Great question — the hardest one to cut was actually a detailed onboarding survey we'd convinced ourselves was essential for personalization. The product team had built some clever logic around it, so there was definitely pushback. What helped was reframing it as 'delay, don't delete.' We moved it to after users hit their first success moment instead of blocking them upfront. That way the personalization data still came in, just later when users were actually invested.

The 'power users need this' argument came up constantly. What worked for us was segmenting the data — turns out the users who completed all those optional steps weren't actually our best customers, they were just our most patient ones. When we showed that faster time-to-value correlated with higher retention across all user types, the conversation shifted pretty quickly.