AcceleratorSoftware.io (AccSoft)
Redesigning Program Manager Onboarding for an Accelerator LMS
The opportunity
AcceleratorSoftware.io needed a better way to get new customers onboarded onto its platform. Sales was manually walking every program manager through setup, one call at a time, and it wasn't going to scale. I designed a guided onboarding wizard that replaced hand-holding with a self-serve activation flow, covering the full admin (Program Manager) onboarding.
AcceleratorSoftware.io is an accelerator management platform used by program managers to run cohorts, manage mentors, and publish content to founders and students. Every new customer was being onboarded manually: sales walked them through setup call by call. That worked at a small scale, but it meant every new sign-up cost real sales time, and it wasn't a model the business could grow on.
The result was a new onboarding initiative designed to scale with the company, not against it.
Business goals
Retention. Keep customers engaged long enough to discover the full potential of the product, not just the parts sales happened to walk them through.
A scalable solution. Sales was spending hours per customer on manual pitches and walkthroughs. As a small startup, that model had a ceiling. The fix meant program owners, mentors, and end-users all needed a smooth, self-serve journey.
Two products, two markets in mind. The onboarding needed to work across two SaaS products built for different markets and different needs, not just one.
The challenge
New program managers were signing up and hitting an empty dashboard with no clear next step. Getting them to a working, published program meant either a sales call or a lot of trial and error, and both were expensive: one in sales hours, the other in customers quietly dropping off.
How might we help new program managers successfully create a cohort and publish a course as first-time users, and how might we encourage further app discovery?
The decision
We decided to start with the client side (the program manager / admin experience) rather than the end-user side. It was more complex, more time-demanding to design, and the solution we built could be reused across other onboarding flows later. We also settled the definition of "done": the onboarding would count as successful once a program manager had created a profile, set up their team, and shared their first piece of content.
Onboarding goal: Set up an admin profile and get them to publish their first program on the platform.
Approach
Personas
Laura, Program Manager (Admin). Her jobs to be done: help founders and the innovation world thrive, build the best accelerator by having the best mentors, people, and community, and ship as many programs as she can.
Scott, the Mentor. Joins programs to guide founders, needs to move quickly without digging through the platform to do it.
Didi, the Founder / Student. The end-user. Often first-time and unsure exactly what they need, so the onboarding they get is entirely shaped by how well the admin set things up for them.
Mapping the client and user journeys
I mapped every touchpoint a customer had with us, before and after they became a client. That mapping made one thing clear: "onboarding" meant different things to different people internally, and we had to agree on what counted as success and what came before a customer even started onboarding. Contrasting that map against our current state surfaced a mix of quick wins and harder structural fixes.
I mapped the end-user side the same way. Through stakeholder conversations, we confirmed that the end-user's onboarding experience would always be downstream of the admin's: whatever the admin set up (or didn't) was what the student or founder would actually see. That's what made the admin side the right place to start.
Early insight-gathering
Before designing anything, I sat in on sales-led onboarding sessions, interviewed the team members handling onboarding, and dug into product analytics to see where people were actually getting stuck.
Usability testing, round one
Once we had our own hypotheses about where the pain points were, I ran six usability sessions, over three hours total, watching people interact with AccSoft for the first time over Zoom. The findings were consistent:
- People were burning mental effort just learning the product, and an empty, unguided setup screen added a second cognitive load on top of that
- An empty-space onboarding UI is a coin flip: either the person finds their way on their own, or they leave
That ruled out a "figure it out yourself" empty state as a viable direction.
Design solution
The wizard
I designed a dashboard wizard to guide program managers through setup step by step, minimising distractions while still allowing for custom workflows. It walked them through three stages:
- Your profile, picture, name, contact details, timezone, and optional social links
- Your organization (owner only), org name, white-label theme setup, notification preferences, Slack connection, team invites
- Explore smart features, cohort size, team structure, cohort duration, and which platform modules they actually need (courses, goals, projects, surveys, community directory, discussion board)
Usability testing, round two
I tested a second version of the wizard against the original. The findings validated the direction:
- Users preferred the shorter, simpler path and valued the step-by-step structure of the second design
- They wanted to be guided through the process rather than having to think about what came next
- Too many tabs felt overwhelming; they preferred to concentrate on one task at a time
That pushed the final design further toward a single-focus, one-step-at-a-time wizard over a multi-tab settings page.
"I didn't know we can establish goals for our participants, that's a winner." — Mario Noan, Delivery Program Manager
Outcome
We also started using Intercom for empty states and began tracking user patterns through data, rather than relying on sales anecdotes to know where people were getting stuck.
"The new onboarding flow has made every cohort manager's life easier. Instead of spending 20 minutes explaining to each user how to set up their email and calendar, we can now focus on optimizing the content workflow." — Shelbi Lucazza, Program Manager
Learnings
Onboarding is a definition problem before it's a design problem. The hardest part of this project wasn't the wizard, it was getting the team to agree on what "successfully onboarded" actually meant. That decision shaped everything downstream.
An empty screen is not a blank canvas, it's a drop-off risk. Removing a generic video tour in favour of a guided, task-specific wizard directly addressed the cognitive overload we saw in testing.
The admin is the real end-user of the end-user's experience. Because founders and students only ever saw what program managers set up for them, designing for the admin's success was the highest-leverage place to start.
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