Welcome folks! 👋

This edition is written by my friend Ramli John, founder of Delight Path. If you've been following this newsletter, you know I'm obsessed with understanding what makes B2B products stick (or not). Ramli's upcoming book EUREKA: The Product Onboarding Playbook for B2B Companies dives deep into this. I'm excited he's sharing a framework that complements how I view activation and product adoption for product-led B2B companies. I apologise in advance for the 🇺🇸 spelling, but the content more than makes up for it!

It will take 7 minutes to read, and you'll learn:

• Why technical friction isn't the main reason B2B implementations fail

• The three levels of friction blocking product adoption (and how to spot them)

• A systematic approach to identifying and addressing friction in your onboarding

Let’s go!

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The Hierarchy of Product Friction: Why Users Really Get Stuck

"We just need to make the product easier to use."

I hear this all the time from B2B teams struggling with adoption. They invest heavily in streamlining UI, simplifying flows, and improving documentation. And while these are important, they're missing something crucial:

Technical friction isn't why most B2B implementations fail.

Working with hundreds of companies at ProductLed, Appcues, and now Delight Path, I've discovered that three distinct friction levels block product adoption. Technical challenges are just the surface - it's the deeper social and emotional friction that truly kills your onboarding success.

Here are the three levels of friction you need to understand and overcome:

The Three Levels of B2B Friction

Level 1: Functional Friction

This is about technical barriers - product setup issues, integration problems, and implementation challenges that teams encounter when first using your product.

Example: A team struggles to get clean data into their analytics platform because events aren't firing correctly or their instrumentation is broken.

Ben shared the best PLG dashboard I've seen (and Amplitude agrees - they're using it themselves!)

But here's the catch: while the dashboard is powerful, teams often get stuck just trying to implement their analytics tracking correctly. Even with great templates available, the functional friction of setting up events, ensuring data quality, and validating instrumentation can prevent teams from getting any value from these insights.

While these technical challenges might seem straightforward to fix, they can completely block teams from reaching their desired outcomes. A broken integration or poor data quality can prevent organizations from accessing the insights they need, even when choosing the right tool for their needs.

Level 2: Social Friction

This is about organizational dynamics, whether getting stakeholder buy-in, coordinating across teams, or managing competing priorities.

Example: A champion loves your product but can't get their team to adopt it because "we've always done it this way."

This is why successful B2B activation requires what Ben calls "distributed activation patterns,” where different team members play different roles in the adoption journey.

As he shared in his post Stop Making This Activation Mistake," at Snyk, they saw how security champions would complete initial setup, developers would experience the aha moment of finding vulnerabilities, and team leads would establish workflows that drove the habit moment. Social friction occurs when these distributed patterns break down or aren't properly supported.

Level 3: Emotional Friction

The deepest level of friction is the fear of making wrong decisions, anxiety about learning new systems, and concerns about job security. Users often hide behind rational-sounding objections.

Example: A decision-maker hesitating to launch your product to production because they're afraid it might disrupt their users' experience or break existing workflows, even after successful testing.

At Appcues, I saw this constantly with product teams implementing in-product guides. While they'd cite technical concerns about JavaScript conflicts or CSS customization, the real friction was emotional: fear of disrupting their users' experience, anxiety about getting internal design approval, and worry about their guides looking "unprofessional."

That's why beta testing became such a crucial part of our onboarding. By encouraging teams to test their guides with a small segment first, we helped them overcome this emotional friction. It gave them confidence in their implementation, validated their design choices with real users, and removed the fear of "going live." What looked like technical hesitation was really about confidence and validation.

This emotional friction often manifests as what seems like reasonable technical objections, but addressing the surface-level concerns without tackling the underlying anxieties rarely leads to successful adoption.

How to Overcome These Friction Types

While there's no one-size-fits-all solution, there are three key levers you can pull to address friction in your onboarding:

• In-product design: contextual guidance, UX improvements, and intuitive interface

• Educational resources: templates, guides, documentation, and playbooks

• Human interaction: CS outreach, sales support, group training

Here's how these levers typically map to each friction type:

Addressing Functional Friction

Functional friction is often best overcome through in-product solutions. Clear UI patterns, contextual help, and smart defaults can eliminate many technical barriers.

