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:
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?”
Overleaf’s research shows that manuscript creation is rarely a single-author activity. A typical paper has 5–12 contributors across roles:
| Persona | Share of teams | Primary Job-to-be-Done | Common tools today |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Author (PhD / Postdoc) | 38% | Draft and integrate feedback fast | Overleaf + Slack + email |
| Senior Author / PI | 24% | Ensure scientific quality; approve final | PDF review + email |
| Co-authors (domain experts) | 20% | Add sections; respond to comments | Word/Docs + email |
| Statistician / Data Scientist | 10% | Validate analyses; update figures/tables | Git + notebooks + Overleaf |
| Admin / Grants Manager | 8% | Ensure compliance (affiliations, COI) | Spreadsheets + email |
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.
Overleaf’s internal funnel analysis for teams that start a “Manuscript” project shows:
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.
Design a product approach that addresses the “contributed to a manuscript” workflow end-to-end.
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.