Forma is a B2B2C life benefits platform scaling rapidly across SMB and enterprise. Its onboarding was a high-touch, multi-month manual process that became a bottleneck as the business grew. The team initially framed this as an efficiency problem — make onboarding faster. After user research with HR managers, I diagnosed something different: the real bottleneck was confidence. HR teams weren't sure which benefits to offer, what was industry standard, or whether they were making the right decisions — and faster forms weren't going to solve that.
Led product strategy, design, execution, and GTM — translating the founder's vision of self-serve onboarding into a tiered guided onboarding model that balanced customer confidence, operational scale, and commercial incentives. Aligned the founder, SMB sales, onboarding, customer support, and executive leadership around an operating model that protected incentives: premium customers retained dedicated white-glove support, while standard onboarding paths shifted to guided self-serve.
This tiered model unlocked a customer experience that felt high-touch at scale — automating lower-friction tasks while preserving human support where reassurance mattered most. Partnered with engineering, design, user research, and customer success to determine which touchpoints to automate, and to reduce uncertainty through progress breadcrumbs, smarter defaults, benchmarking, contextual education, and in-product specialist access.
The guided self-serve experience came to life through a few core product principles:
- Progress breadcrumbs: milestones and timelines so HR managers always knew where they were and what came next
- Smarter defaults: pre-selected benefit categories to reduce decision fatigue
- Industry benchmarks: inline comparisons to help HR managers make confident choices
- Guided support: contextual education and in-product access to a product specialist — including in-app Zoom support without leaving the onboarding flow
The design principles eventually became Forma's blueprint for the rest of its product surfaces.