Exciting announcement! If you're keen on Mastering Product Growth and User onboarding, join the upcoming course in April. You will get personal guidance to create a stellar onboarding experience and frameworks to turn it into live. Get a 15% discount for your team (most value for PM + Product Designer together).

Learn more and get early access → https://maven.com/forms/2c51cc

Welcome to Growthmates — the place to connect with inspiring leaders to help you grow yourself and your product. Here you can learn how companies like Dropbox, Adobe, Amplitude, Canva, and many more are building excellent products and growth culture. Subscribe to get all episodes right to your inbox on katesyuma.substack.com.

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In this conversation, we invited Phil Vander Broek, Co-Founder at Dopt, previously Head of Growth and Business Platform Design at Dropbox. We decided to talk about User Onboarding and unpack all the truth we know about it. From this episode, you can learn:

* How Dropbox approached User Onboarding and what they learned from experimenting with that

* How Growth and Core teams collaboration looked at Dropbox

* What Rituals can help in building a Growth Culture

* and Best practices for User Onboarding from research with more than 80 companies.

Beyond the Dropbox story, Phill shared his transition to becoming a Co-Founder at Dopt, and how his design background helped him play a founder role.

If you find it valuable, please share it with your network and leave us a good review.

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Where to find Phil Vander Broek, Co-Founder at Dopt:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipvanderbroek/

* Website: https://www.dopt.com/

Where to find Kate Syuma, Growth Advisor (ex-Miro):

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekaterina-syuma/

* Newsletter: https://katesyuma.substack.com

* X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/kate_syuma

Where to find Oscar Torres, Product Designer at Miro:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oscartorrestryme/

* Website: https://www.oscartorres.me/

* Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oscar_towers_/

What we’ve covered in this episode:

01:20 Approach to User Onboarding at Dropbox

04:12 Surprising Behavioral Insights from User Onboarding Experiments

11:57 Collaboration between Growth and Core Teams

13:23 Rituals for Alignment and Building a Growth Culture

21:44 Industry Trends in User Onboarding

34:05 Transition to Entrepreneurship and Creating DOPT

44:07 Insights and Learnings as a Founder

46:28 The Connection Between AI and User Onboarding

47:16 Favorite Example of User Onboarding

47:29 Interactive Guides

50:10 Tooltips vs Checklists

51:10 Recommended Resources

53:08 Conclusion

Resources referenced:

* Product Led Onboarding playbook: https://blog.dopt.com/product-led-onboarding-playbook

* The State of User Onboarding — report from 80+ companies: https://onboard.report/

* The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick: https://www.momtestbook.com/

* How to determine your activation metric from Lenny Rachitsky

* I bet you are doing product activation all wrong from Elena Verna

* Mike Maples playbook: https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/61719/maples-a-playbook-for-startups?tab=transcript

* Get early access to the Maven course on Onboarding and Activation (15% discount for teams): https://maven.com/forms/2c51cc

If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to share it with your colleagues and like-minded friends. For sponsorship and other inquiries reach out to ekaterinasyuma@gmail.com.

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SBJ Morning Buzzcast: April 2, 2026