Company Context

Frontier is building an AI-first browser and productivity experience for knowledge workers, students, and teams. The company has strong early adoption through invite flows, onboarding prompts, and premium upgrade surfaces, but leadership is concerned that some growth tactics may be improving activation while weakening long-term habit formation.

Problem

Over the last quarter, Frontier increased first-session conversion to key actions by making onboarding more aggressive: more permission requests up front, earlier premium upsell prompts, and stronger nudges to set Frontier as the default browser. As a result, day-0 activation rose from 42% to 51%, and paid trial starts increased by 18%. However, week-8 retention for new cohorts fell from 31% to 25%, and qualitative feedback suggests some users feel pressured before they understand Frontier's value.

You are the Product Growth Analyst partnering with Product, Growth, and Design to recommend how Frontier should manage the trade-off between short-term conversion and long-term retention across the new-user journey.

Deliverables

1. Define how you would frame the core user and business problem, including which user segments you would prioritize.
2. Identify the key moments in Frontier's onboarding and upgrade journey where conversion and retention are in tension.
3. Propose a product strategy for Frontier that improves long-term retention without giving up too much near-term conversion.
4. Explain how you would prioritize changes across onboarding, default-browser prompts, permission requests, and premium upgrade surfaces.
5. Define clear success criteria and the trade-offs you would accept or reject.

Constraints

• Frontier can ship only 2 meaningful onboarding changes in the next 6 weeks.
• Engineering bandwidth is limited; no major re-architecture or new ML systems.
• Revenue pressure is real: leadership does not want paid trial starts to decline by more than 5% in the next quarter.
• Browser trust is critical; changes that feel manipulative could damage brand perception and word-of-mouth.