TTL 31
Good Morfternight friends,
A couple of weeks ago, my team and I gave a presentation about how we changed our Jetpack onboarding process to boost user engagement.
Since then, I’ve found myself mentally replaying some of the ideas we touched on—especially those around human-centric development and what it takes to get back to it.
I’ve written a few posts on LinkedIn about it. Nothing groundbreaking, really. But it’s the kind of thing that’s simple in theory, but only in theory—and if theory were enough, we’d all be millionaires with six-pack abs. 😉
Many essential principles are simple. The challenge isn’t grasping them—it’s putting them into practice.
Staying healthy. Managing money. Communicating clearly. Building human-centered products.
The basics are right in front of us, but we sometimes need a reminder to stick to them.
So here’s what I’ve written, use it as you please.
Our first redesign made things worse. And that’s why it was useful.
We often treat product launches like performances: months of preparation, one chance to get it right. But when we released the first iteration of our new onboarding flow, we had only worked on it for 4 weeks and site connections actually dropped by 12.5%.
If you could see me right now, you’d notice a big smile on while I write these words.
And that’s because from those mistakes, we learned. Fast. Precisely because we launched fast.
We didn’t spend months trying to anticipate every scenario. We focused on a narrow goal (in this case, we stripped our users’ login experience down to absolute essentials), shipped it, and watched what happened. In just a few weeks, user feedback revealed what was missing.
But it also showed us that user authorizations shot up by 97%, and purchases increased by 76%. So we had fewer people connecting their sites, but more purchasing after that process. The data told us an interesting story.
So we took a step back and made targeted adjustments — not a full reset .
The result? A 42.7% rebound in site connections, taking us 24.8% above our original baseline — while maintaining all the gains in purchases and authorizations.
Tiny adjustments. Real-time learning. Big results.
Don’t build the perfect product. Build the product that teaches you what perfect looks like.
I’m looking for a center of gravity—and that center might be humans.
I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot lately. Not in a cosmic sense, but in the day-to-day mess of building and shipping things.
In business, we often look for something solid to hold on to. A framework. A KPI. A process.
For me—at least right now—that gravity point seems to be people.
Not as an abstract concept (“the customer is always right”) but in a very real way: what are they trying to do? What’s frustrating them? What would genuinely make their life easier?
We’ve made the mistake (more than once) of optimizing for internal metrics before asking those questions.
I recently gave a presentation with my team about how we redesigned Jetpack’s onboarding by focusing on real user needs instead of revenue.
When we flipped the focus, things started working better. For them—and eventually, for us.
Not to brag, but after our second iteration the results were: +148.6% authorizations, +64.4% purchases, +99% improvement in connection-to-authorization rate.
Maybe this all sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But in practice, it’s surprisingly easy to forget.
The more the world shifts, the more I find myself returning to one simple idea: start from the human part, everything else can orbit around that.
Talk less about what you’ve built. Talk more about what people can do with it.
That shift—simple in theory, radical in practice—changed how we write, design, and build at jetpack.com.
The old homepage was all about us: our tools, our expertise, our vision.
It sounded impressive, but it didn’t help people understand why any of it mattered.
Imagine a company that makes aglets. You might not know what aglets are (really?) but you’ll surely have a different impression if you read:
“Delivering end-cap microcasing solutions for frictionless lace guidance.”
vs
“Make sure your shoelaces never fray or wear out before you do.”
The second sentence tells you WHY you need aglets, which is all you need to know to buy them. (Well, I guess you wouldn’t really buy them…but you get the point).
Anyway, that’s why we rewrote the homepage.
Same product, same capabilities—completely different message. We stopped focusing on what we’d built and started focusing on what people wanted to achieve.
We swapped the word “we” for the word “you.”
That’s it for today, see you next week.
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I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog.
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