Reducing Friction in Enterprise Self-Serve Onboarding & Unlocking Product-Led Growth

Overview

Apollo is the company behind GraphOS Studio — a platform that helps organizations manage how their APIs talk to each other. For enterprise teams, GraphOS connects dozens of internal data sources into one secure API, streamlining development, improving collaboration, and providing fine-grained access control.

Role & scope

• Title: Staff Product Designer, Growth & Developer Experience
• ‍Mission: Make Apollo self-serve and enterprise-ready so companies could evaluate securely, reach proof-of-concept faster, and reduce the sales cost of adoption.

Cross functional partners

• Growth & product leads: aligned revenue goals and qualification criteria
• Head of product marketing: aligned product and web messaging
• Head of content & learning: supported documentation and training
• Head of sales: coordinated changes to sales processes and expectations

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Challenge

Enterprise adoption of GraphOS required trust, security, and scalability — but Apollo’s onboarding flow worked against those needs:

• Required API credentials on the first screen (excluding 60%+ of users)
• Silently routed everyone to the free serverless plan, losing high-intent evaluators
• 92% drop-off after sign-up
• Heavy dependence on enterprise contracts and Sales Engineering support

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Why it mattered

Enterprise evaluators needed a quick, low-risk path to see value and share it with their teams. Without it, conversion and trust eroded before sales ever engaged.

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Design challenge

Design an enterprise-ready self-serve trial that reflected the speed and simplicity of GraphQL itself — allowing developers to onboard, activate, and adopt without a sales call.Apollo’s sales-led model didn’t scale. The product needed to build trust through experience, not human mediation.

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Team challenge

Inside Apollo, “enterprise adoption” meant different things to different teams:

• Marketing: “Users don’t understand GraphQL.”
• Engineering: “We just need more features.”
• DevOps: “We’re chasing the wrong users.”

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Alignment was the blocker. To fix this, I led a 90-minute cross-functional workshop (Product, Eng, DevRel, Content). Within minutes, we surfaced language gaps, where terms like graph, project, and activation had inconsistent definitions. I introduced a shared glossary and ownership matrix for when to involve each function. Treating language as part of the design system shifted leadership focus toward user experience, not org boundaries.

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Goals

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Early insights

To understand intent, I added a three-question survey to the sign-up flow. Over 10k responses clarified friction points and user types.

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Key findings

The data reframed the problem from “educate users on GraphQL” to “reduce steps before value.

• 49% had no graph or dataset; most enterprise evaluators dropped off early
• 47% came to run a query
• 73% were “personal” users (some enterprise users mis-categorized to avoid sales)
• 97% remained on the free plan
• 5% sought to implement federation (supergraph)

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Approach

I approached the redesign as a systems problem, aligning user trust, business viability, and technical feasibility.

1. Map the Ecosystem: Audited onboarding flows; identified redundant validation and a 92% API gate drop-off.
2. Uncover Evidence: Paired quantitative funnel data with evaluator interviews.
3. Define Guiding Truths: “Trust first, value fast, complexity unfolds over time.”
4. Prototype for Clarity: Tested progressive-disclosure flows balancing compliance and transparency.
5. Scale Cross-Functionally: Rolled out in sync with marketing and sales enablement for consistent messaging.

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Insights to impact

Cross-team alignment merged Growth, Sales, and Dev Experience under a single adoption metric. Using Amplitude data, research panels, and internal listening tours, we validated that friction stemmed from trust gaps, delayed value, and limited real-world testing.This led to three design levers: personalized onboarding, modular demos, and scalable architecture.

Solution

A self-serve enterprise onboarding flow balancing compliance and conversion:

• Personalized pathways: Segmented users (explorers, beginners, adopters). Moved 30-day trial upfront for enterprise champions.
• One-click demo (“Spotify Demo”): Let users safely experience GraphOS instantly in a read-only environment.
• Project containers: Introduced architectural grouping (graphs, services, variants) to mirror enterprise org structures.

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Personalized pathways (UI peak)

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One click demo (UI peak)

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Project containters (UI peak)

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Outcomes

This work established Apollo’s foundation for product-led enterprise growth — reducing sales dependency, strengthening trust signals, and positioning design as a strategic function driving adoption, not just execution.

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