How to map your onboarding personas (with templates)

Creating a rewarding onboarding experience starts with knowing who you're onboarding. In SaaS and AI products, that means different users—admins, end-users, partners—need different entry points and learning paths. In this guide, we’ll walk through a simple, repeatable process for mapping your onboarding personas. This gives you the clarity to build scalable onboarding journeys that actually activate users—not teach everyone everything.

Why mapping onboarding personas matters

Imagine inviting three different people to your product: a new team member, a channel partner, and a billing admin. Each has different goals, questions, and product touchpoints. But most onboarding flows still treat them the same—and that’s a problem.

According to UseGuiding, 58% of SaaS leaders say lack of onboarding personalization is a top reason for churn. Good onboarding meets people where they are, and persona mapping is how you build that in from day one.

The best teams (think: Notion, Airtable, Zoom) build onboarding based on clear, defined user personas. They balance automation with personalization, delivering the right content at the right time, without hand-holding every user.

In this guide, we’ll break it into four steps:

• Identify your primary user personas
• Group them by intent and usage level
• Define learning objectives per persona
• Map education delivery paths by format
  

Step 1: Identify key onboarding personas

Start with the entry points

The way someone lands on your product says a lot about their needs. Group your prospects by how they enter:

• First-time users – Self-serve signups, often from marketing or referral.
• Invited users – Teammates invited to an existing workspace.
• Admins – People setting up billing, permissions, integrations.
• Partners – External teams or agencies using your tool on behalf of clients.

Audit your current user roles

If you have role-based access (e.g., super admin vs. guest), start there. This structure often reflects different jobs-to-be-done the user has. For example:

• Super admin – Sets up integrations, handles team management
• End-user – Uses features directly, focuses on workflows
• Guest – Limited access, often needs specific output

Tip: Tag these roles inside your CRM or analytics tools like Amplitude or Segment. That way, you’ll have data-driven paths instead of assumptions.

Step 2: Group users by intent and maturity

To scale education, you don’t need 20 personas. You need just enough to teach different types of users what they care about, fast.

We recommend bucketing into two axes:

• Intent – Why are they here (e.g., build a workflow, set up a team, test features)?
• Maturity – Total exposure to your product (e.g., completely new vs. experienced)

Example: A product like Canva might have these personas:

• DIY User (intent: create brand asset, maturity: new)
• Brand Designer (intent: manage assets, maturity: intermediate)
• Marketing Director (intent: assign templates, maturity: advanced)

If you’re already collecting ICP or survey data, combine that with user behavior to validate these groups.

Step 3: Define education goals per persona

Once you know who they are, define what they need to do to be successful. Focus here—not on just features, but on outcomes tied to activation.

Use templates like:

• [Persona] needs to [Primary Goal]
• In order to [Business or Workflow Outcome]
• They must learn: [Feature/Function/Concept]

Example 1:
‘Invited Teammate’ needs to upload their first client deck
In order to deliver work by Friday
They must learn: how to duplicate a workspace template and share via link

Example 2:
‘External Partner’ needs to integrate client data
In order to populate accurate dashboards
They must learn: how to connect an account, set permission levels, and trigger syncs

This approach also prevents bloated onboarding. You teach only what’s critical to get them to value.

Step 4: Choose the right education format

Now that your personas and goals are clear, match the format to their journey. Different users consume content differently—so flexibility matters.

• First-time Users → Tooltips, intro videos, product tour/follow-me
• Admins/Super Admins → Interactive guides, wikis, role-based walkthroughs
• Partners → Embeddable training portals, certification paths
• End-users → Template libraries, contextual help

Teams like Asana and Loom nail format matching. Loom, for example, uses explainer videos for most flows, but also offers a dedicated admin onboarding journey.

Pro tip: Use our platform, Qurioos, to manage modular onboarding paths per persona using triggers like role, usage behavior, or access level. See how.

Tie it all together with a single source of truth

The clearer your persona map, the easier it is to build, test, and improve onboarding flows. The bonus? It puts onboarding strategy in one place—easy to share with product, CS, and enablement.

Use this checklist to get started:

• ✓ Identify all entry paths to your product
• ✓ Audit access roles and account types
• ✓ Define 3–5 key personas by intent/maturity
• ✓ Assign activation goals to each
• ✓ Match formats with content types and channels

Mapping personas doesn’t require re-building your onboarding. It just makes everything you already have more impactful. A few tweaks can dramatically reduce user drop-off and false starts.

Want to start building onboarding content around real personas? Try Qurioos