Company Context
You are the PM for ScholarFlow, a Series B preprint and research collaboration platform used by 2.4M monthly active researchers and 18,000 institutions globally. ScholarFlow’s core product is preprint hosting (similar to arXiv/Research Square) plus lightweight collaboration tools (co-authoring, versioning, commenting). Revenue comes from (1) institutional subscriptions for compliance and analytics, and (2) workflow tools sold to publishers.
ScholarFlow is facing pressure from two sides:
- Preprint-first culture is accelerating (especially in ML/biomed), but researchers still need credible signals of quality.
- Competitors are bundling peer review: OpenReview dominates ML conferences; Research Square offers journal-integrated review; PubPeer owns post-publication critique.
The CEO believes ScholarFlow can win by offering a fast, trusted, and transparent peer review layer on top of preprints—without becoming a full journal.
User / Market Scenario
ScholarFlow serves three primary personas:
| Persona | Segment size | Primary goal | Current behavior | Top pain points |
|---|
| Early-career Author (PhD/postdoc) | 45% | Publish quickly and build credibility | Posts preprints, then submits to journals/conferences | “I need feedback fast, but I don’t want public embarrassment or idea theft.” |
| Senior Reviewer / PI | 30% | Contribute selectively, protect time | Reviews for journals/conferences; ignores most platform requests | “Review requests are spammy; I can’t tell what’s worth my time.” |
| Journal/Conference Editor | 25% | Find reviewers and make decisions faster | Uses ScholarFlow for discovery, but review happens elsewhere | “Reviewer sourcing is the bottleneck; quality varies wildly.” |
Competitive landscape (from internal research)
- OpenReview’s strengths: strong identity/reputation, structured review forms, community discussion. Weakness: perceived as “conference-centric,” less friendly to biomed.
- PubPeer’s strengths: high-signal critique. Weakness: mostly post-publication; can feel adversarial.
- Journal systems (ScholarOne/Editorial Manager): strong workflows, but slow and opaque; poor reviewer experience.
Problem / Opportunity
ScholarFlow ran a 6-week pilot called “Rapid Review” with 1,200 preprints.
Key results:
- Median time-to-first-decision: 23 days (target was <14 days)
- Reviewer acceptance rate: 18% (industry benchmark for cold invites is ~15–25%)
- Reviews per paper: 1.3 average (target 2.0)
- Author satisfaction (post-pilot survey): 3.2/5
- Top author complaint: “I don’t know if reviewers are credible or biased.”
- Top reviewer complaint: “The request didn’t tell me why I was a good fit; the form was too long.”
Business stakes:
- ScholarFlow’s publisher partners are threatening to pause expansion unless ScholarFlow can demonstrate faster decisions and higher-quality reviews.
- The board has set a goal: launch a v2 within 12 weeks that can scale to 50,000 preprints/month.
Your Task (Deliverables)
- Clarify the user problem: What are the most important unmet needs in peer review for each persona (authors, reviewers, editors)? Use a structured approach (e.g., Jobs-to-be-Done).
- Define a product vision for ScholarFlow’s peer review layer: what it is (and is not), and how it differentiates from OpenReview and journal systems.
- Design the MVP workflow end-to-end (submission → reviewer matching/invite → review writing → decision/labeling → public/private display). Specify what is visible to whom.
- Prioritize features for the 12-week v2 using a clear method (e.g., RICE/Kano). Include at least 6 candidate features and justify trade-offs.
- Define success metrics and an experiment/rollout plan to validate quality and speed without harming trust.
Constraints
- Timeline: 12 weeks to ship v2; must show measurable improvement within 8 weeks of launch.
- Team: 6 engineers (2 backend, 2 frontend, 1 data, 1 infra), 1 designer, 1 researcher (part-time). No additional headcount.
- Technical limitations: No net-new ML model training in v2. You may use heuristics and existing embeddings-based similarity service already used for “related papers.”
- Policy & integrity: Must mitigate conflicts of interest, harassment, and retaliation. Must support anonymous review as an option.
- Ecosystem constraint: Many authors still submit to journals/conferences; your workflow must not block later submission and should export artifacts (reviews, decision letters) in a portable format.
Additional Data You Can Assume
- 62% of authors say they would pay (or ask their lab to pay) for “credible rapid review” if it improved acceptance odds.
- 48% of reviewers say they would review more if they got recognition that mattered for promotion/grants.
- Papers with 2+ substantive reviews on ScholarFlow have +22% higher 90-day retention among authors (posting another preprint or updating versions).
Prompt: Walk me through your approach as the PM owning ScholarFlow’s peer review v2.
