Self-Identification as the First Step

A marketing site has no login, no setup wizard — but it absolutely has a first run. For HackerU, that first moment is the personalized homepage entry layer, where a brand-new visitor self-identifies as a prospective student, current student, graduate, recruiter, or discharged soldier, and the primary content card adapts to them. I treated this as onboarding: the job of the first screen is to orient a stranger and route them to relevance fast. For a PM, this reframes a familiar metric. Instead of generic engagement, the question becomes whether each audience reaches content meant for them with minimal friction. So the self-identification step had to be obvious, low-effort, and reversible — a visitor should never feel locked into a wrong choice or punished for exploring. It also had to degrade gracefully: someone who skips it still lands on a coherent default rather than a dead end. The design challenge was doing all of this without a heavy gate that blocks people from the content they came for. Good first-run onboarding here isn't a tutorial; it's a single, respectful question that makes the rest of the site feel like it was built for the person who just arrived.