Onboarding Personalization

This drill routes new users into persona-specific onboarding tours based on their role, use case, company size, and signup context. Instead of one generic tour for all users, each persona gets a tour optimized for their fastest path to activation.

Prerequisites

• Intercom installed with Product Tours enabled
• PostHog tracking user properties and events
• At least 2 distinct user personas identified (e.g., "admin vs end-user", "marketer vs developer", "solo vs team lead")
• A working generic onboarding tour (from the onboarding-flow drill) to use as the baseline

Steps

1. Define persona segments

Using the posthog-cohorts fundamental, analyze your existing activated users. Group them by the properties available at signup or within the first session:

• Role: What is their job function? Collect via signup form or Intercom user properties.
• Use case: What are they trying to accomplish? Collect via a single-question in-app survey on first login.
• Company size: Solo user, small team (2-10), or larger organization (10+)?
• Signup source: Referral, organic search, paid ad, product hunt, etc.

Define 2-4 persona segments. More than 4 creates maintenance burden without proportional activation lift. Example segments for a project management tool:

• Persona A — Solo creator: Individual user, creative role, found via content
• Persona B — Team lead: Manager role, 3+ team invites expected, found via search
• Persona C — Technical builder: Developer role, API/integration interest, found via GitHub or docs

2. Map activation paths per persona

For each persona, identify the fastest path to their specific "aha moment." The activation metric may differ by persona:

• Solo creator: Creates first project and adds 3+ items (value = personal organization)
• Team lead: Creates project and invites 1+ teammates (value = team coordination)
• Technical builder: Connects an integration or makes first API call (value = automation)

Using posthog-custom-events, define persona-specific activation events:

• activation_reached with property persona_type: "solo_creator" (or "team_lead", "technical_builder")

3. Build persona-specific tours

Using the intercom-product-tours fundamental, create one tour per persona. Each tour is 3-5 steps and focuses only on reaching that persona's activation metric.

Tour A — Solo Creator (3 steps):

1. "Create your first project" — spotlight the New Project button, make step interactive
2. "Add your first items" — show how to add tasks/content, interactive step
3. "See your dashboard" — show the overview with their new content populated

Tour B — Team Lead (4 steps):

1. "Create a team project" — spotlight New Project with team template
2. "Invite your team" — spotlight the Invite button, interactive step
3. "Assign your first task" — show task assignment, interactive step
4. "Check team activity" — show the activity feed with team updates

Tour C — Technical Builder (3 steps):

1. "Connect your first integration" — spotlight the Integrations page
2. "See your data flow in" — show the data arriving from the integration
3. "Explore the API" — link to API docs with a pre-generated API key

4. Set up persona detection and routing

Using the intercom-user-properties fundamental, ensure the following properties are synced to Intercom at signup:

• persona_type (from signup survey or classification logic)
• company_size
• signup_source
• role

Using posthog-feature-flags, create a feature flag onboarding-tour-persona with variants matching your personas: solo_creator, team_lead, technical_builder. Set the flag to route users based on their persona_type property.

If persona detection is not available at signup (no survey), build a classification workflow using n8n-triggers: when signup_completed fires, the n8n workflow enriches the user (from signup data, email domain, referral source) and assigns a persona_type property to both PostHog and Intercom.

5. Configure tour triggers in Intercom

Set each tour to trigger only for its matching persona:

• Tour A: triggers when persona_type = solo_creator AND onboarding_complete = false
• Tour B: triggers when persona_type = team_lead AND onboarding_complete = false
• Tour C: triggers when persona_type = technical_builder AND onboarding_complete = false

Fallback: users without a detected persona get the generic tour from the onboarding-flow drill.

6. Instrument and measure per-persona performance

Using posthog-custom-events, track tour events with persona context:

• tour_started with {persona_type, tour_variant}
• tour_step_completed with {persona_type, step_number, step_name}
• tour_completed with {persona_type, duration_seconds}
• tour_dismissed with {persona_type, step_number}

Using posthog-cohorts, build per-persona activation funnels:

• tour_started (persona=X) → tour_completed (persona=X) → activation_reached (persona=X)

Compare activation rates across personas. If one persona activates at 60% and another at 30%, the 30% persona's tour needs iteration. The goal is to bring all personas within 10 percentage points of each other.

Output

• 2-4 persona-specific product tours in Intercom
• Feature flag routing users to the correct tour
• Per-persona activation funnels in PostHog
• Baseline activation rates per persona for optimization