If a product wants me to go through a lengthy onboarding session, whether it be with a representative or through some guided tutorial it's an immediate turnoff

If a product wants me to go through a lengthy onboarding session, whether it be with a representative or through some guided tutorial it's an immediate turnoff and I will likely abandon right then and there. Personal anecdote: We were evaluating Cisco AppDynamics last year as we were in the market for an APM product and, unfortunately, we are a huge Cisco shop. They wanted to hold our hand and walk us through everything, and the product was certainly in a state where I can't blame them - the agent sucked to deploy, they had a nice little UI to configure things during install but after that it was all editing XML. Sure, I could automate it all with Ansible - but you could tell they knew the UX sucked and they just wanted you to get through the onboarding quick and hope you didn't notice. We ended up purchasing Dynatrace instead, I started a trial with no intervention from sales reps. They made their happy onboarding path a "game" (they have "quests" in the UI to guide you through the various parts of the product) but otherwise threw you right in with no handholding. The agent was stupid simple to deploy (here's a manifest to deploy to OpenShift, here's a .msi to install on Windows) and it picked everything up automatically and started working. Figured everything else out by just playing with the tool, with the docs as an aide. // End anecdote I think onboarding has a place, but it shouldn't hold a user hostage. I really liked Dynatrace's approach, especially as the "quests" were covering different components of the product and could be tackled in any order - they also weren't guided tours but instead directed me to investigate other parts of the tool and perform certain actions, even providing a carrot (free credit) for completing them.