1. Clearly state your Idea 💡

Start by stating your idea. It helps to first very clearly define the problem you are solving. We like to write it down, like this:

Problem Statement:
“Potential clients come to our site with a product problem. They want to know if we can help, how we’d do it, what it will cost, and how long it could take. The information is detailed on the site, but it’s spread out. It takes time to find and isn’t easy to scan, especially on mobile. Contact options exist, but are not always obvious. This slows the client down at getting the information, speaking to us and making a decision on next steps. Sometimes it prevents it.”

So our idea is to solve that problem. To solve it, our product needs to provide three core benefits:

1. ✍️ Clarify the client's idea and define what success looks like.

2. ⚡ Instantly assess feasibility and fit with HOP.

3. 📖 Provide guidance, examples, and book the next step.

The target users are founders, tech employees and businesses with underserved product needs who land on our website. So let’s put all that into a clear idea statement:

Idea Statement:
“The product helps founders, tech employees and businesses with underserved product needs who land on https://houseofproducts.design/ to clarify their needs and expectations, verify if the project is feasible and if HOP is the right fit and book a discovery call by providing assistance and information with minimal effort and in under a minute.”

2. Define the job to be done 🛠️

We want to tackle the four big product risks this solution faces early by conceiving it to be valuable, viable, feasible and usable. Starting with the value risk. If our chatbot can deliver the promise written in our idea statement we’ll have a product that is valuable to its target customer.

Now we have to check if it is technologically feasible. For that we first need to define the specific Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) it needs to perform and then check whether the no-code technology available to us for this project can support it.

Jobs To Be Done (Visitor View)

• 🔍 Help the visitor clearly define the problem they’re trying to solve.

• ✨ Help the visitor clearly define the result they expect and the approximate deadline.

• ✅ Assess whether their idea is technically feasible.

• 🎯 Assess whether HOP is right for the job.

• ❓ Answer questions about HOP’s service offerings, experience, and content.

• 📅 Book a call with HOP.

We now know what the product needs to be able to do. In the next post we’ll check if building such a product is feasible. We’ll use ChatGPT to analyze that for us, to save time. Check the results in the next post.

Do you need help with building and growing products?

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🧠 Find hidden gaps.

📉 Fix churn.

⏱️ Get practical advice in 30 mins for free.

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🧩 Which best practices to follow?

🔸 First make sure you really understand your clients’ goals, what they expect from your product and the context in which they will be using it. Then design your onboarding so that it teaches clients to perform the tasks the product was hired to do quickly and without friction and help them reach the goals they are after. Mind their individual contexts - in B2C markets there will probably be just one user per product, while in B2B the same product can be used by many different users in different roles.

🔸 Clients will have different objectives and those with the same objective might have drastically different characteristics. You should handle that plurality with personalisation, creating a different Onboarding experience for each relevant customer segment.

🔸 There are many benefits in making Onboarding a part of your product and you should avoid solutions like programmed email sequences or a slapped-on toolkits. If your product is an app, your onboarding should be a core feature of that app. This will allow you to onboard in a contextualised way and while they use the product. “Learning while doing” is best. Also when Onboarding is built into your app it will likely be able to generate and consume usage data from the product’s database, facilitating personalisation and onboarding progress tracking.

🧩 Here’s an extra tip from Žiga, our Product Manager that has built quite a few Onboardings for different products over the years:

“Treat your Onboarding as a Core Feature of your product. Besides the technical benefits, it will also prevent you from looking at it as a one-of project and will hopefully inspire you to keep iterating on it, experimenting with different iterations and thus keep learning about your clients and your product. Experimentation in quick iteration cycles and consistent knowledge generation about clients needs is what turned my Onboardings into growth tools. Getting your technical setup right is important, but it’s usually how you use it that will determine success or failure. With RD Station Marketing this approach helped us improve Product Adoption by almost 40% in a relatively short time. It really works if done properly!”

Not sure your onboarding is doing the job?

🚨 BOOK A FREE ONBOARDING DIAGNOSTIC CALL 🚀 🚨

🧠 Find hidden gaps.

📉 Fix churn.

⏱️ Get practical advice in 30 mins for free.

🔗 Find out more about our work at houseofproducts.design

Trusted by teams at HubSpot, Endeavor, RD Station, Softplan & SBL.

🧩 What is its job?
Clients hire digital products when they have a problem that they believe the product will solve in an appropriate way. They rarely have previous experience with it and most first need help learning to use it.

