Onboarding
A shorter, self-paced path to value
Replacing a five-week, high-touch setup with a measurable, self-serve flow.
Enterprise B2B SaaS · Product design & research
Designing for the number that matters: retention.
At BrightEdge — the leader in enterprise SEO software — I led the design that turned a churning enterprise product around: automation that lifted retention from 50% to 72% across 1,371 deployments, after rebuilding onboarding for a new kind of customer.
The problem
BrightEdge leads enterprise SEO software, but its dominant user had changed — from technical SEO engineers to digital marketers who were less technical, time-poor, and new to SEO. A product built for experts was now in generalists’ hands, and it showed where it hurts: onboarding took five weeks and the biggest segment was churning at 50%. The job: get less-technical users to value faster, then make that value automatic enough to show up at renewal.
My role
As Product Design Lead I owned design and research across two initiatives — leading design-thinking workshops and the UX research that defined the feature bets, and partnering with Customer Success, Sales, and Engineering to ground the work in why customers actually struggled.
The platform
Built for experts, now used by marketers
A sophisticated enterprise SEO platform — the product we had to make valuable for a less-technical, time-poor user.
Onboarding for a new persona.
I rebuilt the path to value: clarified navigation, taught SEO fundamentals in-product, and replaced the five-week, high-touch setup with a shorter, measurable, self-paced flow — set up → find prioritized issues → act → measure.
Autopilot: make value automatic.
The biggest segment had no time for more work, so features had to run on auto-drive. The strategy: add value, prove performance, automate everything — each one signed off as a proven metric. Autopilot for Compliance automated cookie-consent; Autopilot Convert automated A/B testing across CTAs.
Onboarding
Guided, in-product education
Steps that teach SEO fundamentals where the work happens.
Onboarding
A clarified, focused dashboard
Fewer choices, so a non-technical user can find and use the product.
Onboarding
Prioritized site issues, ready to act on
Surfacing the work that matters, then the recommended next step.
Autopilot
Value on auto-drive
Set once, then the product does the work — no extra training required.
Autopilot
Inside the workflow
Automation built into the tools customers already used.
Autopilot
Autopilot Convert — automated testing
Automated A/B and multivariant testing across CTA types.
Autopilot
Proven on real accounts
Every feature signed off as a proven performance metric.
Autopilot
Running live on a customer site
Automation working on a real customer’s pages.
Autopilot
…across desktop and mobile
The same automated wins, everywhere the customer’s audience is.
“The automation work you guys do really adds a lot of value — and it was a key factor in our decision to continue.”
— Tamar, JCF · a BrightEdge customer
Reflection
BrightEdge is where I learned to design for the number that matters: retention. A beautiful onboarding flow is worthless if the product doesn’t keep delivering value on its own — so the problem moved from “teach the user” to “do it for the user, and prove it.” Anchoring every feature to a signed-off metric changed how the team prioritized — start from the business outcome, design back to the screen.
“He helped me and my team scale a new product… guiding more junior team members through Fortune-500-worthy B2B software product experiences and securing major contracts with Tyndale, Morningstar, DocuSign and Walmart/Sam’s Club.”
Nikola Dosev · Growth Product Manager, SkySlope · worked with Michael at BrightEdge