Project Context

Meta's Messenger team is preparing a Q3 redesign of the new-user onboarding flow to improve 7-day activation for teens and young adults. You are the lead User Experience Researcher supporting one product manager, one content designer, two product designers, and six engineers across iOS, Android, and backend. Leadership wants research insights in time to influence scope decisions before engineering lock in 8 weeks.

Key Stakeholders

The Product Director wants fast directional input to decide which onboarding concepts make the roadmap. Engineering wants requirements frozen by Week 6 to avoid rework. Designers want iterative feedback on prototypes in Figma and expect research to shape interaction details, not just validate final mocks. The Data Science partner prefers to wait for post-launch experiment data and is skeptical of spending engineering time on pre-launch research instrumentation.

Constraints

You have a research budget of $35,000, one recruiting coordinator shared across three teams, and access to only 24 moderated sessions before Week 5. Engineering can support at most 20 hours total for prototype setup, logging, and observer participation. The launch decision review is on August 30, and a limited internal dogfood in Messenger must start by August 16. Privacy review is required if any prototype uses real contact graph data.

Complications

1. One engineering lead says the team cannot attend research sessions because of a reliability incident on Messenger calling.
2. The design team wants to test three onboarding directions, but the PM says only one can realistically ship this quarter.
3. Privacy review may add a 10-day delay if the prototype pulls live friend suggestions.

Deliverables

1. Build an 8-week execution plan showing how you will involve engineers and designers in the research process without delaying launch planning.
2. Define how and when stakeholders will participate in study design, observation, synthesis, and decision-making.
3. Recommend trade-offs on research scope, prototype fidelity, and stakeholder time given the constraints.
4. Propose launch-readiness criteria for using research findings in the August 30 roadmap decision.
5. Identify the top risks to timely, cross-functional research execution and how you would mitigate them.