Balance Growth and UX in Onboarding

Company Context

Pulse is a subscription-based fitness app with 12M monthly active users across iOS and Android. It offers guided workouts, habit tracking, and premium coaching, and competes with larger wellness platforms by positioning itself as the simplest way to build a daily fitness habit.

Problem

Pulse's growth team wants to increase free-to-paid conversion by adding more aggressive upgrade prompts during the first 7 days of onboarding. Today, 38% of new users complete onboarding, 24% start at least one workout in week 1, and 4.8% convert to paid within 30 days. Early tests show that adding a paywall before the first workout could raise 30-day conversion to 6.1%, but it also reduces first-workout starts by 18% and increases day-7 churn among new users.

Leadership is split: the CEO wants faster monetization to hit quarterly revenue goals, while the Head of Product worries that interrupting the core user journey will damage trust and long-term retention. You are the PM responsible for onboarding.

Deliverables

1. Define how you would evaluate the trade-off between user experience and growth for Pulse's onboarding flow.
2. Identify the most important user segments and their core jobs-to-be-done during the first 7 days.
3. Recommend a product strategy for where, when, and how to introduce monetization or growth prompts.
4. Prioritize the MVP changes you would ship in the next quarter and explain what you would not ship.
5. Define success metrics and guardrails to determine whether the strategy is working.

Constraints

• You have one quarter to ship an MVP.
• Engineering capacity is limited to 4 mobile engineers and 1 designer.
• Marketing has already committed revenue targets for the next two quarters.
• Legal requires transparent subscription disclosures and one-tap dismissal for upgrade prompts.
• You cannot materially increase onboarding completion time by more than 30 seconds.