Company Context

Slack is a mature B2B collaboration platform used by millions of knowledge workers across startups, enterprises, and distributed teams. The product is feature-rich and highly adopted, but internal teams are debating whether to prioritize speed of shipping requested features or invest in a more user-centered redesign of a core workflow.

Problem

Slack's onboarding flow for new workspace members has become cluttered after multiple teams added prompts for channel discovery, integrations, profile setup, notifications, and AI features. As a result, first-week activation for new users has fallen from 62% to 54% over two quarters, and user research shows that many new users feel overwhelmed in their first session. Sales is pushing for more feature exposure during onboarding because enterprise buyers want faster adoption of premium capabilities, while Design and Research argue that the experience should be simplified around core user jobs.

You are the product manager responsible for onboarding. In a cross-functional review, you need to advocate for a user-centered design approach and convince stakeholders to align on a revised direction.

Deliverables

1. Explain how you would identify the most important user needs and pain points in Slack's onboarding experience.
2. Describe how you would advocate for a user-centered redesign to stakeholders who prefer feature-heavy onboarding.
3. Propose a prioritized onboarding solution, including what you would remove, simplify, or defer.
4. Define success metrics and how you would validate that the redesign improves both user experience and business outcomes.
5. Discuss the key trade-offs you would make between short-term feature exposure and long-term activation/retention.

Constraints

• You have one quarter to ship an MVP redesign.
• Engineering capacity is limited to one onboarding squad and minor support from the growth team.
• Enterprise sales leadership insists that premium features cannot disappear entirely from the first-week experience.
• You may not materially increase onboarding completion time or require a lengthy setup questionnaire.