Choose Research Methods for New Feature

Company Context

NotionFlow is a B2B SaaS collaboration platform used by 120,000 teams globally. The company is mid-stage, growing quickly in the SMB segment, and is trying to expand upmarket into larger companies where workflow complexity and stakeholder needs are higher.

Problem

The team is considering a new AI-assisted meeting notes feature that would summarize calls, extract action items, and push tasks into project boards. Leadership wants confidence that the feature solves a real user problem before committing a 12-person engineering squad for two quarters. You have limited time and budget, and different stakeholders are asking for different types of research: Sales wants customer interviews, Design wants usability testing, Data wants product usage analysis, and the GM wants a quick survey.

The challenge is not to run every method. It is to decide which research methods to use, in what sequence, and why. Your decision should reflect the stage of the project, the type of uncertainty you are trying to reduce, and the trade-offs between speed, confidence, and cost.

Deliverables

1. Explain how you would decide which research method to use for this project.
2. Identify the key uncertainties you need to de-risk before building the feature.
3. Recommend a research plan, including method sequence, sample types, and expected outputs.
4. Describe how you would balance qualitative and quantitative inputs when making the product decision.
5. Define how you would know whether the research was sufficient to move forward, pivot, or stop.

Constraints

• You have 4 weeks to produce a recommendation for the executive team.
• Research budget is capped at $40,000.
• Analytics coverage is incomplete for meeting-related workflows.
• Only 10 enterprise customers are available for direct interviews this month.
• Engineering can support only lightweight prototypes, not a fully functional beta.