Company Context

TaskFlow is a B2B SaaS work-management platform used by 25,000 small and mid-sized businesses, with 3.2M monthly active users across web and mobile. The company has grown quickly through sales-led expansion, but product leadership is concerned that roadmap decisions are increasingly driven by executive requests, large customer escalations, and competitor reactions rather than validated user needs.

Problem

Over the last two quarters, TaskFlow shipped 14 major features, but only 4 have adoption above 20% of eligible users after 90 days. NPS has remained flat at 31, and qualitative research shows a recurring complaint: "The product keeps adding things, but core workflows are still too hard." Engineering velocity is healthy, yet customer satisfaction and feature adoption are not improving proportionally.

The CPO asks you, as the PM for the core collaboration product, to define how you would ensure your team's work stays aligned with real user needs while still balancing revenue pressure, enterprise customer requests, and limited engineering capacity.

Deliverables

1. Explain how you would identify and validate the most important user needs for this product area.
2. Describe how you would translate those needs into roadmap priorities and day-to-day team decisions.
3. Define how you would handle conflicts between user research, executive asks, and sales-driven feature requests.
4. Propose a lightweight operating model for keeping engineering, design, and GTM teams aligned on user needs over time.
5. Define the metrics you would use to know whether the team is becoming more user-aligned.

Constraints

• You have one product designer, six engineers, and one data analyst supporting this area.
• The next roadmap cycle is 12 weeks away, and leadership expects visible progress by then.
• 30% of engineering capacity is already committed to enterprise customer obligations and technical debt.
• Research resources are limited; you cannot run a large standalone research program or pause delivery.