CORA: Conversion -> Onboarding -> Retention -> Advocacy

The four primary levers of product success.

In the last few months, I spoke with many folks in content and design who work in senior positions either in corporations, or growing startups, and some of them work as an IC. I could not find a single practitioner who said that they made a fairly decent contribution to all the four levers.

For example either they were more focused on conversion and onboarding side, or they were more active towards customer success and customers' brand advocacy goals.

Content and design have often been in a stretched relationship with engineering because the intersection shows pulls from so many directions—product marketing, pricing and revenue, customer support, continuous discovery findings, and the team dynamics of course.

This is why organizations should design the teams around these levers first—message, design, engineering, product marketing, discovery insights, and everything geared towards the onboarding. Likewise all of them collectively focused towards retention.

Why do we create this need to collaborate between content and design and engineering—why to even see these separately?

—If stability is the concern—why do they even need to workshop to think about it together? Why it cannot be the default?

—If retention is the concern—why collective responsibility is not the default without a call for workshop which calls for follow ups and raised voices for alignment, spreadsheets, and tickets for reference.

—Why do we see concerns as 'our concerns' vs 'their concerns'?