How Swiggy Redefined it's Onboarding Flow, with Shrenik Surana, former Principal Product Manager at Swiggy
We discuss how user insights, iterative experiments, and purposeful design drove activation rates and adoption across verticals at Swiggy.
Welcome to the first episode of Experiment Engine!
At Plotline, we believe experimentation is at the heart of app growth. In this series, we’re bringing you in-depth conversations with product leaders at fast-growing B2C apps to uncover their most impactful experiments. From crafting hypotheses to measuring results, these stories reveal what it takes to build app journeys that scale.
For our inaugural episode, we sat down with Shrenik Surana, former Principal Product Manager at Swiggy, to discuss the onboarding redesign that boosted activation rates and drove the adoption of newer verticals as Swiggy transformed from a food-delivery app to a hyperlocal convenience platform.
Some takeaways from the conversation:
🔍 Context is everything
One of Swiggy's critical findings was that users dropped off when onboarding steps lacked clarity. For example, the app asked for location permissions early in the journey without explaining why.
“When we asked users for location permissions right at the start, they’d wonder, ‘Why do you need this already? Is this tied to my home address?’ That kind of uncertainty led to drop-offs,” Shrenik explained.
The solution? Swiggy introduced visual cues and animations to explain that location access was only for a broader area, not specific addresses. By setting expectations and addressing concerns upfront, Swiggy saw a significant increase in users granting location access.
💡 Insight: Always explain "why" for high-friction actions like permissions. Contextualizing these requests builds user trust and reduces drop-offs.
📉 Purposeful friction can drive higher engagement
Swiggy moved signup earlier in the user journey, requiring users to sign up before exploring the app. While this might seem counterintuitive, user interviews revealed that most users were comfortable signing up early, especially using their mobile numbers.
This change addressed two key challenges:
It simplified later steps by decoupling signup from the cart or checkout process.
It allowed Swiggy to present its broader value proposition upfront, framing the app as more than just food delivery.
To accommodate exploratory users who preferred not to share details immediately, Swiggy added a “Skip” button. This option directed users to the location permission screen and then to the home page, enabling seamless exploration.
The result was improved signup success rates and reduced drop-offs from onboarding to the home page.
💡 Insight: Friction isn’t always a negative—strategic placement of signups or similar steps can enhance user focus and retention downstream.
🎨 Iterate small, scale big
Swiggy’s onboarding redesign wasn’t a one-off overhaul. Instead, the team ran 10+ micro-experiments, testing hypotheses like multi-step vs. single-step signup flows and adding WhatsApp OTPs. Each test provided incremental improvements, and only validated ideas were scaled to 100% of users.
For example, enabling OTPs via WhatsApp was a seemingly small addition had a massive impact at scale.
Shrenik emphasized the importance of small, hypothesis-backed experiments. “When you’re working at scale, even a tiny experiment can make a huge difference. For example, enabling WhatsApp OTPs. It sounds niche, but for users in areas with poor mobile networks, having a Wi-Fi-based option increased verification success rates significantly.”
💡 Insight: Test and validate hypotheses incrementally to build scalable, data-backed solutions.
Got insights or questions about onboarding experiments? We’d love to hear about it on LinkedIn!