Crew Onboarding Map

Crew's onboarding has exactly one job: get a new account to the Cross-Tool Reveal — a per-developer or per-team cost fact spanning ≥2 tools that no single vendor dashboard can produce — in the first session, and under 5 minutes for the self-serve CTO. Everything else (team mapping, invites, sharing, chargeback) is deferred until after that aha.

The design philosophy is reveal-first, degrade gracefully, defer heavy setup:

• Reveal-first: the flow is judged solely by time-to-first-reveal. Setup steps that don't serve the reveal are pushed past activation.
• Degrade gracefully: the connect step accepts even aggregate-only billing providers, shows an attribution-coverage % meter, and still delivers a team/aggregate-level reveal rather than blocking.
• Defer heavy setup: cost-center / team mapping — the Platform Lead's heaviest step — happens after the reveal, as an optional second step with auto-infer-and-confirm.

Both personas self-serve, with an optional sales-assist path for larger orgs (security blocker, 2–6 week cycle). The single biggest failure mode — and the one with the strongest designed recovery — is no reveal in the first session.

These decisions were confirmed in the interview and govern the whole onboarding map.

The shared path to activation. Steps 1–4 are the critical line to the reveal; step 5 onward is deferred, post-activation work.

1. Sign up — email or SSO. Capture persona (platform_lead | cto) and company size with one optional question; never block on it. Fires account_created.
2. Connect ≥1 billing provider — Claude Code / Cursor / Copilot / Devin·Windsurf. Per-provider OAuth or API key. Show expected granularity (per-seat | per-key | aggregate-only) during connect so expectations are set. Fires provider_connected.
3. Coverage-aware ingest — pull and normalize billing; display a live attribution-coverage % meter as data lands. Aggregate-only providers count toward spend but are flagged as "team-level only." No team mapping yet. Fires attribution_coverage_sampled.
4. Cross-Tool Reveal (ACTIVATION) — the first dashboard showing a per-developer/per-team cost fact spanning ≥2 tools. CTO target <5 min; Platform Lead within first session. Fires cross_tool_reveal_viewed with time_since_signup_sec, providers_count, attribution_coverage_pct.
5. Share / invite (post-aha, optional) — share-triggered: the first export or "send to Finance" prompts teammate/Finance invites. Fires report_exported, teammate_invited.
6. Team / cost-center mapping (deferred, optional) — auto-infer groupings from billing metadata (email domains, seat assignments), present a draft the lead confirms/edits. Unlocks team-segmented dashboards and showback.
7. Alerts & ritual setup (deferred) — showback-first anomaly alerts and the monthly budget-review ritual; seeds retention. Chargeback is a later expansion step.

An illustrative target allocation of the CTO's <5-minute (300-second) self-serve path to the reveal — a design budget, not measured data. It shows where the flow can and cannot afford friction: the connect step is the largest, riskiest slice.

Activation is a single, sharp event: cross_tool_reveal_viewed. The path and its guardrails:

The activation chain

• connect → ingest → reveal. The reveal must span ≥2 tools — a single-tool view is not the Crew wedge.
• Reveal content: a concrete, surprising fact — "Developer A: $800/mo," "test automation is 40% of Claude spend," or (Platform Lead) "Team X spent 2× Team Y on Cursor."
• Coverage honesty: the reveal always shows the attribution-coverage % so the user trusts the fact and sees what's still unattributed.

Single-provider guardrail

If a user connects only one provider, there is no cross-tool reveal. The flow surfaces a "add a second provider to unlock the cross-tool view" nudge rather than showing a single-vendor dashboard that any vendor already provides.

First success = the Cross-Tool Reveal. Onboarding is "done" the moment the user sees their first cross-tool per-developer/per-team fact. This deliberately stops short of "answered the CFO" or "shared with Finance" — those are conversion/retention milestones, not the onboarding bar.

Post-success momentum (not required for activation, but the immediate next nudges): add a second provider if not already; export/share the reveal; for the Platform Lead, map teams to unlock segmented dashboards.

Three onboarding failure modes, ordered by priority. "No reveal in first session" gets the strongest designed recovery.

Onboarding reuses the confirmed lifecycle-metrics event inventory; no new canonical events are introduced. The onboarding-specific funnel and signals:

Routing is proposed; it activates only after this page is approved.

1. /conversion-map research/crew — the activation→paid / team-rollout path that begins right where onboarding's first success ends.
2. /metrics research/crew — commit firm onboarding-funnel targets (time-to-reveal, activation rate, connect success) left as BASELINE NEEDED in lifecycle-metrics.
3. Per-provider billing-API granularity spike before the connect step can be specced.