Plan Interviews for Onboarding Drop-off

Company Context

NotionFlow is a B2B SaaS collaboration platform used by small teams to manage docs, tasks, and lightweight workflows. The company has 1.5M monthly active users, sells through a freemium model, and is growing quickly in the SMB segment, but activation has stalled for new self-serve signups.

Problem

Over the last quarter, only 32% of new workspace creators complete the core onboarding flow, and just 18% reach the activation milestone of creating a project, inviting a teammate, and returning within 7 days. Product analytics show the biggest drop-off happens between workspace setup and first project creation, but the team does not know whether the issue is poor UX, unclear value proposition, or mismatch between different user segments.

The Head of Product asks you to design a user research plan using interviews and/or usability tests to understand what is going wrong and what to do next. Your goal is not just to collect opinions, but to generate actionable product insights that can inform onboarding improvements within one quarter.

Deliverables

1. Define which users you would interview or observe, and how you would segment them.
2. Explain how you would structure the interview and usability testing process end to end.
3. Describe what signals you would look for in the results and how you would separate symptoms from root causes.
4. Recommend how you would translate findings into product decisions, prioritization, and next steps.
5. Define how you would measure whether the research led to better onboarding outcomes.

Constraints

• Research budget supports at most 20 moderated sessions this month.
• The onboarding team has 1 designer, 2 engineers, and no dedicated user researcher.
• Leadership expects a clear recommendation within 4 weeks.
• You may use existing product analytics, but instrumentation is incomplete for some onboarding steps.