Part Two: The product · The first days
In a team product, one person configures it and others are told to use it. What suits the person setting it up is rarely what suits the people who arrive later.
The person who chose the product spent weeks on it. They saw the demo, compared the alternatives, and know why it is there. Then forty colleagues get an email: "You've been added to a workspace." They did not choose it. They have their own work to do. And they arrive in a place arranged around someone else's idea of that work.
Most onboarding is built for the first person: create the workspace, name it, invite the team. The invited person gets what is left over, which is a password screen.
The operations manager at a plumbing company sets up a job-scheduling tool. She creates twelve job statuses and nine required fields, because she wants good reports. The plumbers, on phones in vans, need today's jobs, an address, and a button for "done." They skip the fields, phone the office instead, and she concludes the team "won't adopt it."
Neither side did anything wrong. The product let her build something her colleagues could not use, and never showed her what they would see. A customer success colleague doing the setup with her on a call can fix that in a minute, by ending the call with her looking at the plumber's screen.
The company selling the product often makes this worse. It counts invitations, so the product pushes "invite your team" before there is anything good to invite them to.
Therefore:
Design two arrivals. Show the person setting up what their colleagues will see before anyone is invited. Then give each invited person a first result of their own: why they are here and one thing to do.
In practice. Accept an invitation to your own product with a fresh email address and no background. Write down what you understood in the first minute.
Goes with. This is WHO PAYS, WHO USES (14) arriving in the product. Each invited person still needs a FIRST USEFUL RESULT IN MINUTES (34), and the invitation itself should wait for TOGETHER WHEN IT HELPS (51).