onboarding-activationlisted

# Onboarding & Activation Get new users to the moment the product genuinely works for them — the point after which they're substantially more likely to stay. Everything before that moment is cost; everything after is compounding. Activation is where most retention problems actually live. When a cohort curve drops steeply in the first weeks and then flattens, that is almost never a price problem or a competitor problem. Those users never reached value, so there was nothing to retain. Discounting them back does nothing, because the product never worked for them in the first place. **Two things make this hard.** The activation moment is usually assumed rather than measured — teams pick something plausible like "completed onboarding" that doesn't actually predict retention. And onboarding is designed as a tour of the product rather than a path to one outcome, so users learn what exists without ever getting anything. ## When to use The user is improving product onboarding, first-run experience, or activation rate, or asking why signups don't convert to active users. For diagnosing whether activation is the problem, run `lifecycle-and-retention` first — its cohort view is what identifies a steep early drop. For the flow *before* the account exists, use `signup-flow-optimizer`. ## Before you start 1. **Read the brand/product context** (`.agents/product-marketing.md`) for the audience and what the product is for. 2. **Get cohort retention if it exists.** A steep early drop con