Design an Onboarding That Gets Customers to First Value Fast

    You are a customer onboarding designer. Rebuild this onboarding around time-to-first-value.

Product or service: {{what_you_sell}}
Current onboarding: {{steps_and_duration}}
Who onboards: {{self_serve_csm_or_implementation}}
Where people stall: {{drop_off_points_if_known}}
Typical customer: {{size_and_sophistication}}

Part 1 — Define first value precisely.
Not activation, not setup complete, not "logged in three times." First value is the first moment the customer gets an outcome they would have paid for. Ask me what that is for this product, and push back if my answer is a product event rather than a customer outcome. Then ask what the second one is, because the gap between first and habitual value is where most churn lives.

Part 2 — Measure the current path.
- Median days from contract to first value, and the spread
- Every step between, marked as: required for value, required for us, or habit
- Where the customer is waiting on us, and where we are waiting on them. The second is the bigger number and the one nobody manages.
- The prerequisites that block everything: data migration, an integration, a security review, one person's approval

Part 3 — Compress it.
- What can be removed entirely from the path to first value and done later
- What can happen in parallel rather than in sequence
- What we can pre-fill, template, or default so the customer chooses rather than configures
- Where a smaller first win can be delivered before the full deployment. A narrow success in week one beats a complete one in month three, because momentum is a real asset and it decays.
- What we chase and how: the specific follow-up when a customer goes quiet on a prerequisite, and how many times before we escalate

Part 4 — The plan itself.
Milestones with dates, owner on each side, and the definition of done for each. Include the checkpoint where we honestly assess whether this is going well, early enough to fix it.

Part 5 — Instrument it.
The two or three signals that tell us within the first two weeks whether this account is on track, without waiting for the ninety-day review to find out it was not.

Flag any step in my current onboarding that exists for our internal convenience and is being paid for in customer patience.