Product · customer journey
Building the Customer Journey at an Early-Stage SaaS Company
Helping turn an early route-planning product into a customer experience with repeatable onboarding, feedback loops, and retention systems.
Context
There was no finished product or customer playbook.
I joined as the company’s first hire and worked alongside the founder and development team while the product, market position, and customer journey were still taking shape. The formal title did not capture the job. I operated across product thinking, user experience, customer success, and business strategy.
That environment forced every decision to connect. A feature affected onboarding. Onboarding affected support. Support exposed product gaps. Product changes needed clear lifecycle communication.
The work
Build the product and the way customers experience it.
- Contributed to product development from idea through launch, including feature prioritization, MVP scope, and user workflows.
- Owned early onboarding and customer-success patterns, then converted repeated guidance into reusable processes.
- Acted as the connection between users and engineering, translating customer needs into defined product improvements.
- Developed cohort and revenue views to understand retention, growth, and product engagement.
The system
A feedback loop, not a suggestion box.
Customer feedback became useful when it was tied to the job the user was trying to complete, the point in the journey where friction appeared, and the business effect of leaving it unresolved. That structure helped separate an isolated request from a repeatable product problem.
User evidence → journey friction → product decision → lifecycle communication → new evidence
The same loop shaped feature priorities, onboarding content, retention work, and release planning.
What it taught me
Adoption starts before implementation.
The customer journey is not a layer added after the product is built. It is part of the product. This experience continues to shape how I approach implementation today: start with the operating job, make the path understandable, and ensure customer evidence returns to the people making product decisions.
This public version uses qualitative evidence while earlier business metrics are revalidated.