From their perspective onboarding’s job is to assist with:
➡️ Implementing the product into the company tech-stack & configuring it;
➡️ Teaching efficient ways of performing the JTBD for which the product was acquired;
➡️ Ensuring they are successful with the product;
➡️ Helping them avoid problems and solve them if they appear;
➡️ Developing appropriate usage habits for their context;
➡️ Helping them grow with the product, uncovering advanced use cases;

🧩 How can your company benefit from it?
It can greatly improve product performance and your company’s bottom line. It gets clients using the product immediately and they get value from it quickly by solving real problems the product was hired to solve. This reduces churn and improves the entire client retention funnel - improving activation, adoption and retention. Your product becomes much less of a leaky bucket, average customer LTV grows and with it your company’s bottom line.

As clients become good at using the product, onboarding can help them expand their use beyond core functionality to advanced features. Once they reach the limits of one product, good onboarding should direct them to the next one. These clients already know your company and your products, which is why they make high-quality leads for your other offerings. Automated onboardings can go as far as closing these up & cross-sell opportunities autonomously, saving great amounts of money in sales-rep salaries and commissions.

🧩 Should you revisit and improve yours?
Yes! If you cannot empirically prove that your onboarding is driving early retention, deflecting support tickets, generating product qualified leads, increasing customer LTV and assisting in cross and up-sells. It is disappointing your clients and underserving your company.

We can help you build or improve yours, so…

🚨 BOOK A FREE ONBOARDING DIAGNOSTIC CALL 🚀 🚨

🧠 Find hidden gaps.

📉 Fix churn.

⏱️ Get practical advice in 30 mins for free.

To help you diagnose Onboarding problems yourself in the future and help you turn it into a powerful growth tool, we will dive into the ideal technical setup and onboarding best practices in our upcoming posts 📚.

🔗 Find out more about our work at houseofproducts.design

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🧩 Why Onboardings fail?

Some products have inadequate Onboarding or fail to provide it at all, letting clients to figure it out for themselves. This can demand a greater amount of effort they are willing to invest and can make some churn.
Weak onboardings ignore client objectives, their characteristics and context. Product centric onboardings are a good example. These explain what the product and its features do, but fail to explain how clients should use it efficiently to do the jobs it was hired for. Such onboardings are also of little help to those who are stuck or need support.

If onboarding happens outside your product, e.g. via email, you might be asking your clients to perform some gnarly UX acrobatics. Like constantly switching between their email and your product while they are trying to learn a new piece of software. They may not want to do that. It’s also not very effective to explain the UI and usage flows outside the product. The same applies for onboardings that live in sign-up flows or hide in Help Centres.

When onboardings are treated as a one time project, rather than a part of the product, they are usually launched with the new release and then forgotten about. Sooner or later they become obsolete, either not covering newly added functionality or not tending to new client needs the new features themselves might have generated.

🧩 Why is it crucial to get Onboarding right?

Your Onboarding needs to make your clients successful with the product and help your product grow. Not getting your Onboarding right means you are not efficiently helping your clients get started and be successful with your product. Low Activation, Adoption, Retention, and low NPS scores for new clients are the usual consequences, and they all affect your bottom line. It can also lead to missed learnings about your clients’ needs and expectations, and how your product should address them. Those learnings are precious opportunities your product and business can grow on.

🧩 Is my onboarding underperforming, or worse, failing?

Yes, it just might be if it doesn’t guide the most relevant client segments to their respective objectives in a way that is appropriate for their context, is not updated when needed and doesn’t generate new learnings about client needs. Do you want us to have a look?

🚨 BOOK A FREE ONBOARDING DIAGNOSTIC CALL 🚀 🚨

🧠 Find hidden gaps.

📉 Fix churn.

⏱️ Get practical advice in 30 mins for free.

🔗 Find out more about our work at houseofproducts.design

Trusted by teams at HubSpot, Endeavor, RD Station, Softplan & SBL.

In most cases, AI needs a senior designer to define:
- What is the real problem we’re solving?
- What are the expected user and business outcomes?
- How does this piece fit into the broader product or platform strategy?

Without that human oversight, AI can’t operate with quality. It executes tasks but doesn't question assumptions, spot hidden risks, or connect solutions back to the bigger picture.

That said, I’m genuinely impressed with how much AI has helped speed up my work, especially in early discovery phases or when available data is limited. Having access to a massive knowledge base makes AI a powerful assistant when used thoughtfully.

Now, in specific tasks, like heuristic evaluations, AI can perform surprisingly well. Its output can even resemble the work of a more senior product designer at times.

But even then, it falls short when critical reflection is needed: understanding how a single screen, flow, or recommendation fits into the complex system of user needs, business goals, and long-term product evolution.

Bottom line:
AI is a powerful tool for supporting product design work. But it’s not autonomous, and it’s definitely not a replacement for critical thinking, strategic insight, and human creativity.

Where have you seen AI really shine (or struggle) in your product design work?

