Project Background

Notion's self-serve workspace product has seen new signups grow 28% quarter over quarter, but paid conversion from new teams has fallen from 6.4% to 5.1% over the last two months. You are the program manager supporting a cross-functional effort to decide whether the team should ship a new guided onboarding flow or spend the quarter improving activation for existing users through template recommendations and lifecycle emails.

The team has 8 weeks before the next quarterly planning review, and leadership wants a recommendation backed by product data, delivery risk, and launch readiness. The working team includes 1 PM, 4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst, and shared support from marketing ops and customer success.

Key Stakeholders

The VP of Product wants the highest-impact initiative for Q3 revenue. The Growth PM favors the guided onboarding flow because it is visible and easy to market. The Engineering Manager prefers the lower-risk template recommendation work because the onboarding codebase has known technical debt. Customer Success is pushing for improvements that reduce first-week confusion for larger workspaces.

Constraints

You have a maximum implementation budget of $180,000, no additional headcount, and only 4 engineers available at 70% allocation because two are supporting reliability work. A board update is scheduled in 8 weeks. Any launch must avoid degrading signup completion by more than 1 percentage point and must support rollout to web only in the first release.

Complications

1. Event tracking for one onboarding step has been unreliable for the last 3 weeks, creating uncertainty in funnel data.
2. Marketing has already drafted a campaign around the guided onboarding flow, increasing pressure to choose it.
3. A major enterprise prospect is evaluating Notion and has cited poor first-week activation as a concern.

Your Task

1. Recommend which initiative should be prioritized using available data and execution trade-offs.
2. Create an 8-week execution plan, including analysis, decision points, build, and launch readiness.
3. Define success metrics and guardrails for the chosen launch.
4. Identify key risks, dependencies, and a rollback or contingency plan.
5. Explain how you would align stakeholders when the data is incomplete or conflicting.