Choose Exploratory vs Evaluative Research

Company Context

Notely is a B2B SaaS collaboration platform used by 25,000 small and mid-sized teams for meeting notes, task tracking, and lightweight project planning. The company is growing steadily, but enterprise expansion has slowed because activation for new team workspaces is inconsistent.

Problem

Notely plans to redesign its workspace onboarding flow after seeing that only 42% of newly created workspaces complete three key setup actions in their first 7 days: inviting teammates, creating a shared doc, and assigning a task. The Head of Product believes the current onboarding is confusing, but the design team has already proposed several solutions, including guided templates, checklist-based setup, and role-based onboarding.

You are the PM responsible for onboarding. In an interview, explain the difference between exploratory research and evaluative research, and show how you would apply each to this situation. Your answer should make clear when each method is appropriate, what decisions it informs, and how it affects product prioritization.

Deliverables

1. Define exploratory research and evaluative research in practical product terms.
2. Explain which research approach you would use first for Notely's onboarding problem, and why.
3. Propose a lightweight research plan covering methods, target users, sample size logic, and expected outputs.
4. Describe how research findings would influence feature prioritization across the three proposed onboarding concepts.
5. Identify trade-offs if the team has limited time and can only run one round of research before committing engineering resources.

Constraints

• MVP decision must be made within 3 weeks.
• Research team has 1 UX researcher shared across 4 product squads.
• Engineering can only build one onboarding concept this quarter.
• Existing analytics show funnel drop-off, but do not explain user motivations or confusion points.