Prioritize Growth Ideas for Q3

Project Context

Notion's self-serve growth team needs a simple framework to prioritize 18 growth ideas for the next quarter. The ideas span onboarding, activation, referral, pricing, and lifecycle messaging, and leadership wants a decision within 2 weeks so engineering planning can start. You are the program manager coordinating a 9-person cross-functional team across product, engineering, design, data science, and marketing.

Key Stakeholders

The Head of Growth wants the framework to maximize near-term sign-up-to-paid conversion this quarter. The Product Director wants to protect long-term product quality and avoid shipping low-confidence experiments that create UX debt. Finance wants a clear link between prioritized ideas and expected revenue impact, while Engineering wants a lightweight process that does not require weeks of analysis.

Constraints

You have 10 business days to recommend the top 5 ideas for Q3. The team has capacity for only 20 engineering-weeks total, a fixed experiment budget of $60,000, and just 1 data scientist who is already allocated 40% to another initiative. Of the 18 ideas, 6 depend on a billing-system update scheduled for Week 5 of the quarter, and 4 require legal review for email or referral incentives.

Complications

1. The Head of Growth is pushing a referral incentive idea that has high upside but no supporting data and meaningful legal risk.
2. Engineering estimates for 7 ideas are still rough and may vary by plus or minus 50%.
3. Last quarter, two “high-impact” experiments failed because teams overestimated reach and ignored operational complexity.

Deliverables

1. Propose a simple prioritization framework with scoring dimensions, weights, and tie-break rules.
2. Show how you would evaluate trade-offs across impact, confidence, effort, dependencies, and risk.
3. Recommend the top 5 ideas for Q3 and explain what should be deferred.
4. Outline an execution plan for validating assumptions before final roadmap lock.
5. Define success metrics and a review cadence for reprioritizing if assumptions change.