Phased Implementation: A Better Way to Onboard SaaS Clients

Your mom knows more about how to run a successful implementation process than you give her credit for. 

Don’t believe me? Ever heard your mom say one of the below?

• “Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”
• “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”
• “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Every customer success team and SaaS company has felt the pain of trying to onboard a new customer and watching the implementation process grind to a halt because they’ve tried to tackle too much, too soon.

From your end—the one providing the software or service—a robust implementation plan might not feel scary or intimidating. But you can probably add a new user or build a custom report in your sleep, can’t you? 

Chances are your new customers aren’t quite as comfortable with your software. 

There’s a common cognitive bias that’s to blame here. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge, and it’s what happens every time you assume that others have the same knowledge or expertise that you have. 

If you’re tired of cursed failed implementations and stalled onboarding sessions, this guide will show you how to use a phased implementation plan to get better results. We’ll look at how to develop a structured plan, defining key deliverables at each stage, and how to use Dock’s tools to make the whole process smooth and simple.

And who knows?

It may even make your mom proud of you for taking her advice, too. 

👉 Looking for a template? Steal Dock’s free implementation plan template here.

What is phased implementation?

Phased implementation is a strategic methodology for rolling out a new system in steps instead of all at once with the goal of achieving faster time to value. Each step or phase focuses on a goal, like setting up a feature or training a specific team.

A phased implementation plan is a step-by-step roadmap organizations can use to introduce change incrementally, ensuring it sticks without overwhelming everyone involved.

Phased implementation plans are especially useful for software and service providers when onboarding their largest enterprise customers.

When a major client signs up for your platform, you can't immediately activate every feature, train all their employees, and expect full adoption on day one. 

Instead, you need a strategic plan to gradually introduce advanced features as teams become comfortable. Perhaps you begin with a small pilot group or project team in one department, expand to key power users across teams, and finally roll out to the entire organization.

For instance, if you're helping a client implement a new CRM system:

• You might start by migrating just the contact database and training the sales team. 
• Once that's stable, you add integration with support tickets and bring in the customer service team. 
• Finally, you could enable advanced automation features and custom reporting for leadership.

Each phase builds on the previous one's success, just as you guide your customers through their own adoption journey.

For customer success and onboarding teams, your mission is to achieve tangible progress early to maintain momentum. Rolling out a new system all at once can lead to confusion, frustration, and disengagement—much like dumping every feature on a new customer at once. 

By introducing changes gradually, CS teams can manage expectations, reduce resistance, and address potential roadblocks before they escalate.

What are the benefits of phased implementation?

By breaking down your implementation plan into stages, you can address challenges early, improve the speed of adoption, and deliver measurable value to your customers at the beginning of the relationship. 

Phased implementation has a direct positive impact on some of the most important customer onboarding metrics, and has plenty of benefits, including:

Deliver faster time-to-value (TTV)

A selective rollout strategy ensures your implementation resources are spent on features that deliver immediate impact and return on investment for your client, rather than spreading attention across features that might not be immediately relevant.

You’re able to demonstrate a fast time-to-value across numerous different teams and use cases. 

Instead of trying to activate every feature at once, a phased implementation strategy lets you focus on what matters most to specific user segments or teams. 

For example, when implementing a customer service platform, your enterprise customers might need sophisticated ticket routing and SLA management first, while smaller teams prioritize knowledge base creation. Rolling out to each team or segment in stages means each one gets immediate access to the features that solve their most pressing problems.

That’s critical to avoiding what Gillian Heltai, former Chief Customer Officer at Lattice, calls “the trough of disillusionment” in onboarding, where your customers say, "Oh, I thought it was going to be this. And now this is so sad."

Once core value is established, you can expand to complementary features that enhance the primary use case. You can also ensure effective resource allocation by focusing your team’s time on the most impactful areas.

Increase adoption rates

Breaking down complex platforms into learnable chunks significantly impacts adoption rates.

We all have short attention spans, and your customers are busy with a dozen other priorities. That means you have a small window to capitalize on and drive adoption. 