Example: At Appcues, we saw teams struggle with JavaScript implementation. We solved this by creating a Chrome extension that automatically validated their installation, highlighted potential conflicts, and guided them through fixes, turning a technical challenge into a guided experience.

Addressing Social Friction

Social friction typically requires a combination of human interaction and educational resources. This is why successful B2B product-led companies often need a human-led component.

Example: When implementing Ben's Amplitude dashboard, teams need both educational resources (like implementation guides) and human guidance (like solution architects) to help them navigate organizational challenges around data access, team coordination, and establishing tracking standards.

Addressing Emotional Friction

Emotional friction is the trickiest to diagnose and might require all three levers working together. The key is building confidence through validated success.

Example: Beta testing programs combine all three levers: In-product controls for limiting exposure, educational resources for building confidence, and human support for addressing concerns. This creates a safe space for teams to validate their implementation before wider rollout.

The most successful B2B products don't just work well technically; they make users feel confident, teams feel aligned, and organizations feel transformed.

Putting It Into Practice

Here's a systematic approach to identifying and addressing friction in your onboarding:

1. Assemble Your Team

Start by gathering a cross-functional team. Product might spot UI issues, Sales understands customer objections, and Customer Success knows where users get stuck. Having multiple perspectives helps overcome individual blind spots and creates a more complete picture of friction in your onboarding.

2. Map Your Success Milestones

Create a timeline of 6-7 key wins in your onboarding journey. Use the format "[ACTION] first [THING]" for each win.

Example for a project management tool:

• Create first project board

• Create first task

• Complete first task

• Add first team member

• Assign first task

• Review first project update

3. Identify friction at each milestone

For each milestone in your onboarding journey, gather your team and identifythe three types of friction points.

Work through each success milestone systematically, identifying all three friction types before moving to the next one.

Pro Tip: Use different-colored sticky notes for each friction type to create a visual heat map of your biggest challenges. You can use my Friction Mapping template.

For example, let's look at implementing an analytics tool:

• Functional: JavaScript setup issues, data validation problems

• Social: Getting engineering resources, coordinating with legal for data access

• Emotional: Fear of exposing poor metrics, anxiety about data accuracy

This visual mapping often reveals clusters of friction that might not be obvious when looking at individual issues.

4. Design Targeted Solutions

Different products and user segments need different solutions. A developer tool might lean heavily on documentation and self-serve resources, while an enterprise CRM might need more human touchpoints.

Match solutions to each friction type using the three levers we discussed:

• In-product solutions for technical barriers

• Educational resources for knowledge gaps

• Human interaction for complex coordination

Trust your team's expertise here. They know your users best and will have insights into which approaches will resonate most effectively.

5. Prioritize Based on Impact-Effort

Plot your solutions on an Impact-Effort matrix:

• High Impact, Low Effort: Do these first

• High Impact, High Effort: Plan these carefully

• Low Impact, Low Effort: Nice-to-haves

• Low Impact, High Effort: Avoid these

Start with one or two "quick wins" - high-impact, low-effort solutions that can show immediate value. This builds momentum for tackling bigger challenges.

The Bottom Line

The most successful B2B products don't just work well - they make users feel confident, teams feel aligned, and organizations feel transformed.

Stop treating onboarding as just a product problem. Start seeing it as what it really is: a multi-dimensional challenge that requires addressing functional, social, and emotional friction in harmony.

Want to dive deeper? Download the first chapter of my new book, and pre-order it before it launches in June 2025: "EUREKA: The Product Onboarding Playbook for B2B Products." 

THAT’S A WRAP

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That’s all for today,

If there are any product, growth or leadership topics that you’d like me to write about, just hit reply to this email or leave a comment and let me know!

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Until next time!

— Ben

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