hard to explain and requires a lot of technical depth. The only person in the company who could write about it was our CEO. When we saw Kamran had created a Pluralsight course around our product, we reached out to him to help us with our developer marketing and education.

Kamran has simplified complex features clearly and understandably for my team internally and our community. He has helped us design more engaging technical content and education through his excellent writing and communication skills and use of examples.

I personally expressed in our management meeting that no one in our company could provide such high-quality content, presentations, and videos.”

— Sabrina Globus, VP of Marketing at RavenDB

“Of all the engineers I've worked with, Kamran ranks among the top in terms of his commitment to educating and leveling up his peers.

I'd strongly recommend Kamran to boost any team. Anyone who has worked with him would be excited to get the chance to work with him again in the future.”

— Anders Johnson, Principal Engineer at Target

What is Time to Hello World?

Time to Hello World is a crucial measure of how quickly a developer can get up and running with your tool, experiencing its power firsthand. Here’s what I mean: one time, I was sitting in a workshop with the CTO of a new framework, and it wasn’t until the second day that people’s heads started to explode about how powerful the tool could be (but by then some people had already decided not to show up).

Don't let a complicated onboarding process detract potential users from your DevTool. In today's fast-paced market, you're competing not only with alternatives but also with shorter and shorter developer attention spans.

A shorter Time to Hello World means a more efficient and enjoyable onboarding process, leading to faster developer adoption, increased developer satisfaction, and higher free-to-paid conversion rates.

Still have questions? No problem, reply to my email and I'll try to answer them.