As Customer Success Coach Rachel Provan put it in on Grow & Tell, onboarding is your “first date,” so you really need to make the most of it.

A phased approach eases the learning curve and simplifies training. It gives customers the opportunity to focus on mastering the basics before moving on to more complex elements, which will also reinforce their confidence. That’s especially true when you’re onboarding a technically complex product.

Minimize potential risks and scope creep

A strong risk management approach includes launching incrementally to reduce the likelihood of system-wide failures. 

Incremental rollouts ensure that issues can be resolved before they escalate, leading to a smoother overall rollout. This reduces the pressure on both your team and your customers, as potential disruptions are contained within a manageable project scope.

A phased approach allows providers to test compatibility, gather user feedback, and refine configurations within single business units, minimizing risks before scaling. You can prevent data migration errors, integration conflicts, or configuration mistakes that could be extremely costly (in time, if not in money) for your customers. 

Support effective change management

Gradual rollouts make it easier for end users to adapt to new systems, giving people time to adjust and ensure changes feel manageable and sustainable. A phased approach fosters buy-in by:

• Creating opportunities for quick wins that demonstrate value.
• Providing natural pause points to gather and incorporate feedback.
• Giving teams time to update documentation and processes.

Building momentum for long-term success

Phased implementation creates a steady stream of positive outcomes. These consistent small wins are key to creating what Eloise Salisbury, Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, calls “product excitement”, which leads to long-term engagement with your product or service. 

When you break the onboarding process down into logical steps, each successful phase serves as a milestone, building trust and excitement and motivating both internal teams and customers to stay engaged and committed to the project's goals.

Big-bang vs. phased implementation: which is right for you?

The alternative to phased implementation is to take a big-bang implementation approach—one where you try to implement and deploy everything at once. 

For example, if September 1 is launch day for your new CRM, then you’re doing everything you can to prepare for that launch ahead of time. When launch day comes, you pull the plug on the old CRM and push out the new CRM in all of its glory to everyone across the organization. 

When deciding between a phased approach and a big-bang implementation, it’s important to assess your product, team, and customer needs. 

Here’s how to evaluate if you’d do better with a phased or big-bang approach for your next implementation:

Phased implementation is better for incremental change

Phased implementation mirrors habit formation by focusing on manageable, incremental steps. 

It’s ideal for:

• Enterprise platforms with multiple modules: Rolling out core features first helps users build confidence before diving deeper into more advanced technicalities. Using the CRM example, this might mean rolling out contact management and basic pipeline tracking first, then introducing forecasting and territory management.
• Cross-functional tools with varying user types: Introducing changes department by department or branch by branch allows for focused support and reduces disruptions. It also means you can give each team specialized training for their needs. Say you’re implementing project management software, a marketing team might start with basic task management, while engineering adopts sprint planning features later. 
• Top-down software purchases: Often in enterprise SaaS, the decision-makers aren't the end users. When end users don’t choose the system, there might be some resistance. A phased rollout lets you identify and convert influential team members early. Starting with a pilot group of engaged users can turn them into internal champions.
• Legacy system replacement: Phasing out an old system slowly reduces operational risk. This is especially true for data-heavy migrations. You can start with data impacting active users and then slowly import historical data, once the core system is stable and teams are comfortable with the new interface.

Big bang is better for immediate transformation

A big bang implementation might suit scenarios that require quick, unified changes. This is just like quitting smoking cold turkey—it’s bold, but comes with significant challenges. 

The big bang approach works best when:

• Unified adoption is required: Some systems depend on simultaneous usage to function effectively. If you’re moving billing systems, you typically want to implement that in one go, or you might risk introducing payment errors. 
• Urgent timelines are critical: If immediate ROI or compliance deadlines are at stake, there might not be time for incremental steps. For example, many ecommerce businesses will try to implement major changes during their off-season so there’s no disruption to customers during peaks. 

How to build a phased implementation plan

To improve the odds of successful customer onboarding, your implementation project plan should define clear deliverables, set measurable goals, outline responsibilities, and include tools to track progress.

