An empty dropdown and no way forward
The product, a landing-page builder for marketing teams, could email every lead the moment they submitted a form. Almost nobody had it switched on, and support kept getting the same question: how do I set this up?
The pattern customers pay for. Steps 1–3 worked. Step 4 almost never got set up.
The form settings asked users to pick a follow-up email from a dropdown. For anyone who had never built one, the dropdown was empty. There was no button and no hint that emails lived in a different product.
Getting one follow-up running took eleven actions across two products. Session recordings, support tickets and funnel data all pointed to the same four places where people gave up.
A bridge, not a rebuild
The team's first instinct was to rebuild the email builder. I argued against it. People weren't stuck inside the builder. They were stuck getting to it and back again. Rebuilding it would have taken the roadmap and left that gap open.
So we built a bridge instead: one fix for each drop-off point, without touching the email builder itself.
What happened
Activation roughly doubled from a very small base, and the setup tickets stopped. We had aimed higher. Removing friction closed about half the gap, which told us where the next constraint was: the email builder itself.
What I'd do differently
Talk to the people who quit. The recordings and tickets were enough to ship, but five conversations with drop-outs would have shown us the awareness problem before launch instead of after.