Company Context

Slack is a mature workplace collaboration platform used by millions of teams globally, with revenue driven primarily by paid seat subscriptions. It is a strong market leader in team messaging, but continued growth depends on improving activation and retention for new workspaces.

Problem

Slack's product team has seen a rise in negative feedback from newly created workspaces over the last two quarters. Common themes include: "too many setup steps," "hard to know what to do first," and "channels feel empty unless my whole team joins immediately." Internal data shows that only 42% of newly created workspaces send 10+ messages in their first 7 days, down from 49% six months ago. Workspaces that fail to hit that threshold have 35% lower 90-day retention.

User feedback comes from app store reviews, onboarding surveys, support tickets, and interviews with admins at small businesses. Engineering capacity is limited, so the team cannot redesign the entire product. You are the PM responsible for improving the new-workspace onboarding experience using this feedback.

Deliverables

1. Explain how you would synthesize user feedback and identify the highest-priority problems to solve.
2. Define which user segment(s) you would focus on first and why.
3. Propose a product improvement plan, including MVP scope and what you would explicitly defer.
4. Define success metrics and how you would validate whether the changes actually improved onboarding.
5. Discuss key trade-offs and risks in acting on qualitative feedback.

Constraints

• MVP must be designed for launch within 10 weeks.
• Team capacity: 1 designer, 4 engineers, 1 data analyst.
• No major backend architecture changes or new ML systems.
• Must work across desktop and mobile onboarding flows.
• Cannot materially increase time-to-create-workspace during signup.