Company Context

TaskFlow is a B2B SaaS work-management platform used by 25,000 small and mid-sized teams for project tracking, documentation, and workflow automation. The company is growing steadily, but activation for new team admins has stalled and several roadmap decisions are being made with limited user evidence.

Problem

The Head of Product wants a repeatable way to choose between interviews, surveys, card sorting, and usability testing when answering product questions. Recent examples include: understanding why new admins abandon setup, validating whether navigation labels are confusing, measuring how common a pain point is across customers, and diagnosing why users fail to complete a workflow in a new prototype. The team has only 6 weeks before Q3 planning, a small research budget, and one UX researcher shared across three product squads.

Your task is not to run the research itself, but to define how you would decide which method to use for a given question, and how you would apply that decision process to TaskFlow's current needs.

Deliverables

1. Define a practical framework for selecting among interviews, surveys, card sorting, and usability testing based on the type of product question.
2. Apply your framework to at least four concrete TaskFlow questions, specifying which method you would choose and why.
3. Explain the trade-offs between speed, depth, confidence, scalability, and actionability for each method.
4. Recommend a prioritized research plan for the next 6 weeks, including what to do first and what to defer.
5. Define how you would judge whether the research produced decision-quality insights.

Constraints

• One UX researcher supports three squads; PMs and designers must help execute lightweight research.
• Budget allows either 12 moderated sessions total or one large survey to up to 2,000 users, not both at full scale.
• Q3 roadmap decisions are due in 6 weeks.
• Engineering can only support one prototype iteration before planning lock.