Product Growth

Strategy

The growth funnel framing

Product-led growth is a user-centric approach where the product itself guides new people to value through direct interaction — not sales calls, long PDFs, or human-led training. People learn by doing. The goal is to shorten the time it takes to reach that first "aha."

Before my team was even hired, I mapped the funnel — the stages customers actually move through, and where the biggest opportunities for education and adoption sit inside it. The mapping, cross-aligned with Cloudflare-specific customer jobs to be done, became the strategy. The team executed the three projects below against it.

Core Principles

• Show, Don't Tell

  Embed instructions and tooltips inside the product itself instead of forcing people to read a manual.

  Case study: Video ↓

• Fast Time-to-Value

  Remove friction and cut extra steps so people see a real result fast.

  Case study: Onboarding ↓

• Behavior-Based Triggers

  Deliver targeted, just-in-time guidance based on what someone does or where they get stuck.

  Case study: Docs-in-Dash ↓

Execution

Three ways the team moved people through it

Below are three examples mapped to the stages of that funnel they touch — discovery, onboarding, setup, usage, the aha moment, expansion, and advocacy. Understanding a customer isn't a phase you finish; it's a mechanism you keep running.

01 · Onboarding

Onboarding that asks what you need first

Leadership: Katie Sebkhi  |  Design Execution: Alexa Mavrogianis

Problem

Every Cloudflare Zero Trust customer went through the exact same four-step flow — welcome, team name, plan, payment — whether they were a hobbyist replacing a home VPN or an architect rolling out policy across a whole company. The flow never asked what someone was actually trying to do. Fewer than 1 in 4 people who started onboarding finished it.

Whoever made it through landed on an outdated Quick Start guide with two generic options, neither tailored to what they'd come to accomplish.

Solution

My team redesigned onboarding to ask one question upfront: what are you trying to do? Based on the answer, customers are routed into one of five guided paths — replacing a VPN, securing web traffic, connecting to private apps without an agent, filtering DNS, or securing SaaS apps with SSO — each one setting up only what that use case actually needs instead of a generic flow everyone had to work around.

Alexa beautifully translated this strategy, balancing complex conditional logic with a highly intuitive user interface.

Impact

• Targeting a 50% increase in onboarding completion over the sub-25% baseline.
• Cutting the time it takes customers to reach their first meaningful action.
• Using each customer's self-identified use case to build clearer adoption cohorts.

02 · Docs-in-Dash

Bringing help to the moment of need

Leadership: Katie Sebkhi  |  Design Execution: Abby Keller

Problem

Every product made people leave the dashboard to find help. My team brought help to them instead.

The interface was technical and the barrier to entry was high. People bounced between the product, docs, videos, and support content — and often gave up before finishing the task.

Solution

My team built a lightweight, reusable UX pattern for the design system that embeds guidance, AI insight, and video directly inside dashboard workflows — so any team could add contextual help without redesigning their product.

Abby expertly executed this vision by designing a nested, non-intrusive drawer system that surfaces relevant articles based on the user's active screen state.

Impact

• Scaled across 100+ dashboard pages.
• Every product that added it saw higher task completion.
• Engaged users showed retention approaching 100%.

03 · Video

The same strategy, told through a new medium

Leadership: Katie Sebkhi  |  Video Production: Jess Liu, Emanuel Caetano

Problem

Video content was highly requested to help with technical setup, but before I inherited the video team, it only existed buried deep in documentation or scattered across YouTube. There was no central place to find it. Even the videos we did surface — through a button on the dashboard — opened in a new browser tab, pulling people out of their workflow right when a video was supposed to help them keep going.

Solution

I applied the same journey-mapping strategy here that I use everywhere else. Video gave us a way to tell a story, not just show a setup step. We embedded videos directly into the docs and dashboard pages people were already using, and rebuilt the video button into an inline player people can watch, move, and resize without ever leaving the page. Instead of guessing what to produce next, we used customer insights and support data to decide what content actually needed to exist. I also updated the video component in our design system, turning video into a real tool the UX team could design with — not a one-off content push.

Watching setup videos, right inside the dashboard, without ever losing your place.

Impact

• 31% jump in the number of users who watched a video after switching to the inline player.
• Users who watched the load balancing setup video were roughly 6x more likely to complete a purchase (1.03% → 6.12%), and over 200% more likely to save a new load balancer.
• Shipped a public, browsable Videos page on Cloudflare Docs, including the 4-part storytelling series.

Want to talk through how this kind of thinking could apply to your product?

• Get in touch ↗