Company Context

NotionFlow is a B2B collaboration SaaS company with 12M monthly active users across startups, mid-market teams, and enterprise customers. The product has strong adoption for docs and project tracking, but leadership believes the next growth lever is improving the onboarding experience for new team workspaces.

Problem

Activation for newly created workspaces has stalled: only 38% of new workspaces create 3+ pages and invite at least 2 teammates within the first 14 days, down from 44% six months ago. The team has several open product questions: Are users confused by setup? Are templates not relevant enough? Is collaboration value not clear early enough? The PM has limited time and budget and needs to decide which research method to use for each question rather than defaulting to the same approach every time.

You are the PM responsible for onboarding. Your task is not to redesign onboarding itself, but to explain how you would select the right research method for a given product question and how that choice would influence product decisions.

Deliverables

1. Define a framework for choosing among research methods such as user interviews, usability tests, surveys, product analytics, diary studies, and experiments.
2. Apply that framework to the onboarding problem and map specific product questions to the most appropriate research methods.
3. Explain what you would do first, given limited resources, and why.
4. Identify the trade-offs between speed, confidence, depth of insight, and scalability.
5. Describe how research findings would translate into product prioritization decisions.

Constraints

• Research budget supports only 2 methods in the next 6 weeks
• Engineering can instrument minor analytics changes, but no major rebuilds before quarter-end
• Enterprise customers represent 35% of ARR, so onboarding changes cannot significantly disrupt admin workflows
• Leadership expects a recommendation with clear success criteria by the next planning review