No two implementation plans are alike, but we’ll walk step by step through some common phases and steps below. The key to making sure you get this right is to think through what phases are appropriate for onboarding a new customer to your product or service. 

You can use this implementation plan template to customize your own version within Dock.

Phase 1: Define goals and phases during discovery and planning

Every effective implementation plan should start with the discovery and planning phase, because it lays the foundation for smarter decision-making for the entirety of the implementation lifecycle.

This phase is also when you’ll do your research and discovery work in order to outline the full scope of the project.

Caption: Dock timelines help you visualize implementation progress for your clients.

Discovery may require conversations with your new customer, using client onboarding questionnaires, pulling info forward from your digital sales room, or even working with third-party vendors.

Caption: In Dock, you can create tasks for each of the moving parts in the planning process.

One common example of implementation activities in this stage is identifying and connecting with key stakeholders and decision-makers. Before actively kicking off your implementation, you’ll want to make sure you understand:

• Who your product champion is
• How to reach technical leads during the project
• The various types of end users you’ll need to keep in mind (and remember that you may split each end user group into a separate phase). 

Once you have the right stakeholders in mind, you should identify the following:

• Project objectives: What are the high-level goals for implementation?
• Key metrics and KPIs: How will you measure the success of those goals?
• Product roles: Who on the client team will be responsible for implementation?
• Tech stack dependencies: What third-party tools need to be implemented or accounted for?
• Risks assessment: What are potential risks in implementation? What risk-mitigation plans are needed?

Store all the key contacts and agreed-upon success metrics right within your Dock implementation plan so that everyone stays on the same page through the process.

Once you have all that information, how do you figure out what phases you need? There are two possible approaches to phased implementation you should consider: 

• Feature-based phasing: Start with core features, then add on more later. This helps when your product has clear dependency chains or when different features require significantly different levels of technical setup and expertise. For example, in a BI tool, start with standard reporting before implementing custom dashboards since users need to understand data relationships first. This approach works best for products where features build on each other or when your customer base has similar core needs regardless of role.
• User-group phasing: Choose this approach when different departments have vastly different use cases or when you need strong internal advocates before expanding. For instance, if you’re implementing a project management tool, starting with the PMO team lets you perfect workflows with expert users who can then help train others (great for adoption!). This works particularly well in organizations with strong departmental autonomy or when different teams will use the product in fundamentally different ways.

Phase 2: System setup and integration

This project execution phase is when the ‘real’ implementation work begins. 

System setup and integration usually involves a lot of tactical and mission-critical tasks, which is why building out checklists within your Dock implementation plan can be so helpful.

If you’re phasing your implementation based on features, then you’ll want to keep this phase fairly short. Identify the core features users need to know right out of the gate and the tasks to get them set up and working well. Don’t worry about ancillary features at this stage—bucket setup tasks related to those features underneath a later phase.

For instance, if you’re implementing email marketing software, you might start by importing subscribers, migrating or setting up 10 objects, and setting up one automation flow. 

Your product can do a lot more, but that’s all a user needs to see to achieve success in the early days. 

Phase 3: Testing and validation phase

If you have dedicated implementation and onboarding, your product isn’t a simple ‘just sign up and go’ type of product. 

Once you’ve done the hard work of importing data and setting up key integrations, you need to test and ensure everything is working appropriately. 

Tasks like UAT, optimizing views, and obtaining final approval are common in this phase. The ultimate goal is to make sure your new client is happy with the setup process before launch day.

Again, keep in mind that your phased approach means you need to clearly define what you’re testing and what success looks like at each point. 

If you’ve agreed that your first phase is to roll out your AI chatbot to support agents for internal use, then you don’t need to test and validate that it’s showing up properly for customers in your help center (because it shouldn’t be—that’s out of scope for now). 

Phase 4: Deployment and post-implementation support

Onboarding doesn’t end at go-live (even if it feels like it should). In this final stage, you’ll define everything you and the customer need to do to launch your product.

