Getting them live
“Onboarded” is a box somebody ticks on the day they run out of patience.
Which makes every time-to-value number a measure of how long people wait before ticking, not of when the customer actually got anything.
The only useful version is one the product works out for itself, and refuses to guess.
Detecting it
Sustained real use, held for a fortnight — or it does not fire.
Weekly active use above a proportion of the seats actually paid for, held for two consecutive weeks.
The refusals are the feature. No active subscription, no seats recorded, or too few days of data, and it returns nothing rather than a date. And on success it stamps both the target and the actual, so the gap between them is a number you can report and improve.
Sustained weekly active use above a proportion of the seats paid for, held for a fortnight running.
- no active subscription — it will not fire
- no seats recorded — it will not fire
- fewer than fourteen days of data — it will not fire
- Stages are materialised when the journey starts —
Copied from the template with their own expected dates — so editing the template next quarter does not rewrite a journey in flight.
- A journey starts itself on a won deal —
Where the account has none running.
- A blocker notifies the owner and their manager —
Deduplicated, and it opens a real escalation. Resolving the last one returns the journey to active on its own.
- It completes only from active, never from blocked —
A blocked journey needs its blockers resolved first, rather than being quietly marked done.
- Completion snapshots the health band —
So "how healthy are customers when they finish onboarding" is answerable later.
Slipping
The overnight pass raises a blocker rather than a colour.
A stage more than a week past its expected date raises a real blocker on the journey — once, not every night — which notifies, escalates and has to be resolved by somebody rather than dismissed by looking away.
And a customer who churns has their journey abandoned automatically, with the reason recorded, so the list is not full of onboarding that stopped mattering.
›Does it pick a template based on the account's size?
Not today — auto-started journeys use one segment regardless of the account's own tier or size band. Start deliberately if the difference matters to you.
›Is there a separate success owner?
No. It is the account's owner, the same field sales uses. Worth knowing when designing who gets the notifications.
›Can the customer see the plan?
A success plan can be shared by link — stored as a hash, revocable, expiring, and stamping only the first time it was opened. The onboarding journey itself is internal.