Onboarding DX Audit

Wish someone could give you the good, the bad, and the lovely on your dev tool usage journey?

As you've grown, you've added more features and with that, more complexity in educating new developers on your tool. 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 dev tool 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 even have new hires go through your getting started guides to uncover issues but internal devs are not your customers – there's bias by default and the incentives are misaligned. Plus hiring is infrequent or cyclical. You've considered sourcing developers yourself but it's a challenge to find reasonably qualified people to do this sort of thing. The problem is, there still might be gaps no one’s uncovered yet.

You understand that marketing is a long game but you're getting antsy waiting for long-term results to spread awareness to drive new developers to your product. How many developers that are checking out your dev tool are actually reporting issues they face? Are they just silently abandoning your onboarding and going with a competitor?

Imagine knowing exactly what to improve in your onboarding DX in weeks, instead of months.

Imagine developers 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.

What if YOUR tool was 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).

Schedule your friction audit with me today. Why?

• I have over 20 years of experience in tech, 12 of which were directly helping developers succeed on multiple platform teams within the enterprise space across multiple stacks and roles including frontend engineering, backend APIs, and DevOps/SRE
• I was a lead on a web platform engineering & enablement team whose re-platforming efforts doubled the speed-to-market for new Target.com experiences, contributing to record sales that year
• I've personally designed, facilitated, and performed usability tests and UX audits for both internal and consumer-facing Fortune 500 apps
• I’ve upskilled over 12,000+ professional developers on different dev tools through my Pluralsight courses and routinely speak at international and regional conferences like React Summit and NDC on various tech topics
• I have a business background that helps me bridge the gap between business and engineering teams

Onboarding for DevTools is unique 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.

Sample Developer Journey Map:

Want to see what a sample report looks like? Here is one visualization taken from a sample journey audit on Stripe's getting started guides which you can view below:

Here’s how it works:

You swipe plastic and book your slot on my calendar. Thanks! 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 entry points are to the getting started experience.

At the kickoff meeting, we’ll discuss the gaps you are already 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

Ready to rm -rf friction from your DevTool?

Are you ready to make your onboarding easy? Awesome! You can get started by booking your audit by clicking the button below. The price is $3,000, which is easily recouped by increasing adoption and converting more free-to-paid customers.

If your investment today converted 60 more developers this year with an average LTV of $600, that's $36,000 of revenue you didn't have before.

Now imagine over the next 3-5 years you continue to convert an average of 75 additional developers per year based on the recommendations I provide – that's a potential increase of around $225,000 in revenue without even raising your prices, investing in more content marketing, or increasing LTV. Not bad for a $3,000 investment, right?

100% Money Back 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%. If you’re not satisfied with my findings after the final presentation, simply let me know, and I’ll refund your money.

People I've helped

“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

“In our time together at Target, Kamran was instrumental in the design and delivery of our new Web Platform, as we migrated our massive Target.com applications to a new architecture centered around Next.js.

Of all the engineers I've worked with, he ranks among the top in terms of his commitment to educating and leveling up his peers - from the many internal presentations and tutorial videos he produced on topics like performance, to countless pairing sessions and support in chat threads.

I was always impressed by his commitment to including stakeholders in the design process, and contributing high quality documentation & code comments for the solutions he helped deliver.

On top of that, he was a major advocate of TypeScript both inside and outside the company, a technology which added immeasurable value to our developer experience and application stability. He also helped lead a thorough performance audit of our site, fixing several findings, and sharing the rest with our teams as opportunities.

Finally, he helped us write various tools and lint rules to empower and educate our engineers toward best practices and effective patterns.

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 not sure?

You might need a developer onboarding friction audit if...

• Churn's going up each month
• Devs need help to see the value of your dev tool
• You'd love more devs to build stuff and go for a paid plan
• Devs sign up, log in once, then ghost
• You want to maximize your content marketing spend
• You haven't checked out your getting started guides in a while
• You aren't sure if you have a frictionless onboarding experience
• Devs keep asking about how to do easy stuff with your API or SDK

Alright, you've reached the end.

Time to make a decision. You're only 2 weeks away from knowing what's slowing you down. Click the hot pink button below to stop waiting.

Still have questions? No problem, shoot me an email.