Post-launch, you’ll also need to figure out your plan for ongoing support. If you’ve chosen a phased implementation, the next step very well might be to move right on to planning another phase (e.g. rolling out your AI chatbot to customer-facing channels). 

This of this as a recursive process with phases within phases.

Whatever that process looks like for you, be sure you're communicating clearly with your customer about where they should look for support and assistance moving forward.

5 tips for simplifying implementation with Dock

A phased implementation approach involves more than a series of tasks to complete. Your customers need clear visibility into progress, easy access to resources, and the ability to engage different stakeholders at the right times. 

Let's walk through how to structure your implementation plan using Dock's template and features.

1. Set up an implementation workspace

Start by creating a dedicated implementation hub in Dock — a single workspace where you and your customer can track every step, resource, and milestone of the implementation process. 

This workspace serves as the home base for your onboarding plan, housing the implementation schedule, assigned tasks, critical documents, and training materials.

You can templatize a general implementation workspace, and then personalize it to each customer.

Customers can easily bookmark the workspace and come back to it any time — no more digging through emails for the latest doc or link.

2. Connect multiple checklists with the project widget

Dock workspaces work well for phased implementation because you can both break the project into smaller checklists and consolidate those smaller lists into one master to-do list.

To start, you can create a separate action plan checklist for each phase, with only the relevant tasks and resources they need at that stage. 

Your admin setup phase, for example, might include technical configuration steps, with due dates for the project team, links to help center resources, and embedded tutorial videos.

💡 Pro tip: Embed action buttons directly in Dock checklists to prompt users to upload configuration files, access training resources, or connect with support. This direct integration of actions into the implementation flow makes it easier for customers to complete tasks without juggling multiple tools or platforms.

And then, with the project widget, you can pull all those checklists together into a single, consolidated project view — giving both your team and your customer a clear picture of:

• What’s completed across all phases
• What’s in progress
• What’s coming up next

This balance between phased, focused lists and a unified project dashboard helps keep complex implementations organized — without losing sight of the overall goal.

3. Visualize implementation progress with timelines

Phased implementation only works if everyone can see the path forward. Dock’s timelines lets you visualize progress with actual progress bars.

Right inside your Dock workspace, customers can see their entire project implementation plan laid out as a timeline, with clear phases, key milestones, and a progress bar that moves with them as they complete each step. 

This turns what’s normally an abstract or overwhelming process into something that feels tangible and achievable.

Noah Massucci, Director of Sales Engineering and Customer Onboarding at Robin, says this is his favorite Dock feature. 

“The fact you can tie it to the different stages and see, ‘Hey, you're halfway there’ or ‘You're three-quarters of the way there’ was so awesome, because it helped our team track it, but more than anything, it helped the customer be on the same page with us and understand if we’re going to hit those goals and deadlines we had talked about in the kickoff.”

4. Personalize the experience for each stakeholder

Different team members need different views of the implementation. 

Your technical leads might need access to API documentation and integration guides, while department heads might focus on training resources and adoption metrics. 

Dock's visibility settings let you create tailored experiences for each stakeholder group without requiring individual user accounts. This means your customer's IT team can work on SSO configuration while their end-user trainers simultaneously prepare for rollout, each seeing only the relevant content for their role.

Dock allows you to use a multi-modal approach mixing video content, written documentation, and interactive elements—so you can adapt your process for different learning styles from the same place.

5. Track engagement and progress to identify red flags

Understanding how actively customers engage with the implementation process and tracking project progress is crucial, so you can react in a timely manner. 

Dock provides visibility into which resources stakeholders are accessing, which tasks are being completed, and where teams might be stalling. This enables you to proactively reach out when you notice engagement dropping or celebrate with customers as they hit major milestones, like a go-live deadline.

Streamline implementation with Dock

A phased approach offers a structured, flexible way to deliver value to your customers while minimizing risks. With Dock’s phased implementation plan template, you can streamline the process, ensuring every step is clear and actionable.

Get started with Dock today and build a phased implementation plan that scales with your customers’ success.