01
Omnibox: Closing the Gap to the Aha Moment
Soul Machines · Director of Product
New users were stalling before the aha moment, and the fixed templates meant to help them were quietly boxing in what they could build. I rebuilt onboarding around one idea: describe what you want in plain language. Omnibox moved the product's value ahead of every sign-up gate and let people create anything, so they reached it faster and on their own terms.
Context
Omnibox was an internal initiative that built on the Digital Workforce platform. We had shipped Digital Workforce, but I could see new users weren't reaching the aha moment fast enough. Between landing and a working agent sat a series of gates: sign up, choose a plan, pick a template, then configure. Every gate was a place to drop off, and the real power of the platform stayed hidden behind all of them.
What I did
I started a separate track, known internally as Omnibox, to bring the value forward into a pre-logged-in state. Instead of the gauntlet, one natural-language box: describe what you want, and the platform builds it in front of you. This was a deliberate two-part bet: simplify the flow down to a single step, and at the same time stop the fixed templates from curtailing what people could create. Rather than choosing from a preset menu, users could describe anything, so onboarding got simpler without boxing their ideas in. People could sense the value before they were ever asked to commit, and it was designed to eventually fold back into Digital Workforce.
I didn't hand this over as a spec. I prototyped almost all of it directly in our codebase and brought it to the engineers as a functional, near-ready-to-ship build, with the user experience, interface, and design decisions already worked through. The kinks were ironed out up front, so the team could move straight to hardening and shipping rather than starting from a brief.
Why it matters
The shift was from "sign up, then maybe you'll see why this matters" to "see why this matters in seconds, then sign up." We collapsed a multi-step, gated onboarding into a single prompt, and moved the first real taste of the product ahead of every barrier that had been standing in its way. It is the clearest example of how I work: watch where people fall out, find the one change that removes the most friction, and prototype it hands-on until it is near ready to ship. Always toward the same end: put the value first.