Turn Vague Problems Into Research

Company Context

Nimbus is a B2B SaaS collaboration platform used by 12,000 mid-market companies for project tracking, internal documentation, and workflow automation. The company is post-product-market fit, growing steadily, and competing against larger suites by shipping faster and staying close to customer needs.

Problem

Nimbus's product teams frequently bring the research team vague requests such as "users are confused," "adoption is low," or "we should improve onboarding." As a result, research projects are often too broad, take too long, and produce insights that are hard to act on. In the last two quarters, only 35% of completed research studies directly influenced roadmap decisions, and average time from request intake to actionable recommendation is 5 weeks.

Leadership wants a better approach for defining the right research questions before studies begin. The goal is to improve the quality, speed, and usefulness of research without significantly increasing headcount.

Deliverables

1. Explain how you would turn a vague product problem statement into a clear set of research questions.
2. Identify which users or segments you would prioritize first and why.
3. Describe the research approach you would use to separate symptom from root cause.
4. Define how you would decide whether the research output is actionable enough to influence product decisions.
5. Recommend a lightweight intake or prioritization process the product organization should adopt.

Constraints

• Research team has capacity for only 3 major studies per quarter.
• Product managers want answers within 2 weeks for most requests.
• Existing product analytics are incomplete for newer workflow features.
• Engineering can support only minor instrumentation changes this quarter.
• Leadership expects a repeatable process, not a one-off answer for a single team.