Company Context

NoteFlow is a B2B collaboration SaaS platform used by 25,000 small and mid-sized teams for meeting notes, lightweight project tracking, and internal documentation. The company has strong top-of-funnel growth, but product leadership believes the roadmap has become overly driven by executive requests, competitor parity, and large-customer escalations rather than consistent user insight.

Problem

Over the last two quarters, NoteFlow shipped 14 major features, but only 5 reached meaningful adoption. Weekly active teams grew just 3%, while customer interviews show users still struggle with core workflows: finding past notes, turning notes into action items, and onboarding new teammates. Internal surveys also reveal that engineering and design teams often cannot clearly explain which user problem a feature is solving.

You are the PM for NoteFlow’s core product area. The CPO asks: How would you make sure your team stays focused on the user while still balancing revenue goals, stakeholder pressure, and delivery timelines?

Your answer should describe both the operating model and the product decision process you would put in place.

Deliverables

1. Define how you would identify and prioritize the most important user needs for the team.
2. Explain what rituals, artifacts, and decision rules you would introduce to keep day-to-day work anchored in user problems.
3. Describe how you would handle trade-offs when user feedback conflicts with sales requests, executive opinions, or short-term revenue opportunities.
4. Propose how you would measure whether the team is actually becoming more user-focused over the next 2 quarters.

Constraints

• You cannot add a dedicated user research team this half.
• Engineering capacity is fixed for the next 6 months.
• Sales has already committed two roadmap items to enterprise prospects.
• The company expects visible business impact within 2 quarters, not just process improvements.
• Existing analytics are incomplete, so you must combine qualitative and quantitative inputs pragmatically.