Company Context

You’re the PM for Overleaf Pro, a B2B SaaS product used for academic writing and publishing workflows. Overleaf Pro has 6.5M monthly active users globally, with ~420K teams on paid plans (university site licenses + lab subscriptions). Revenue is driven by seat-based pricing ($18–$35/user/month) and enterprise contracts with universities and research institutes.

Overleaf Pro competes with:

• Google Docs (ubiquitous collaboration, weaker LaTeX + citation workflows)
• Microsoft Word + Track Changes (dominant in some fields, poor multi-author versioning)
• Notion / Confluence (knowledge management, not submission-grade manuscripts)
• Authorea (publishing workflow focus, smaller ecosystem)

Overleaf’s differentiation is LaTeX-first authoring, reproducibility, and publisher-friendly templates. However, growth in enterprise deals is slowing because procurement teams increasingly ask: “How do you reduce the end-to-end pain of getting a manuscript submitted?”

User / Market Scenario

Overleaf’s research shows that manuscript creation is rarely a single-author activity. A typical paper has 5–12 contributors across roles:

Competitive pressure is increasing because Google Docs is improving citation add-ons and Word is bundling Copilot-based rewriting. Meanwhile, publishers are pushing stricter compliance checks (COI, author contributions, funding statements), raising the cost of late-stage mistakes.

Problem / Opportunity

Overleaf’s internal funnel analysis for teams that start a “Manuscript” project shows:

• Median time from first draft to submission export: 29 days
• 38% of projects have “late-stage churn”: they become inactive for 14+ days after heavy commenting activity
• In post-mortem surveys (n=1,200), the top reasons for delays are:
  1. Unclear ownership of sections and revisions (52%)
  2. Feedback fragmentation across comments, email, and PDFs (47%)
  3. Approval bottlenecks from senior authors (41%)
  4. Compliance rework (affiliations/COI/funding) discovered near submission (26%)

A key qualitative insight: contributors describe their work as “contributing to a manuscript” rather than “editing a document.” They think in roles (draft, review, approve), not just cursor-level collaboration.

Your VP of Product sets a goal: reduce time-to-submission by 25% for multi-author teams while maintaining Overleaf’s reliability and compliance posture.

Your Task (Deliverables)

Design a product approach that addresses the “contributed to a manuscript” workflow end-to-end.

1. Clarify the user need and JTBD: What does “contributing to a manuscript” mean across personas (drafting, reviewing, approving, compliance)?
2. Define a product vision for a first-class manuscript collaboration workflow (not just better editing).
3. Propose 3–5 solution concepts (features or workflow changes) and explain how each maps to specific pain points.
4. Prioritize what you would build first (MVP vs later) using a clear method (e.g., RICE, Kano, or a hybrid).
5. Define success metrics and an experiment/rollout plan that proves impact on time-to-submission without harming retention or trust.

Constraints

• Timeline: MVP must ship in 10 weeks; broader roadmap can span 2 quarters.
• Team: 6 engineers (3 frontend, 2 backend, 1 infra), 1 designer, 0 dedicated data scientist.
• Technical: Real-time collaboration stack is stable; you can add metadata and workflow layers, but cannot rewrite the editor.
• Compliance: Must support auditability (who approved what, when) for enterprise customers; cannot store sensitive personal data beyond what’s needed for authorship metadata.
• Reliability: Any new workflow must not increase p95 editor latency by more than 50ms.

What We’re Evaluating

We’re looking for structured product thinking: how you translate a vague prompt (“contributed to a manuscript”) into user needs, a coherent workflow, prioritized features, and measurable outcomes under real constraints.