The biggest mistake companies make with customer onboarding is treating it like a product problem.
It’s not.
It’s a product problem, design problem, a customer success problem and, increasingly, a technology problem, all at the same time. That’s why interdisciplinary collaboration is a superpower to tackle the issue.
As an experienced product designer, Mahshid Atabaki understood this issue well and ventured on the ambitious task of bringing together London’s best problem solvers to cure it.
The format was called a Hackathon.
To different people this means different things however, at its core, random people get together in a room, set their sights on a problem and see how far they can get in a specific time frame using particular technology.
It’s not a new way to solve these problems but it’s definitely a strategy that gets the adrenaline pumping.
Participants worked with tools and platforms including Lovable, ElevenLabs, Built for Mars, Perlego and Dori but the most interesting part is not the technology itself.
It was who was using it.
For years building software has largely been shaped by clearly defined roles. Engineers build. Designers design. Marketers communicate. Customer success deals with the consequences.
AI tools are starting to erode the boundaries and nowhere is more important than onboarding. The first few minutes a customer spends with a product often determine whether they understand its value or abandon it entirely.
Harry Martin, Community Manager at Ramen Space, described the philosophy behind the coworking community that facilitated the event:
“Charlie Ward [Ramen Space founder] really wants to build a community and help the community... The entire community here is built off the back of people who are bootstrapped, trying to run through a new idea and start a big company. Anything to do with that, Charlie will always have open ears.”
That spirit was evident throughout the hackathon. The event brought together people with different backgrounds, skills and perspectives, but gave them a shared problem to work on: how can we make customer onboarding better?
The technology gave them the ability to build quickly. The hackathon gave them the environment to collaborate. And the diversity of people in the room meant the problem could be approached from more than one angle.
Perhaps that is the real opportunity AI creates for onboarding: not simply better tools for building products, but the ability to bring more people into the process of solving the problems customers actually experience.