The Two Common “Anti-Systems” Approaches in SaaS

Over the years, I’ve seen two dominant patterns play out in onboarding teams.

1. The “Great People Will Figure It Out” Model

“We hire smart people. They’ll get clients onboarded.”

The problem?
You’re asking great people to invent the onboarding system while simultaneously delivering onboarding.

• They recreate steps from memory.
• They fill documentation gaps on the fly.
• They triage issues reactively.
• They improvise when clients ask, “What happens next?”
• And when volume increases, everything cracks.

This is not a talent issue — it’s system absence masquerading as a people problem.

Your best people end up firefighting instead of building repeatable processes. And because everyone is “doing their own version,” you get inconsistent delivery, inconsistent client experience, and inconsistent outcomes.

2. The “Executive Glow” Model

This one is even more subtle.

A senior leader—often the founder or COO—gets involved to “ensure the implementation goes right.” They join kickoff calls, review plans, adjust timelines, and personally unblock issues.

This creates early wins, but it becomes a scaling trap:

• Teams learn to wait for executive decisions.
• The organization never develops a real onboarding system.
• The CEO becomes the bottleneck and quality guarantee.
• Decision-making power remains concentrated at the top.
• Teams feel disempowered and hesitant.

When onboarding quality relies on a single executive’s presence, you don’t have a system — you have a dependency.

The Real Root Cause: Unseen System Failures

Both patterns share one underlying problem:

Onboarding is treated as a people activity, not a systems activity.

• No single source of truth
• No adaptive playbook that updates as the product evolves
• Documentation debt accumulating quietly
• Reactive communication
• Lack of clarity about “what good looks like”
• Knowledge trapped in heads instead of processes
• Teams spending time on low-leverage improvisation instead of high-leverage delivery

You cannot scale tribal knowledge.
You can only scale systems.

The PDL Method: How Systems Replace Heroics

1. Build a Clear Path to Value

• Define the activation milestone
• Map every dependency
• Create a step-by-step path visible to client + internal team
• Make it repeatable across customer segments

2. Turn Tribal Knowledge Into a Continuously Improving Knowledge System

• Centralized, Obsidian-based documentation
• Playbooks that evolve weekly
• AI copilots to make knowledge instantly searchable
• Weekly improvement loops to eliminate documentation debt

3. Create Adaptive Onboarding Playbooks

• Segment-aware templates
• Automated decision trees
• AI-generated reminders
• Embedded checklists for consistent delivery

4. Establish a Single Source of Truth

• Shared timelines
• Role clarity
• Unified definitions of success
• Transparent dashboards
• Automated progress updates

5. Use AI Copilots to Reduce Cognitive Load

• Draft communication
• Summaries & insights
• Historical pattern lookup
• Risk identification
• Recommended next steps

6. Run Onboarding Like a Delivery Engine—Not a Project

PDL’s 20-Week Framework turns onboarding into a predictable engine:

• Plan: define value path, build playbook, fix documentation
• Do: execute with system-backed confidence
• Launch: improve the system weekly

Why Systems Matter More Than Ever

When companies rely on great people or executive glow, onboarding becomes inconsistent, stressful, slow, and unscalable.

But when onboarding relies on systems, everything changes:

• Teams feel empowered
• New hires ramp faster
• Executives stop firefighting
• Client experience becomes premium + predictable
• Time-to-value accelerates
• Quality becomes repeatable—not accidental

Systems create freedom. Heroics create fragility.

The Takeaway

If your onboarding process requires your best people—or your executives—to constantly step in, you don’t have a scalable onboarding model.

The solution isn’t more effort or more meetings.
The solution is a continuously improving onboarding system.

That’s what PDL builds.