Company Context

Pulse is a B2B SaaS collaboration platform used by 12,000 mid-market companies for project tracking, internal documentation, and async team communication. The company is growing steadily, but activation for new team workspaces has stalled at 41%, and leadership believes the onboarding experience is not aligned with how different teams actually adopt the product.

Problem

The Head of Product wants to run a user research study before redesigning onboarding. Previous studies produced long lists of observations but few actionable decisions because the team started with vague goals like "understand users better." As the PM for onboarding, you need to define the right research questions before the study begins.

You have some existing signals: 58% of newly invited users do not complete a key setup action in their first 7 days, customer success reports that admins and end users have different expectations during rollout, and win/loss interviews suggest some teams choose competitors because Pulse feels "powerful but hard to get started with."

Deliverables

1. Define the core product problem and explain what decision the research should inform.
2. Identify the most important user segments or personas to study first.
3. Write the research questions you would use, and distinguish between broad learning questions and specific interview or study questions.
4. Explain which questions you would avoid because they are too vague, biased, or not actionable.
5. Describe how you would know whether the research produced useful output for product decisions.

Constraints

• You have 3 weeks to scope the study and 4 weeks to run it.
• Research support is limited to one shared UX researcher.
• Budget allows for at most 20 participant sessions.
• Leadership expects a recommendation on onboarding priorities for the next quarterly roadmap.
• You cannot redesign the full onboarding flow immediately; engineering capacity supports only 1-2 major improvements in the next quarter.