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Feature-Bloated SaaS, No Decision System
Activation rate jump from 20% to 75% in 3 weeks.
01. The Mess
Engineering-heavy team shipping weekly for 6 months. Good velocity, but users were signing up and churning within days. Founder couldn't articulate why.
02. The Surgery
I instrumented the product properly, identified an 8-step onboarding flow where users dropped off at step 3, and cut it to 3 steps. We moved 'power features' behind initial value delivery.
03. The Cadence
Established weekly user behavior reviews to drive roadmap decisions. Founder stopped being the bottleneck for every feature decision.
Founder Context
"The founder was too close to the features to see the confusion. I provided the external authority to kill 'important' features that were actually barriers to value."