Diagnose First-Time Onboarding Friction

Company Context

FinFlow is a mid-stage personal finance app with 6 million registered users and a freemium subscription model. The company is growing quickly through paid acquisition, but leadership believes too many new users drop off before experiencing the product's core value: linking accounts and receiving a personalized spending overview.

Problem

FinFlow's first-time user onboarding has a high top-of-funnel completion rate but weak activation. Of users who install the app, 72% create an account, 54% start onboarding, 31% complete account linking, and only 18% view their first personalized dashboard within 24 hours. Early qualitative research suggests users are confused by permission requests, hesitant to connect bank accounts, and unsure why certain setup steps matter.

Your task is not to redesign the entire product. Instead, identify what friction points you would look for in the first-time onboarding journey, how you would prioritize them, and what changes you would recommend first.

Deliverables

1. Define the core user job-to-be-done in first-time onboarding and identify the most important user segments to analyze.
2. Map the onboarding funnel and list the friction points you would investigate at each step.
3. Prioritize the top friction points to solve first, with clear rationale and trade-offs.
4. Propose 2-3 product changes for an MVP improvement plan.
5. Define how you would measure whether onboarding friction has meaningfully decreased.

Constraints

• You have one mobile squad, one designer, and one data analyst for the next 6 weeks.
• You may change onboarding copy, sequencing, UI, and education flows, but cannot rebuild bank-linking infrastructure.
• Legal requires existing consent and compliance steps to remain in place.
• Leadership wants improvements that increase activation without materially reducing fraud checks or data quality.