How can you onboard customers effectively at scale without throwing more people at the problem? 

The answer lies in a lean, data-driven approach.

In this article, I’ll share my journey from working as an HR leader to a customer success professional at a high-growth startup. I'll explain how we adopted a "lean onboarding" methodology, borrowing principles from engineering and applying them to the customer journey. 

You'll learn how we defined and delivered the first moment of value, identified and eliminated waste in our processes, and leveraged technology to personalize the customer experience, all while laying the groundwork for sustainable growth.

The journey from HR to customer success

Six years ago, I was completely burnt out. I had just left a demanding chief HR officer role and decided to change gears in both my personal and professional life. I started training for long-distance running, and in parallel, I shifted my career into the HR tech space. 

This felt very natural because I had literally walked in the customer's shoes just a few months before. 

I joined a company called Orgnostic, a people analytics platform that surfaces insights for business leaders.

It didn't take me long to see the parallels between the HR world and customer success. In HR, everything revolves around the employee journey – from attracting and retaining top talent to improving employee productivity. 

HR professionals achieve this by identifying and pulling the right levers at key moments in the employee journey. This is exactly what we do in the customer success world, and it felt so natural for me to continue on this same path.

Defining the first moment of value

At Orgnostic, we were a high-growth startup living the dream, but our rapid growth was becoming a potential nightmare.

We couldn't onboard more customers by simply adding more people. We needed a new methodology that would allow us to activate customers faster without additional headcount. This is where we opted for a lean onboarding approach.

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The core idea behind lean onboarding starts with two key principles: focusing on delivering the first moment of value and eliminating any waste around that process. 

Delivering this first moment isn’t always easy. It’s about answering the question, "What is that moment when the customer says, 'This is why I bought this tool?'" It's about justifying their decision to buy. We found that this approach reduces early customer churn, which was one of our main objectives.