• Problem: Onboarding felt slow and hard to understand; frequent stalls

  • Stakes: Lost momentum, heavy manual intervention, partner frustration

  • My role: Led interviews, built end-to-end flow & experience map highlighting “four big drops”

  • Outcome: Secured approval to stand up self-serve information portal; prioritized fixes

The UX Challenge

Make a multi-team, API-heavy onboarding feel simple and predictable for producers, PMs, and engineers with very different levels of identity expertise.

What was broken

  • Steps and owners weren’t obvious; partners stalled waiting on someone else

  • Loops between docs, tickets, and Slack created rework

  • No single view of progress, risks, or readiness

Entire original onboarding user flow beginning to end

 

Who I designed for

  • Partner PMs/Producers: want clarity on steps, status, and approvals

  • Partner Engineers: need exact requirements, examples, and test criteria

  • EADP Identity team: needs fewer ad-hoc questions and cleaner intake

My role & scope

Led discovery, stakeholder/partner interviews, current-state mapping, and the experience map. Defined “happy path,” exception paths, owners, artifacts, and readiness gates. Proposed self-serve content and a lightweight status view.

Solution at a glance

1) End-to-end flow (single source of truth)

  • From intake to integration to testing and launch, with owners, artifacts, and entry/exit criteria.

2) Four “drop points” called out

  • Moments where sentiment tanks (unclear scope, auth confusion, test failures, go-live risks) with explicit mitigations.

3) Readiness gates

  • Define • Decide • Deliver • Validate: simple checklists that prevent premature handoffs.

4) Self-serve guidance

  • Task-based docs (what/why/how), copy-paste snippets, and a glossary to reduce back-and-forth.

5) Status at a glance

  • A compact tracker showing current step, blockers, and next owner—shared by EADP and partner teams.

Research & iteration

  • Partner interviews across roles to capture real stalls and “unknown unknowns”

  • Ticket/Slack audit to quantify common questions and handoff failures

  • Workshops with Identity, Security, and partner eng to align on artifacts and gates

  • Iterated the map until teams could run onboarding using the document alone

 

Key design decisions (and why)

  • Owner on every step: reduces “who moves next?” thrash

  • Entry/exit criteria: no handoffs without the minimum ready state

  • Task-based docs: faster answers than long narrative pages

  • Exception paths: show what happens when tests fail or requirements change

  • Shared tracker: one view of progress and risk across both orgs

Outcomes & impact

  • Approvals unblocked: the journey map made gaps visible and solvable

  • 25% fewer escalations: partners self-served common questions

  • Predictable timelines: sized work based on readiness, not optimism

  • Cleaner handoffs: fewer loops between teams

Reflection

This wasn’t just a flowchart exercise, it was aligning people, decisions, and evidence. By making ownership and readiness explicit, we turned a confusing integration into a predictable path.

Next steps

Automate the tracker, add telemetry (time per step, top blockers), and fold common exceptions into the self-serve docs. Add a short “Getting ready” checklist partners can complete before intake.