Paddle self-serve migration journey
Problem
Challenges
Provides a way to migrate on their own with minimal support
Ideal for 80% of classic Paddle customers
Reduces Paddles need to hire more staff to manually migrate
Suitable for customers with less than 10k subscriptions
At the beginning
Below is a list of initial thoughts and knowledge gaps I wanted to understand as we started our discovery journey and to understand our customers better. These were asked to our classic paddle customers who wanted to migrate as part of our discovery.
• What are the key factors driving your decision to migrate to the new billing platform?
• Have you set up your Billing account yet?
• How would you expect to migrate from Paddle Classic to the new Paddle Billing?
• What are your concerns and main risks when you think about migrating?
• Do you have any expectations on how long a migration should take?
• How much support would you expect to receive when migrating?
• Would you consider migrating your customers and subscriptions yourself if it meant you would be transacting on Paddle Billing sooner?
• Would you prefer to start with a test migration, or move a large batch of subscribers right away?
Discovery and learnings
The PM and I began by interviewing customers who were eager to migrate, while I developed a discussion guide and a design plan to structure our approach.
We lifted data from snowflake to identify ideal migration candidates
Worked with and consulted our back-end engineering team
Spoke to over 10 Paddle small - medium sized customers
Reviewed competitor experiences and ways of migrating
Theme one
Migrating is scary to our sellers, they don't want to lose revenue or customers, there's a risk involved
Theme three
Sellers wanted to test a migration before considering larger batches
Theme two
Paddle customers wanted to grow their business and begin using their data more proactively
Theme four
Support. Sellers wanted support in several ways throughout their journey
Ideation workshop
Cross collaboration.
Following on from our discovery I decided to leverage some internal knowledge and ideas by leading a two-part ideation workshop designed to spark fresh thinking, surface hidden insights, and unite cross-functional Paddlers turning collaboration into a catalyst for shaping the project's future direction.
In the sessions we had engineers, solutions, PMs, design and support team members
The session proved highly effective, resulting in two clear migration journeys
Prototypes and testing
I built and tested four prototypes, each evolving from the last with customer insight. There were extensive design iterations and idea exploration along the way too.
I managed to refine the process to four simple steps after speaking with and testing prototypes with customers. Its was clear they wanted oversight of their plans and subscribers within the experience.
Easily choose a plan and customer
It was clear customers wanted to control who they migrated and when. Our initial assumption was they would want us to do that for them.
Contextual support
Support resources like FAQs and explainers were embedded within the drawers, linking out to our developer documentation. After launch, we plan to enhance each step with video tutorials.
Tracking the migration process was a top priority to ease customer concerns about timelines. We also planned to send email notifications once migrations were complete.
Final designs
Mark Slater 2025