👉 LET’S CHAT AND WE’LL TELL YOU HOW WE CAN HELP 🚀

🔗 Find out more about our work at houseofproducts.design

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One of the most important points he makes is that AI should be seen as a collaborator, not a replacement. It can generate ideas, automate repetitive tasks, and speed up processes. But at the end of the day, it’s still up to designers to interpret the output, apply critical thinking, and ensure the final product aligns with both user needs and business goals.

Just this week, I’ve been using it to generate feature concepts, but one major shortcoming is its inability to envision connected user flows. Unlike humans, it lacks a holistic view of the experience, often creating disjointed, noisy features rather than streamlined solutions. This means more refinement and critical thinking are needed to achieve a usable outcome.

🔍 So, what does this mean for designers?

Embrace AI as a collaborator, not a competitor. Let it handle repetitive tasks, but keep the human touch in problem-solving and user empathy.

Focus on critical thinking and context. AI might generate concepts, but designers must still evaluate and iterate based on real-world scenarios.

Stay adaptable. As AI tools evolve, so should our skills. Invest in learning how to integrate these technologies into your design process effectively.

Ultimately, product design remains rooted in human insight and strategic thinking. AI can enhance our work, but it cannot replace the nuanced understanding of user needs and business strategy. In the next post I'll show another example but applied to UI design.

I would love to hear how others are incorporating AI into their design practices!

👉 LET’S CHAT AND WE’LL TELL YOU HOW WE CAN HELP YOUR COMPANY! 🚀

🔗 Find out more about our work at houseofproducts.design

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Why?

Because CEOs likely had the vision of how their Product will make the world better, they built the first version of the Product, and had to sell it — to customers, investors, or partners.

The CEO understood the specific customer problem they were solving, saw the opportunity, and started telling the story about the world where the customer and the solution meet in market exchanges that are mutually beneficial. These are all elements of Product Marketing.

But here's the thing: CEOs don't often have time for this. They have a full agenda leading the company, representing the culture, overseeing operations, managing stakeholders, keeping company finances under control, and taking care of a multitude of other fundamental responsibilities.

On top of that:
The market keeps changing.
Customer needs evolve. New problems arise.
New competitors spring up.
Technology evolves & moves fast.

That’s where Product Marketing comes in, not as a supporting role or another responsibility the CEO needs to worry about, but as a strategic business function that connects market and product, outside and inside, demand and supply.

It ensures your product is discovered by the right customers, understood, bought, used and valued.

🎯 Product Positioning and Messaging
💰 Pricing, Packaging and Monetization
🧩 Go-To-Market Strategy
📚 Sales Enablement
🚀 Product Launches

These aren’t isolated tasks — they sit between Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Unit Economics. Without alignment, the product gets built… but not sold.

Customers won’t buy what they can’t find, don’t understand, or what they don’t care about.

Product Marketing aligns your product to the real world. And gives your team the confidence and tools to move forward and sell it. That’s the power of Product Marketing.

Do you need help telling your product’s story to the world?
We’ll discuss your challenges, understand where to dig into more information and create an informed plan to support your goals, whether to launch a new functionality, attract more visitors, convert them into customers or drive more product adoption and expansion.

🚨 BOOK A FREE CALL TO DISCUSS YOUR CHALLENGES 🚀 🚨

Our conversation will help us understand how we can support your product and ensure it is successful on the market, for a fraction of the price and the commitment that a full time PMM expert would cost you.

🧠 Find hidden gaps.

📉 Launch and grow.

⏱️ Get practical advice in 30 mins for free.

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This move was necessary because, as you know, merely building a product is not enough. It’s just the start. A product has to reach those who need it. But even a good product rarely sells itself. For customers to discover and understand it, learn to use it in their own context, solve real problems, and grow, it requires effective Product Marketing. It helps your product to:

• 🎯 Find Product-Market Fit

• 🚀 Plan & Execute high-impact launches

• 💰 Maximise Product Monetization

House of Products helps you build products, market and monetise them with Product-Led Growth (PLG).

Through PLG your product becomes an acquisition, sales and customer success channel, growing the user base and its revenue sustainably, without costly investments in ads, sales-teams or customer support.

Research by OpenView Partners and Gainsight shows that PLG alone was able to boost user activation by up to 150%, increase retention by 30%, and lift LTV. Many companies miss growth opportunities because they lack synergy between product, design, business, and marketing. Our new holistic method not only creates products but also takes them to market and optimizes their revenue through the entire product lifecycle.

Want to unlock your product’s true potential? 🔓 Let’s make it happen!

Discover how our lean, full-team expertise can propel your product forward without the cost of full-time hires.

🚨 BOOK A FREE DIAGNOSTIC CALL 🚀 🚨

🧠 Find hidden gaps.

📉 Fix churn.

⏱️ Get practical advice in 30 mins for free.

🔗 Find out more about our work at houseofproducts.design

Trusted by teams at HubSpot, Endeavor, RD Station, Softplan & SBL.