Our onboarding was not broken, it was long. A new team needed five working days on average before the first real project ran. Nobody complained, and that was the problem. People simply stopped halfway and came back weeks later, or never.
We invited twelve teams to set up the product while we watched. No help, no hints, a notebook on our side and a timer.
I was not stuck. I just did not know which of the eight settings mattered today.
We stopped counting completed steps and started counting the minutes until something useful happened. For most teams that moment is the first shared project with a real deadline.
First, we moved seven of eight settings out of the setup flow. They still exist, they just wait until someone needs them.
Second, every new workspace now starts with a project template that matches the team size. Third, invitations go out after the first project exists, so colleagues land somewhere with content instead of an empty room.
We would have watched people much earlier. Every assumption we tested in the first week turned out to be wrong in an interesting way, and each one was cheaper to fix on paper than in code.
The median setup now takes three hours and forty minutes. The next goal is a single coffee break.