Executive Case Practice Studio

RelayForge: VP Product practice case

Simulation notice: RelayForge, its customers, observations, quotations, costs and numerical values are entirely fictional data prepared for this practice exercise. They do not describe a real company or measured customer results.

Your role and decision

You are the incoming VP Product of RelayForge, an operations SaaS company that helps distributed service teams assign and verify shift handoffs. The CEO wants the next quarter's one onboarding investment to improve useful customer adoption and sustainable subscription contribution.

Choose whether to prioritize

1. a self-service activation improvement for single-site accounts; or
2. a structured assisted onboarding offer for network accounts that operate multiple sites.

You may recommend deferring either investment if you explain the consequence and the evidence needed to release the allocation. Make one primary choice. Do not split the engineering allocation between both pilots.

You have

90 minutes to prepare a decision memo of

up to 1,000 words, plus one small calculation table and an oral-defense card of

up to 200 words. The calculation table and defense card are outside the memo's word limit. After preparation, be ready for a five-minute discussion of your recommendation. The discussion is outside the 90-minute preparation period.

Use only the four supplied exhibits. AI assistance and ordinary calculation tools are permitted for this fictional exercise. External research is unnecessary and should not be used. State assumptions explicitly. You do not need company knowledge or a particular framework.

Constraints and expected submission

The quarter has one six-engineer-week allocation, with a fixed loaded cost of $24,000. Only one of the proposed pilots can use that allocation. There are 144 incremental customer-success hours available for an assisted pilot. These hours are a capacity limit; their variable cost is specified in Exhibit 3. Do not assume additional staff or acquisition spend.

In your memo, state the decision, chosen customer behavior, strongest alternative, economic comparison, scope boundary, proposed test, measurement and decision rules, accountable owner role, and evidence that would change your direction. Address customer friction and operating consequences. Connect useful adoption to subscription contribution without claiming an unobserved causal effect.

The calculation table should show a common economic comparator, input assumptions and a break-even condition. The defense card should give a short spoken recommendation, the most important assumption and two likely objections with concise responses.

You are not being asked for an annual company forecast, a full product strategy, a complete technical architecture or a production launch. Do not assume the existence or absence of capabilities beyond the supplied baseline.

Exhibit index

1. Mature 90-day new paid-account cohort
2. Onboarding progression for that same cohort
3. Next-quarter capacity and cost assumptions
4. Directional customer evidence and current product baseline

Exhibit 1: mature 90-day new paid-account cohort

This is one cohort of 240 new paid accounts that began service during a fictional April–June enrollment window. Every account has its own complete 90-day observation period; windows start at the account's service start. Internal accounts and trials are excluded. There was no onboarding experiment and no random assignment. The two segments use the current approach.

Prices are fixed monthly recognized subscription revenue. A paid account-month means one complete 30-day subscription period recognized within the first 90 days. The maximum is three per starting account. All accounts pay for the first period; canceled accounts may have paid for one, two or three periods. An account retained at day 90 is still paying and active at that point. There is no expansion, discount, refund, pass-through revenue or acquisition spend in these figures. Retained-at-day-90 status and the three-period paid-month count are different measurements.

The account-level join is available. Of the 72 single-site accounts with a first verified handoff by day 14, 63 were retained at day 90. Of the 56 network accounts with a first verified handoff by day 14, 51 were retained at day 90. These are observational associations; onboarding route and customer complexity were not randomized.

A

verified handoff is an assignment to a named customer operator, with required fields valid and receipt acknowledged by a different customer operator, persisted in RelayForge's authoritative handoff record. Demo or internal handoffs are excluded.

Exhibit 2: onboarding progression for the same cohort

Counts below use the same 160 single-site and 80 network accounts and the same account-relative observation windows as Exhibit 1. Each stage count is distinct accounts, not attempts. Workspace creation, role assignment and first verified handoff are cumulative by day 14. A repeat verified handoff is a second verified handoff by day 28, by an account that completed the first by day 14. Repeat counts are a subset of first-handoff counts. A later first handoff does not qualify for this repeat measure.

The current human onboarding option is offered after signup, but cohort records do not reliably identify which accounts accepted it or how much assistance they received. Service exposure cannot be used as a treatment indicator. Failure reasons are not consistently recorded for accounts that abandon a stage. The verified-handoff and payment records are authoritative; source logs can be joined to assignment records in a new pilot.

Exhibit 3: next-quarter capacity and cost assumptions

These are fictional finance and operations planning inputs, not observed pilot outcomes. The next quarter's planning population is 160 new single-site accounts and 80 new network accounts; do not extrapolate beyond that population. A comparison group may receive the current experience. The following service limits apply to the intervention; candidates should explain how they allocate treatment and comparison without exceeding them.

Ordinary recurring variable hosting, payment and support costs equal $32 per paid single-site account-month and $104 per paid network account-month. These costs are additional to the one-time intervention costs above; do not count the same costs twice. Ordinary costs for the current experience belong in the counterfactual. Fixed pilot investment should be kept separate from recurring contribution.

The $12 self-service estimate has not been validated. Its modeled range is $6–$30 per treated account. The assisted three-hour estimate is the staffing assumption; time overruns reduce the number of accounts that can be served under the 144-hour cap. No price increase or new onboarding fee is authorized.

The causal effect of either intervention on first handoffs, repeat use, cancellation and paid account-months is unknown. If you use a 12-month incremental contribution model, define paid-month uplift relative to the current approach and label any uplift values as assumptions. The historical 90-day cohort is not a 12-month forecast. For comparison, show each option both at its permitted deployment size and at the treatment size chosen for your test, or explain why a different common unit is more useful.

Exhibit 4: directional customer evidence and current product baseline

These synthetic interviews were sampled for convenience from recently onboarded customers and accounts that stalled. They are separate from the quantified cohort; interview accounts cannot be joined to it. Responses may overlap within each sample. They are directional observations, not representative prevalence estimates.

Synthetic single-site quote: “I could create the workspace, but I was not sure who should receive the first handoff.”

Synthetic network quote: “A session helped one site; we still had to decide what should be shared across the others.”

Verified current product baseline: a workspace setup flow, role assignment, field validation, six generic handoff templates, a CSV import with mapping preview, human-session scheduling and persisted handoff acknowledgement. The templates have not been tested as a guided onboarding sequence. The import works for supported fields; it does not resolve customer ownership or site policies.

Unverified capabilities: cross-site policy recommendations, automated mapping from a customer's existing tools and an AI onboarding planner. Public silence or this exhibit's omission does not prove those capabilities are absent. Treat them as unknown and state the evidence needed before committing scope. No AI component is required by this case.

Return your work

Return the memo, the small calculation table and the oral-defense card together. Clearly distinguish supplied facts, inferences, assumptions and proposed thresholds. Choose a direction and specify what the CEO is being asked to authorize now, what must be learned before a larger commitment, and who owns the next decision.