Reducing Mobile Analytics Onboarding from 3 Hours to 20 Minutes

Adjust was losing users to competitors. The reason? Setting up mobile attribution tracking took 2–3 hours through a 12-step wizard.

Users got halfway through, realized they needed a developer or someone from marketing, and the whole process stalled. By the time they could see their campaign data, many had already churned.

I was working with 2 PMs, 4 developers, the CPO, my manager, and occasionally the CTO. Lots of stakeholders, zero alignment on what needed to change.

I talked to solution consultants across São Paulo, Tokyo, San Francisco, Paris, and Berlin. The same problems surfaced everywhere:

Users went in blind—they didn't know what to prepare before starting.

The wizard forced a linear flow that didn't match how teams actually worked. If you needed to pause, you couldn't.

Support was overwhelmed. Teams were building PDF guides just to help clients get through setup.

I mapped the entire 12-step journey. It took weeks just to document it and align every team involved—customer success, support, engineering, product.

My first instinct: simplify the wizard. We tested it. Users hated it. They wanted to leave and come back. They wanted to skip ahead. The wizard made that impossible.

I scrapped it.

With another designer, we proposed a tab-based onboarding model. Users could tackle tasks in any order. Each tab showed progress and made it obvious what was missing. If marketing needed to configure tracking while engineering handled SDK integration, both could happen in parallel.

We tested it. Users felt in control. The flow made sense.

I presented to stakeholders. Almost everyone agreed—except my manager. I scheduled a separate meeting, walked through the user testing data, and showed how tabs came from our existing design system. He was convinced.

Users could see campaign data faster. They could identify what was missing from their setup thanks to a real-time SDK status overview. Support workload dropped. We stopped losing users to competitors.

We tracked onboarding completion time, churn rate during setup, and support ticket volume as our core metrics. Some figures are under NDA, but the project was considered successful enough to be rolled out globally across all Adjust markets — and became a reference case internally for how growth and design should collaborate.