Analysis of usage and business data revealed a key insight: 80% of teams using Donut were not paying customers.
Working with our data scientist, we discovered that paying teams consistently used more than one Donut product. This raised two critical questions:
How does multi-product usage impact conversion?
What’s preventing the majority of teams from adopting more than one product?
To explore these questions, our team aligned on a dual approach: conducting qualitative interviews alongside usability tests. The map below outlines the strategy we used to guide this research.
Different people connect in different ways
Teams often found that not every Donut product fit their culture, but having options mattered. For example, extroverted teams gravitated toward Intros (video-based), while more introverted teams preferred Watercooler (chat-based). This flexibility made it more likely that multiple products would get adopted within a single workspace.
10% of teams trying a paid product eventually convert
This stat reframed our goal: instead of pushing conversion directly, we needed to increase meaningful exposure to more products during onboarding and early use.
More products = more billable users
Because Donut’s pricing is per user, the more teammates engaging with different products, the more likely a team is to exceed the free tier and convert to paid. Multi-product use effectively increased the "surface area" for monetization.
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Most users weren't aware of Donut's full suite of products
A surprising number of participants were only aware of one Donut product. When shown a page listing all available products, many said it was their first time seeing it. This likely contributed to low conversion rates; people simply didn’t know what else they could use.
If users are introduced to all of Donut’s core products during the installation flow through a clear, streamlined, intuitive experience, then the rate of multi-product adoption per team will increase, and in turn, raise Donut's bottom line.
We now have 2 new guiding insights:
1. Different people prefer different modes of connecting with people within company, and this increases the monetization surface area
2. First time installers aren’t fully aware of Donut’s full suite of offerings, leading to missed opportunities for proving Donut's value, which could lead to conversion
With a refined hypothesis, I partnered with PMs to run a cross-functional workshop with the goal of redesigning Donut's onboarding. I brought in stakeholders from engineering, product, customer success, and marketing to gather diverse perspectives and create alignment early.
To spark ideas, participants shared favorite onboarding experiences from other apps, revealing patterns in what made them intuitive and memorable. I framed our challenge as: “How might we encourage teams to install multiple Donut products during onboarding?”
Through rapid sketching, critique, and dot voting, we surfaced concepts that sparked alignment and excitement. The session not only generated strong ideas, but also built shared ownership, eliminated blind spots, and gave the team a clear direction forward.
Building on what we learned from usability testing and user interviews, I defined a set of design imperatives to guide the new onboarding experience. These were aimed at addressing friction in the current flow, while testing our hypothesis: That teams who adopt multiple Donut products are significantly more likely to convert to paying customers.
Our team understood that implementing a radical redesign project like this can be risky, despite a high level of confidence in the new design due to good usability test results and support from the rest of the company.
To mitigate risk, we decided to conduct an A/B test to compare the new design’s efficacy against the current one’s, tracking key metrics like:
• Number of products installed per session (+33%)
• Trial starts (+10%)
• Conversion to being paid customers (+10%)
Based on these KPIs (taken 6 months after initial implementation), there was some truth to our hypothesis. Increased product exposure and education in the onboarding phase ultimately led to a 10% increase in customer conversion. And though, that is not a small feat, we were expecting that number to be higher. This experiment certainly answered some questions around product exposure and how it affects conversion, but introduced a few more that could be further explored down the line, such as clarity around product value and getting to product "aha moments" faster, not only through onboarding exposure and education but through experiencing the product.
GRAFITI
Building and growing a data visualization search tool to 30K MAU
30,000
MAU
-31%
BOUNCE RATE
+50%
REPEAT USERS
TRIP TIP
Making sharing travel tips among friends easier (0-1)
