Project Context
At Notion, the growth team has identified a drop in new-user activation on the self-serve workspace product. Only 42% of new signups create a second page and invite a teammate within 7 days, down from 48% last quarter. You are the program manager assigned to lead a cross-functional effort to improve this activation metric before the next board review in 12 weeks.
The working team includes 10 people: 3 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, 1 product manager, 1 lifecycle marketer, 1 user researcher, 1 QA lead, and you. The urgency is high because paid conversion is strongly correlated with 7-day activation, and leadership expects a measurable lift this quarter.
Key Stakeholders
The VP of Growth wants the fastest path to a metric lift and is pushing for an aggressive launch. The Head of Product wants to avoid shipping a narrow onboarding fix that creates long-term UX debt. Engineering is concerned about limited bandwidth because one engineer is already committed 50% to reliability work. Legal must review any new email or in-app messaging changes that use behavioral targeting.
Constraints
- Timeline: 12 weeks, with a go/no-go decision by the end of Week 4
- Budget: $120,000 for research, experimentation support, and contractor design help
- Team capacity: 3 engineers, but only 2.5 effective FTEs available
- Dependency: analytics instrumentation fixes must be completed before experiment readout
- Deliverable deadline: preliminary results must be ready for the board packet in Week 11
Complications
- Baseline activation data is noisy because event logging for teammate invites has a known 8% undercount.
- Sales has requested that enterprise trial users be excluded from onboarding changes to avoid disrupting active deals.
- The lifecycle marketer is launching a separate re-engagement campaign in Week 6 that could affect the same metric.
Your Task
- Build a 12-week execution plan to improve 7-day activation.
- Define the cross-functional roadmap, owners, and decision points.
- Recommend trade-offs on scope if the team cannot deliver the full onboarding redesign.
- Propose launch criteria, success metrics, and a rollback approach.
- Identify the top risks and how you would mitigate them.
