Turn Research Into Product Hypotheses | Dataford Interview Questions

Company Context

NotionFlow is a B2B collaboration SaaS company with 120,000 weekly active teams and a strong mid-market presence. The product has broad adoption for docs and project tracking, but leadership believes future growth depends on turning user research into a more disciplined pipeline of testable product bets.

Problem

Over the last quarter, the research team completed 30 customer interviews and 2 diary studies across admins, team leads, and individual contributors. Findings were rich but inconsistent: users mentioned onboarding friction, weak cross-team visibility, and difficulty turning meeting notes into action items. Product teams agree the insights are useful, but they struggle to convert them into clear hypotheses, prioritize what to test first, and avoid jumping straight to solutions.

Leadership has asked you to define how you would work with product, design, research, and engineering to turn this research into hypotheses for future work. The goal is to create a repeatable process that improves roadmap quality without slowing delivery.

Deliverables

Explain how you would synthesize research into user needs, pain points, and opportunity areas.
Show how you would convert those insights into strong product hypotheses and candidate solutions.
Describe how you would prioritize which hypotheses to test first and what evidence you would require before committing roadmap capacity.
Define success metrics for the process and for the first set of product experiments.
Discuss key trade-offs, including speed vs rigor and user value vs engineering complexity.

Constraints

You have one PM, one designer, one researcher, and one engineering manager available part-time for 6 weeks.
Engineering can support only 2 lightweight experiments next quarter.
Existing analytics are incomplete for collaboration workflows, so some hypotheses will rely on qualitative evidence first.
Leadership wants a recommendation that can be used across multiple product squads, not just one team.

Problem

Company Context

Problem

Deliverables

Explain how you would synthesize research into user needs, pain points, and opportunity areas.
Show how you would convert those insights into strong product hypotheses and candidate solutions.
Describe how you would prioritize which hypotheses to test first and what evidence you would require before committing roadmap capacity.
Define success metrics for the process and for the first set of product experiments.
Discuss key trade-offs, including speed vs rigor and user value vs engineering complexity.

Constraints

You have one PM, one designer, one researcher, and one engineering manager available part-time for 6 weeks.
Engineering can support only 2 lightweight experiments next quarter.
Existing analytics are incomplete for collaboration workflows, so some hypotheses will rely on qualitative evidence first.
Leadership wants a recommendation that can be used across multiple product squads, not just one team.

Problem

Company Context

Problem

Deliverables

Explain how you would synthesize research into user needs, pain points, and opportunity areas.
Show how you would convert those insights into strong product hypotheses and candidate solutions.
Describe how you would prioritize which hypotheses to test first and what evidence you would require before committing roadmap capacity.
Define success metrics for the process and for the first set of product experiments.
Discuss key trade-offs, including speed vs rigor and user value vs engineering complexity.

Constraints

You have one PM, one designer, one researcher, and one engineering manager available part-time for 6 weeks.
Engineering can support only 2 lightweight experiments next quarter.
Existing analytics are incomplete for collaboration workflows, so some hypotheses will rely on qualitative evidence first.
Leadership wants a recommendation that can be used across multiple product squads, not just one team.

Problem

Company Context

Problem

Deliverables

Explain how you would synthesize research into user needs, pain points, and opportunity areas.
Show how you would convert those insights into strong product hypotheses and candidate solutions.
Describe how you would prioritize which hypotheses to test first and what evidence you would require before committing roadmap capacity.
Define success metrics for the process and for the first set of product experiments.
Discuss key trade-offs, including speed vs rigor and user value vs engineering complexity.

Constraints

You have one PM, one designer, one researcher, and one engineering manager available part-time for 6 weeks.
Engineering can support only 2 lightweight experiments next quarter.
Existing analytics are incomplete for collaboration workflows, so some hypotheses will rely on qualitative evidence first.
Leadership wants a recommendation that can be used across multiple product squads, not just one team.